It just happened, she thought. The bastard had waited until I sent up the garage door, and then he did it. Waited the three full hours I was gone until the very last minute. “You goddamned son of a bitch.”
She noticed her hand was still shaking as she held the cigarette between two fingers, propped up by her elbow. It surprised her, the trembling, the light-headedness. This was what she’d been secretly — and not so secretly — hoping for since the kids had left home, to be free of this bastard and this marriage. And yet, in some deep, almost primal way, she was upset by it. She could barely stand to look at him when he was alive, and now she couldn’t take her eyes off him. She’d wanted him to be gone, and now that he was, it was a shock. A palpable, gut-churning blow to the system.
He’d been threatening to kill himself since the moment they’d left the oncologist’s office in October. Stomach cancer. Inoperable. Too far along. Six months at best.
“I’m not going to waste away into nothing,” he’d said on the ride home, his hand incessantly tapping at his thigh as she drove. “I’ll kill myself first.”
“No, you won’t.”
“I sure as hell will.”
“You haven’t got the nerve.”
Turns out he did. She had to give him credit. The son of a bitch had somehow found the nerve. She reached over and flicked the ashes from her cigarette into Tom’s ashtray.
Noticing the note again, she pulled it closer to her. What she’d thought was a single sheet of eight-and-a-half by eleven paper was actually several pages — maybe a dozen — bound together by a pair of staples spaced evenly at the top. He’d written his suicide note on the back of the last page:
Jenny and Michaeclass="underline"
I couldn’t let the cancer win. Better to go out on my own terms. Please forgive me for not saying goodbye. Know that I love you both and I adore your spouses and children. Not seeing the grandkids grow up is what I’ll miss most. Give them everything they want. They’re worth it, just as both of you were. And are.
P.S. Speaking of “terms,” Doreen, you’ll want to check them before you try to collect. I’m worth about as much as you always thought I was.
I’m sure of that. Triply sure. I can’t tell you what pleasure that brings me in my final moments.
Doreen flipped over the packet of papers. Large, boldface letters ran across the top: POLICY OF LIFE INSURANCE. It was the two-hundred fifty thousand dollar policy they’d taken out on Tom a year and a half ago, when both of their old term policies had run out and Tom had still seemed healthy. He hadn’t even been smoking then, having quit cold turkey five years before. This allowed him to get the non-smoker rate, while she’d been forced to get the more expensive smokers policy — also worth two-hundred fifty thousand — because there was no way in hell she was going to quit.
But neither of them had been concerned with the rates. They’d each assumed they’d outlive the other, and both had regarded the premiums as a relatively short-term investment with a quarter million dollar return. It had been almost a bet between them, wagering themselves as beneficiaries.
But terms. What terms? There had been dozens of terms the agent had pointed out to them. Grace periods. Incontestability. Misstatement of Age or Sex. Changing beneficiaries. On and on. Some she had missed as her mind had drifted to daydreams of someone actually paying her that much money for the body of her dead husband. Like some sort of a bounty for an outlaw. Dead or alive. Preferably dead.
While part of her had dreamed, another part had figured that with her luck she’d never be young enough — she was fifty-eight at the time — to enjoy the money. But then, like a gift, Tom’s cancer had shown up. Initially she had wondered if she’d somehow brought it on, her hatred of him, her anger toward him, her resentment that of the two of them he was the one people liked more. The one who could make everyone laugh. Everyone but her.
And that laugh. God help us, that deep-barrel growl of a laugh. That self-righteous chortle. Others seemed to find it endearing — “Doesn’t Tom have the best laugh?” — but to Doreen it was infuriating. Maybe the thing she hated most about him.
But as the cancer had advanced, his humor had left him. The bitterness had grown. The laughter had died. And his so-called friends stopped coming to visit. And now he’d killed himself. She’d had nothing to do with any of that. That had all been Tom’s fault.
And now she was two-hundred fifty thousand dollars richer.
A charge ran through her. Made her hands tingle. She took a quick, excited puff on her cigarette.
But then it struck her. What Tom had meant by “terms.” The tingling in her hands became nausea in her stomach. She picked up the policy and flipped through page after page of numbers and boilerplate until she found the section.
Suicide: In the event of the suicide of the insured, while sane or insane, within two years from the date of issue, our liability will be limited to the premiums paid.
Doreen flung the policy off the table. It landed near the refrigerator like a dead mallard. “Shit.” She pounded the table. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.”
She jumped to her feet and began pacing and screaming at him. “I hate you. I hate you. I’ve always hated you. I hope you burn in hell.” She paced some more and took hard pulls on the thin brown cigarette, her hand still shaking, the shock replaced by rage. Then she ground out the More in the ashtray as if it were his smiling face. She began nibbling at the skin at the edges of her fingernails, her breath scuttling back and forth through her curled fingers. She came to a stop at the edge of the table and stared at Tom’s open mouth.
“I’ll get you back for this, you son of a bitch.”
She needed that money. Her losing streak at the casino had been going on longer than she wanted to admit. She’d even been dipping into Tom’s retirement account — now that she had power of attorney — without his knowledge. But even that was running out.
I need that damn money, she thought, as she put her hands on her hips and surveyed the mess Tom had left behind. A mess worth exactly a quarter of a million dollars.
Twenty minutes later, she removed her gardening gloves and scanned the kitchen as if for the first time. Duct tape held Tom’s hands behind his back and his ankles together. The gun was in her purse. She’d scrubbed his hand, having read in some mystery novel about the gun powder residue that could be found on the shooter’s skin. She moved to the bathroom and assessed the cut screen, the open window and the shattered glass on the floor. It looked real enough. She checked the other rooms of the rambler. Some of the drawers were open and rifled through — enough but not too much. A robbery gone bad. Any burglar would be disappointed by what they’d find in our tiny house, she thought. Except Tom’s .38, which according to the new story she’d hurriedly concocted, the intruder had used to kill Tom and then had pocketed.
Satisfied, she fixed her hair, cleaned her shoes of Tom’s detritus, and left the house. She drove to the library — a place she hadn’t visited since the kids were small — and found a copy machine tucked away in the stacks. After carefully pulling the staples, she copied the policy side of the last page. Then she stuffed the suicide note into her purse and re-stapled the new last page to the policy, making sure to punch through the old holes.
In the car, she tore the note into a dozen pieces and deposited the remains into a brown paper grocery bag, the same grocery bag that held the gun, her garden gloves, and Tom’s overpriced boots. She rolled the top of the bag closed.