My client, Cliff, married to Martha for thirty-eight years, was completely unaware he was about to be in a terrible predicament.
Martha started scrambling around in the pantry looking for the crackers. We were organizing, tossing the outdated canned goods, donating the packages they could no longer prepare, reconfiguring shelves and making a big fat mess of things in the process. Martha had encouraged me to open a jar of homemade chunky blackberry jam. We were in dire need of a sugary snack to get thru the rest of the job.
As she gobbed the blueblack fruit on a Ritz cracker, her eyes latched on the label. It said "Blackberry Jam - from one passionate lover to another, summer 1997." "Who the hell made this jam?" She turned the now sticky jar over to me. I heard a shuffle from the other room. Cliff flounced around the corner, suddenly very interested in the goings-on in the kitchen. "What jam?" Obviously they've spent a lot of time together and he had selective hearing. Earlier on, she was screaming at the top of her lungs, asking him about some of the dipping sauces, and whether he wanted them or not. He only seemed to hear at the decibel of the Blue Angels swooping by. Now, he could hear her heart beating louder.
I peered at the jar and Cliff lurched to grab it from my hand. "Nevermind," he said, "the neighbor musta dropped it off." I'd caught the name "Nora," yet kept it to myself.
Martha shrugged but clearly paid close attention to Cliff's skirting the jar behind the mayo and sauerkraut. He must have thought her forgetfulness would prevent her from sniffing it out, though, later on, it's just what she did. Before I left, she had pulled the jar from it's hiding spot and after a bit of scrambling, found the magnifying glass they use for crossword puzzles the size of a first graders alphabet workbook.
The next day, I heard the rest of the story, which Martha seemed to want to holler from the rooftop. Nora was evidently the woman Cliff had an affair with for ten years. He had "whole 'nother family" and Martha had only found out when Nora became a grandmother. The two women had a fight that would have put them on the Jerry Springer Show, she admitted, had the tv host found out about their predicament.
How Cliff ended up with a jar of Nora's jam, decades later, no one knows. Martha said Nora had a heart attack and died a few weeks after the story unfolded. She had suspected something odd was going on and followed him. He'd gone out after work one day (he was an attorney so why was he driving in the direction of a suburban neighborhood when he said he had to go downtown?)
I find out a lot about my clients' while digging around in their shit but this is the first "He had another family." I've run across.
Martha says, "Write it in your story thing on the computer so other grannies don't get all sappy about their husbands." "God knows," she says, "men are worth crap." (No joke, she really said that!)
So, here's your story, Martha, may Nora rest in peace.
And may we all accept the fact that, SOME men are crap!