suspected we would end up as we did. They hoped we were happy, but were worried about how our decision would affect our lives. By that time, we’d already seen every degree of reaction. Most people weren’t surprised. They were the people that proclaimed “About time!” when we gave them the news, making us wonder if we had really been so obvious. Some wondered why they had been left out of the initial ‘coming out,’ as if they hadn’t been trusted. A few refused to listen, tried to change our minds, or simply ignored that part of our lives. I was more surprised by how people I would never know and never meet responded to our orientation in the media. We watched side-by-side, on her living room sofa, as politicians, mothers and religious extremists told us something was wrong with us, that somehow we were flawed. I could only think then, isn’t everyone?
The damage was done. Despite a supportive social circle, I was worried about holding Jodie’s hand in public; every look from a stranger became a scrutinous stare. I expected to, at any moment, be persecuted. I knew the change hurt Jodie, but she never mentioned it. My parents didn’t help. My father often spoke of how I simply hadn’t tried hard enough to like men; that one day a strapping, true gift to red-blooded macho would appear, and I would see the light. He assured me, always, that he liked Jodie; sometimes he would joke that he might have liked to date her too if he were twenty years younger, but he always wanted me to keep my mind open, to be ready in case a man worthy of me came into my life. To him, Jodie was just a romantic placeholder, and that thought kept me at odds with him for years.
“Have you decided?”
The voice of the shop-keeping apparition brings me back, and I look over my shoulder, shaking my head. I set the book down. There are better memories to remember than these.
Nothing now in my hands, I walk between a narrow set of shelves, passing a display case of newspaper headlines. I mostly ignore them. My thoughts are on Jodie, my sight streamlined to what makes me remember her. I bypass rainbow streamers and marathon shoes, scuba gear and picket signs touting equal rights and the faces of men and women long out of office. I see an autographed baseball and ticket stubs to concerts, museum exhibits and lectures. My years pretending to be a part of high society or the intellectual community seem of little consequence now.
The next area of the shop is starkly different from the rest, needing to be entered via a door with a drooping handle— the front door to the first house Jodie and I ever bought. My hand trembles on the copper finish, before I step inside.
It is small, but bright and sunny, filled with the promise of so many dreams we wished to achieve together. A room half painted reminds me of spontaneous dances, both with clothes and without. I go to the kitchen. The smell of spice and garlic fills the air. Jodie loved garlic. She put it in everything. I drag my fingers across the counter, remembering parties held in honor of friends or anniversaries. Ten years in this house together, before I was diagnosed.
It had started as a simple hoarseness. I had been having trouble swallowing, and it was actually Jodie who noticed one night that there was a lump on my neck. Thyroid cancer.
I move through the house now, remembering the days leading up to the surgery. Jodie never left my side. Our house was inundated with well-wishes in the form of cards and bouquets. People I hadn’t talked to in years suddenly sprang up to offer me their prayers and support. It had been pretty unreal. It crossed my mind that I might die.
The surgery was a success, of course. But the fear of mortality that it had put in both of us made us re-examine everything. The hospital bill had been mortifying. We had to sell the house, but we were still together. I took my pills every day, and Jodie bought a ring. She said it was to celebrate my not being dead, in her typical morbid humor. I had never really thought about getting married before that; from the time I’d been a little girl I had simply been conditioned that it was something that I would never experience. I didn’t even know they made cake toppers for same gendered partners. Jodie was convincing.
We got married in Iowa in the spring of 2010. It wasn’t anything over-the-top; we each splurged a bit on dresses, bought a cake too big to eat and then invited those who could join us to a city office in Cedar Rapids for the ceremony. A tax commissioner performed the service. That day replaced all others as the best day of my life. I felt a sense of triumph, and completeness, to be able to call Jodie something besides “my girlfriend.” Now, we were partners. Not quite what we wanted, logistically, as it sounded so formal and business-like, but that was just the PC thing to say at the time.
