My Husband’s Girlfriend Didn’t Know I Was the Wife

My husband’s girlfriend stood on my fitting box and told me his wife was old and boring. She didn’t know she was talking to his wife. “He’s leaving her right after Christmas,” she said, and twirled in the cruise dress he bought her. I just kept pinning.

I’ve had my alterations shop on Main Street in Hartselle for thirty-four years. Hems, zippers, wedding gowns, choir robes. If you were married in this town since 1992, there’s a fair chance I took in your dress. The sign says Main Street Alterations, but most folks call me Miss Lavonne.

Mitch and I had been married forty-six years. For most of that time, I thought we had the kind of marriage where you knew the other person’s small habits without needing to ask. He liked his work pants hemmed the same way every time. He ate the crispy edge pieces of my chicken and dumplings. He’d sit at the kitchen table while I sorted receipts, even if all he had to say was that the truck needed gas.

In August, his truck needed a new battery. I went out to the garage to get the jumper cables from behind his seat. There was a phone back there, not his regular phone. A cheap black one, plugged into a cord he’d run under the seat.

I’m sixty-eight and not good with phones. Mitch couldn’t remember a number to save his life, so he’d never put a lock on that one. I opened the pictures.

There was a woman with frosted hair and a big laugh. Maybe fifty. Her in a sundress, her on a boat, her sitting in Mitch’s lap at a Mexican restaurant in Decatur. I knew the shirt he was wearing. I’d washed it that week.

Then I saw the messages.

“Can’t wait for our cruise, baby.”

“Tell the old lady you’re going fishing with your brother.”

That night Mitch ate two helpings of my chicken and dumplings. He said the transmission on his truck needed $9,000 of work. Our savings book sat in the desk drawer, where I’d kept it for years. I’d put a little into that account every week since 1981.

I looked at the drawer and felt sick. Then I put the jumper cables back and went inside. I didn’t say a word to him. I didn’t know yet what I was going to do, but I knew I wasn’t going to cry in front of him.

Two weeks later, the bell over my shop door jingled. The woman from the pictures walked in carrying three dresses over her arm.

“Are you the lady who does alterations?” she asked. “My friend at work says you’re the best in Morgan County.”

My hands went cold. I made them pick up my pincushion.

“Step up on the box, honey.”

Her name was Kelsey. She’d moved down from Huntsville that spring and worked the front desk at the dentist’s office two blocks away. She climbed onto the box and started talking while I pinned. People do that when they’re standing still in their stockings and looking at themselves in a mirror.

“I’m going on a cruise the week before Thanksgiving with my fella,” she said. “He bought me this red one. He doesn’t get to see a thing till we’re on the boat.”

“Isn’t that nice,” I said.

“He’s married.” She lowered her voice like we were girlfriends. “His wife is old and boring. She sits home with the TV on all day.”

I put a pin in her hem. Straight as a ruler.

“He’s leaving her right after Christmas. He’s already got the money set aside.”

I knew exactly whose money she meant.

She came back the next week, then the next. Every time, she brought another dress, and every time, she told me more. Where she and Mitch went on Thursdays. What he called me behind my back.

“He calls her the warden,” she said once, rolling her eyes. “He never says her name.”

Forty-six years, and I was the warden.

Another time she said, “And the house is all his. She won’t get a thing when he goes. He made sure.”

That house was on my daddy’s lot, and I’d put my egg money into it. The words stung so much I had to look down at her sleeve to keep my face steady.

“Well, isn’t he smart,” I said.

I’d go home every night and make Mitch supper with my glasses hanging on their chain. Then I’d lie in bed beside him and listen to him snore. I cried in the shower where he couldn’t hear. It hurt worse than burying Mama, and I’m ashamed to say it.

My daughter called the second week of October. I almost told her what I’d found. Instead, she told me Mitch had been over talking about me.

“Daddy says you’ve been spending too much at the shop, Mama. He thinks he ought to handle the money.”

I hung up and sat down on my cutting table. I was angry at Mitch, but I was angry at myself, too. I had kept quiet so long that he was already telling our daughter his version of what was wrong with me.

He was getting ready. He was making it sound as if the money belonged to him and the trouble belonged to me. If I fought him, he might turn the kids against me. Years earlier he’d laughed and said, “You leave me, and those grandbabies will choose their granddaddy.”

Maybe they would. I sat at my table with the phone in my hand and thought about all the ways I could lose more than a husband.

The next morning, I went to the bank. I moved what was left of my savings into an account in my own name. I didn’t empty it for spending. I wanted a record of what was there and some room to think before Mitch got his hands on it.

Then I called a lawyer in Decatur. I told him I had found a second phone and that my husband was talking about leaving me and taking control of our money. He told me to bring the savings book and the house papers when I came in. He didn’t promise me anything. He told me not to sign anything Mitch put in front of me.

