“Confession is good for the soul.” Taken from an old Scottish proverb.

The old man blinked his eyes open. He was in a hospital room and connected to various machines which were providing the light in the room.

“I ain’t dead yet,” he thought as he slightly grinned.

“Not yet, but soon,” a voice said.

His eyes glanced towards the corner of the room, where the voice had come from.

“Who the hell are you?”

“You know who I am.”

“So, what do you want with me.”

“I want to talk about you and your first wife.”

“Why? You know what happened.”

“I need you to tell me. I want the truth, not those lies you told the police and your family for all those years.”

The old man furrowed his brow and appeared to be in deep thought then started.

“Sue and I had been married 7 years...”

He was interrupted, “Start at the beginning, when you first met her.”

“Okay. I had just returned home from Viet Nam. You sure you don’t want me to tell you about those 13 months? I did some things over there you might have an issue with.”

“All that has been forgiven. HE has a soft spot for Marines. The fact is HE uses them, remember the last line in the Hymn?”

The old man thought for a minute, then grinned.

“Like I was about to say, I was back and working with my father when I first saw her. I think it was love at first sight, for me anyway. The problem was I was 23 at the time, she was 10 years younger. But I did not talk to her, just admired her from afar, no stalking. I’ll admit I found excuses to talk to her father when I saw them together at the feed store or the co-op. but I never touched her until she was 18 years old. I dated others, my age. You know that!”

“We do and that counts in your favor.”

“By the time she was 18 my father had died and left me the farm and the business. I went to her high school graduation with a man who worked for me to see his son graduate. That’s when my courtship with Sue started. As I talked to her mom and dad, she came up all excited and well ... I asked her out. We dated for six months before I took her to my bed. She told me she was a virgin, I had my doubts because there was no blood or resistance. She explained that she grew up riding horses and, well you know. We married three months after that first time. I moved us into my family home and we started our life together.

Her family lived in a rundown two-bedroom trailer on a small plot of land her father had inherited. I built them a two-bedroom cottage out of timber I cut off my farm. When her dad had that accident and could not work anymore, I hired him as a ‘consultant’ to my business and paid him a decent salary to do nothing. When Sue’s sister got involved with drugs and ended up prostituting herself to feed her habit, I was the one who bailed her out of jail, got her an attorney that made a deal to get her into a rehab facility, that I paid for. When she successfully completed the program, her record was expunged. I did all that for her family, and how did Sue thank me...”

The old man started coughing.

“You better calm down or you are not going to finish the story.”

“Sure, it’s just after all these years, I still can’t believe...”

“Get back to the story.”

“Over that time Sue and I had a baby, a little girl. Sue was not a good mother, so I hired a nanny to help with the child. The doctors said Sue was suffering from ‘postpartum’ depression. I don’t know about that. Looking back, maybe it was something else. The doctors thought that maybe if she got out of the house, took a job, you know, something to get her mind off the baby, she would come out of it. She did not have to work! We did not need the money!”

“Calm down. Now continue.”

“She found a job at a lawyer’s office in town. Honestly it did seem to help, at first anyway. But after about 4 months into her working there, I noticed a change in our relationship. She became distant from me. We rarely made love anymore and she started talking about how dirty I was when I came home from work every day. I would clean up before dinner, but she was always making comments on how I worked with my hands and not with my brain like the lawyers she worked with. I started noticing things. Things like the way she dressed and some days she showered as soon as she came home from work. She worked late a couple of nights a week. Why would a receptionist at an office that closes at 4pm need to stay until 8 or 9 at night? Then she started going to what she called a ‘girl’s night out’ with a couple of the women who worked there. I knew the reputation of those women and I warned her about them. She said for me not to believe the rumors. One night I paid the nanny to stay late and I followed Sue when she left work. There was no ‘girls night out’. She went to a motel with one of the attorneys she worked with!”

He paused his story while he got his emotions under control.

“Now, I knew she was cheating, and I knew who with! He was Stewart Pauls, a young attorney, about Sue’s age at the time, twenty-five.

I tried to forgive her! I really did! I prayed about it. I gave her time to get it out of her system. I started talking about her being over her depression and maybe we should have another kid. Her dalliances only got worse. More ‘working late’ excuses. ‘Girls night’ went from once a week to two or three times. I started to hear ‘rumors’ around town about her being seen together with this Pauls guy. Finally I had enough, I was going to catch them together and divorce her cheating ass. This was before our state enacted those ‘no-fault’ laws so adultery was a valid reason for divorce.