My Wife's Next Husband

She sees someone give him an office plant that isn’t flourishing. He smiles and holds it in his hands. He’ll look like an actor cast as an out-of-work carpenter.    

Ballroom, every woman thinks.  

He holds the pot to his ear. Taps it and listens again.    

Dear Father, he’ll say.

Dear Father, my wife will pray. But not for what everyone thinks.

Water and stones and wood and flowers. Buds to be unfolded on the old terms. Velvet beans. White oak ashes in a firepit. Sweet gum maples. Blossoms like muscadine grapes on the locust tree I planted in our backyard so she could see it from our kitchen.

Their fingers entwine quietly as vines and she decides to tell him she never remembers her dreams. And that she can’t live with pets. And that she wishes she could take her head off to cut her own hair.  

And that’s the evening, the preacher will say, that decided everything.

When my wife calls our kids.

When her next husband drives home.    

Kingdom, he calls firmly to an obedient brown dog. Come.

Our children stand with her because they love her and not because they don’t love me.

And Jesus the Irresistible Traitor is there for them all.

Move naturally, He says. Right tribe. Loved ones first. Wine at 5.

He’s telling them: Fear not. Everyone who’s still here gets to live longer, and happily.

She redirects herself. She asks him to help her solve the crossword that lets her fall asleep.  

And they lie in their bed, solving a puzzle.

And then they fall asleep.

And that’s what kills me, Jesus, the last nail in the cross.

That she won’t remember her dream.

The one I’ll be in like a song on repeat.

The kind I always have where I can’t figure out what town this is. These trees with the sun in the branches.  

Where I’m driving and trying to get back home and everyone tells me the same thing: there’s nothing here to care about.