I wasn’t ready to tell my daughter everything. I was afraid she’d hear it as me asking her to choose sides. I also didn’t tell the lawyer about Kelsey yet. I wanted to be certain I wasn’t turning my anger into a story that couldn’t hold up.

For six weeks, I let Kelsey talk. I asked ordinary questions while I pinned. She told me Mitch said he was tired of being watched. She said he had told her I spent too much at the shop, that the house was his, and that the money for their new life was already set aside.

I hated her for a while. I hated her for standing on my box and calling me boring as if she knew me. Then I’d remember who had chosen to climb into my husband’s truck, and I’d get mad at him all over again.

I was also ashamed. Some nights I wondered if maybe they were right about me. Maybe I really had become a person who worried about the bank book and the shop more than anything else. I knew that wasn’t the truth, but it took me a while to stop hearing his voice in my head.

Kelsey came in for the final fitting on a Thursday afternoon in November. She wore the red cruise dress.

“Make it perfect, Miss Lavonne,” she said. “He’s taking me to the Bahamas.”

“Oh, it’ll be perfect.”

She looked at herself in my three-way mirror and turned so the skirt swung around her knees. I picked up the shop phone and called my husband.

“Mitch, honey, my car won’t start. Can you come get me at the shop?”

“Be there in ten,” he said.

He didn’t know anybody else was in my shop. Kelsey didn’t know who I’d called.

I knelt down at her hem with a mouthful of pins.

“Hold real still, sweetheart.”

Eight minutes later, the bell over my door rang. I stepped back behind my curtain to get the steamer. I heard his boots on my wood floor.

Then Kelsey’s voice, high and happy.

“Baby! What are you doing here?”

And I heard my husband say, “Kelsey, this is Lavonne. My wife.”

For a second, neither of them spoke. Then Kelsey stepped down from the fitting box and looked at me. Her face had changed. She looked from my hands to Mitch and back again.

“You said she stayed home,” she said.

Mitch didn’t answer her. He looked at me.

“Lavonne, I can explain.”

I came out from behind the curtain. I still had the pins in my mouth, and I took them out before I spoke.

“Explain what, Mitch? The phone? The money? Or what you told her about me?”

He glanced toward the front window, like he wanted to make sure nobody was there. The shop was empty except for the three of us.

“This isn’t the place,” he said.

“You came to my place,” I told him. “You can answer here.”

Kelsey stood with one hand on the skirt of the red dress. She looked embarrassed now, but mostly she looked angry.

“You didn’t tell me she was your seamstress,” she said.

“I didn’t know she was doing your alterations,” Mitch said.

“You knew where I went every Thursday,” I said. “You knew the shop.”

He started to answer, then stopped. I saw him try to find a version that would work in front of both of us.

Kelsey turned to him. “You told me she never left the house.”

“I said she was home a lot.”

“You said she watched television all day and didn’t care what happened to you.”

He looked back at me. “I was trying to make it easier.”

“For who?” I asked.

He rubbed his thumb along the side of his hand. He’d done that for years when he was trying to decide what to say. I knew that habit better than I knew my own.

“For both of us,” he said.

Kelsey let out a short laugh, not because anything was funny. “You told me the money was yours. You said it was already put aside.”

“It was our savings,” I said.

Mitch’s jaw tightened. “We saved it together.”

“I put a little in every week since 1981. You told me the transmission needed $9,000.”

“It does need work.”

“Then why did you tell Kelsey you had money set aside for the two of you?”

He looked at her, and that was answer enough. Kelsey took a step away from him.

“You told me you’d handled everything,” she said.

“I was going to.”

“With money you told me wasn’t hers?”

Mitch lifted his hands, palms out, the way he did when he wanted a conversation to stop before it got worse.

“That’s not what I said.”

Kelsey shook her head. “It is exactly what you said.”

I wanted to let her have it. I wanted to tell her she had been foolish to believe a married man who lied about his wife. But I knew what that kind of foolishness looked like. I had believed Mitch too long myself.

So I said, “You can take the dress off when you’re ready. The fitting is finished.”

She looked down at the hem and then at me. “I’m sorry.”

I believed she meant it. It didn’t make the months of listening easier, and I wasn’t ready to forgive her. I nodded once.

Mitch tried again. “Lavonne, let’s go home and talk.”

I didn’t want to go home with him. I was angry enough that I could feel my hands shaking, and part of me wanted to say something that would hurt him just because he had hurt me.

Instead, I said, “You told her the house was all yours. Is that true?”

He looked at Kelsey. “This is between us.”

“It was between us before you brought her into it,” I said. “Answer me.”

“The house is in my name,” he said.

I knew the papers in the desk drawer said more than that. But I also knew I couldn’t argue the whole thing out over a fitting box.

“I’m seeing a lawyer,” I told him. “Don’t touch the savings account, and don’t ask our daughter to manage my money.”

His eyebrows went up. “You moved the money?”

“I moved what was left into an account in my name.”

