My name is Carol. I’m fifty-six years old.
I’ve been married to Mark Delaney for thirty-one years.
Until Thursday night, I would have told you it was a good marriage. Not perfect. Nobody’s is. But good. We had a house on Sycamore Drive with a wraparound porch and a maple tree in the front yard. We had a son we loved more than anything. We had Sunday dinners and Friday movie nights and a camper we took to Lake Erie every August.
We had my father’s company.
Brennan Lumber & Supply. My father, Joe Brennan, started it in 1976 with a borrowed pickup truck and four thousand dollars. By the time he died, it was three locations, sixty employees, and the biggest building supply company in three counties.
Mark had run it for the last twelve years. Since my father passed.
Everybody said Mark was a natural. Everybody said Joe would have been proud.
Everybody was wrong. But I didn’t know that yet.
Three months ago, our son Daniel married Jenna.
It was the most beautiful wedding I’d ever been to. Better than my own. A big white barn out in the country, strung with lights. Sunflowers on every table. A string quartet that played “Here Comes the Sun” when Jenna walked down the aisle.
Daniel was glowing. My boy. Twenty-nine years old. An ER nurse at St. Vincent’s. The gentlest person I’ve ever known. When he was six, he cried for an hour because he stepped on a beetle. When he was sixteen, he gave his winter coat to a homeless man outside the library and walked home in the snow.
He looked at Jenna like she’d hung the moon.
Jenna was twenty-seven. Blonde. Pretty in a soft, friendly way. She worked in marketing for a dental chain. She called me “Mom C” from their second date. She brought me flowers on my birthday. She hugged me every time she saw me.
I loved her. I truly did.
At the reception, Mark gave a toast. He stood up in his navy suit with a glass of champagne, and he talked about Daniel as a little boy. About teaching him to ride a bike. About the beetle.
Then he turned to Jenna.
“Jenna,” he said, “welcome to the family. Daniel’s a lucky man. If I were thirty years younger, he’d have some competition.”
Everybody laughed.
I laughed too.
I cried like a baby through most of that wedding. Happy tears. I thought my family was complete.
I didn’t notice the way Mark’s eyes stayed on Jenna a beat too long after the toast.
I didn’t notice anything.