I glance down at my hand, absently, and notice for the first time that the band Jodie had given me as a wedding ring is missing. I turn, panicked, to the specter.
“Where is my ring?”
“Somewhere in here,” it says, its hollow eyes flickering, like a blink, “Everything that means something is here.”
“I need to find it.” Nothing else in the shop interests me now. I know what I want; what I want to take with me. I cannot leave that band of promise behind.
“Very well,” the apparition moves ahead of me, slipping out the back door of our house, and back into the shop, gliding through shelves and aisles as I follow clumsily. Towers of chocolate boxes, license plates— even the siding of a cruise ship— are blurs in my periphery. I now have purpose for being here.
The ghost takes me to another corner of this shop that seems infinite and finite all in one, and there I see my wedding dress. Tears spring to my eyes almost instantaneously to see it; this is not the dress of a civic union. This is more. The train of creamy satin is unblemished; the rainbow bouquet of flowers I carried that day are suspended in memory, as fresh as the moment the florist handed them to me. I remember then; our second wedding. Nearly ten years after the first, we made vows again. The country had changed. The civil movement had won. There were parades everywhere. Jodie and I couldn’t help ourselves and got swept up in the rush like everyone else. We did groan a bit at how much our taxes went up though.
We were wives, then. The truest word I could have ever used for her. It felt right. It felt committed, not just to a union as “partners” or to a passion like “lovers.” The word, which had always been just out of my reach, suddenly wasn’t, and I was freed from all of the shame and paranoia I had fostered for so long. I could call Jodie my wife. I could show, in that one word, everything she meant to me, and she could do the same. We weren’t young anymore; I had crow’s feet and bags of flesh where none belonged, but the way Jodie looked at me that day made me feel like I was the most beautiful woman in the world to her. I am sure I was.
Two years later, she died.
There was no warning; no goodbye. I got the call while I was at work, from a nurse I would never speak to again. Jodie had been in a car accident; she had died on impact. The police were investigating the cause. None of that mattered to me. In the space of three minutes, I became lost in my own shell. Life simply ceased to be. Every other second, I would wait to feel her comforting hand on my shoulder, to help me through the loss— it was then that I would remember that she was the one who was gone, and the pain would increase.
There are no words. I do not remember eating. I do not remember sleeping. I remember staring at walls, stopping mid-step while walking, and blanking out in the middle of conversations. Being in our apartment was painful; lying down in our bed was agonizing. I had always told myself I wouldn’t know what to do without her. I never realized how true it actually had been. So much of my life had been her; based on the constancy of her being there. I had been prepared to grow old with her; maybe for she or I getting sick—at the very least to have the chance to hold her hand before the end. I still regret that I wasn’t there. Thinking about her dying alone on the pavement gives me nightmares, even now.
The owner finally comes to rest in front of a large, chestnut box. Brass handles at the side and bordered carvings give it a dignified, unmistakable image: Jodie’s casket. I do not feel fear for seeing it. This is where I said goodbye to her. The cas
ket is closed, sparing me the memory of death’s visage, but on its polished top are flowers, and at their center, three bands of gold, tied together by a simple white ribbon. The ghost floats off to the side as I approach Jodie’s final resting place. Picking up the rings, I watch as the two with diamonds twinkle, oblivious to the sorrow that stains them. I undo the rings from the ribbon immediately, shaking as I slip them on one at a time: our first vows, our second vows, and then my lone vow. To never forget her, to hold her in sickness and in health, for as long as I lived, until death did we part.
“Have you decided?” the specter asks, after a time.
I look down at my hand, feeling the weight of my rings and hers, holding in them the sum of our love, and a life that had been spent creating happiness for another and receiving it in turn. In these rings I see her smile, our years of complete commitment to one another, and all of the memories we made as a result of that. If there is nothing else that I can take away from my life—if there is only one thing that I can bring with me, to remember the result, the impact of my existence, then it is the love I had with Jodie that I