“You had no right.”

“I have the bank record. The lawyer can tell us what happens next.”

For the first time since he’d come in, Mitch looked at Kelsey as if he needed help. She took off the red dress carefully, holding the fabric away from the floor.

“You told me she was the problem,” she said. “You told me you were already done.”

“I am done,” he said.

“No,” I said. “You are still married to me.”

He stared at me. Then he looked at the counter, at the pin cushion, anywhere but my face. I had spent forty-six years making things fit him. I didn’t feel proud of that then. I felt tired.

Kelsey pulled on her own clothes behind the curtain. I stayed at the cutting table, folding the dress over my arm so it wouldn’t drag. Mitch didn’t move toward me.

When she came back out, she said, “I don’t want to go on that cruise.”

He reached for her. She stepped back.

“Don’t.”

She left without the dress. The bell rang behind her, and Mitch started after her. He stopped at the door and looked over his shoulder.

“You’re making a mess out of this.”

I was mad enough to answer too quickly. “You made it. I’m just not hiding it anymore.”

I regretted how sharp I sounded, but I didn’t take it back.

He stood there another moment, then walked out. I finished the dress and hung it in the back room with Kelsey’s name on the ticket. My fingers were shaking so badly I had to use the table to tie the hanger tag.

That evening, I sat across from Mitch at the kitchen table. He asked me to let him explain, and I asked him to start with the money. He said he hadn’t taken it. He said the savings were meant to help him get started after he left. He said he didn’t know how I would manage the shop if I had to pay the house expenses myself.

I had been listening for some explanation that would make the last few months feel less mean. There wasn’t one.

“You told Kelsey you had the money set aside,” I said.

“I thought I’d have it by then.”

“You told our daughter I was spending too much.”

“She asked me what was going on.”

“You told her you ought to handle my money.”

He looked down at the table. “I didn’t want to argue about it.”

I sat there with my hands around a cup I hadn’t taken a drink from. “You don’t get to call me careless so you can take the bank book.”

He had no good answer. After a while, he said he wanted to stay in the spare room until we knew what we were doing. I told him I wanted him to stay somewhere else. He said the house was his, and I reminded him that my name was on the deed too.

That made him stop. He’d counted on me not checking the papers. I had lived in that house long enough to know where the folder was, and I had taken it with me to the lawyer’s office.

The next day, I met with the lawyer in Decatur. I brought the savings book, the house papers, and the bank statement showing what I’d moved. He looked over the deed and told me the house wasn’t Mitch’s alone. Both our names were on it.

I had spent years hearing him call it his house. Seeing the deed in front of me made my stomach turn, but it also settled one piece of it. He couldn’t make ownership disappear by telling Kelsey a story.

The lawyer said the savings needed to be accounted for as we worked through the separation. He told me to keep the records and not move anything else without talking to him. I had already moved what was left, so I showed him exactly where it had gone.

I left his office with the bank statement in my purse and called my daughter from the car. This time, I told her the truth. I told her about the phone, the affair, Kelsey, and the money.

She went quiet at the other end.

“Daddy said you were going to spend everything,” she said finally.

“I haven’t.”

“I know, Mama. I know now.”

I cried then. Not in the shower, not with the water running, but sitting in my parked car outside the lawyer’s office. I was sorry my daughter had been pulled into it. I was relieved she could hear me.

She came by that night. Mitch was still at the house, but he went to the spare room when she walked in. I put the bank book and the house deed on the kitchen table. She read the statement, then looked at the deed.

“Daddy told me the house was his,” she said.

“It isn’t.”

“Why would he say that?”

I couldn’t tell her what he thought. I could only tell her what he had said to me.

“Because he wanted me to believe I had nowhere to go.”

My daughter reached across the table and put her hand over mine. I had been afraid she would choose him. She didn’t say anything about choosing. She just stayed.

The next morning, Mitch took a bag of clothes and left. He said he needed time to think. I told him the lawyer would be in touch about the next steps, and that he couldn’t come back and take things from the desk or the savings account.

He didn’t argue about the bank book after that. He didn’t say the house was his again.

Kelsey never came back for the red dress. I kept it on its hanger for a while, waiting for her to call. She didn’t. I finished the hem and put it in the back room with the other clothes people hadn’t collected. I still don’t know whether she stayed in town or went back to Huntsville. I only know she didn’t go on that cruise with Mitch.

I signed the papers for my lawyer to begin the separation. Mitch and I would have to settle the house and the rest of the money through the ordinary process, but he didn’t get to decide it by himself. I stayed in the house on my father’s lot. I kept working at the shop, and I kept the savings records in the drawer where I could find them.

I still think about how long I let him tell me who I was. That’s the sentence I would be nervous to post, but it’s true. I waited until Kelsey was standing in my shop before I made him hear it from me.

The day after Mitch left, I unlocked Main Street Alterations and turned the sign to OPEN.