Beloved wife. Devoted mother. Builder of everything that mattered.
I picked those words. Two years ago. Sitting at our kitchen table in Shaker Heights with the man from the monument company. He’d asked what I wanted on the stone. I’d stared at the catalog for an hour.
Builder of everything that mattered.
Because she was.
My name is Harold Bennett.
For forty-three years, I loved one woman.
Eleanor was my wife. My business partner. The only person who knew every scar beneath my skin.
Today was the second anniversary of her death.
We met in 1979 in a diner in Marietta, Ohio. Her hometown. A little river town on the Ohio where the Muskingum comes in. I was twenty-four, driving a delivery truck for a feed company out of Columbus. She was twenty-three, waitressing her way through Marietta College. Accounting.
I ordered pie. She brought me the wrong kind. Cherry instead of apple.
“I ordered apple,” I said.
“Cherry’s better,” she said. “Trust me.”
I ate the cherry. She was right.
I came back to that diner every Tuesday for four months. I always ordered apple. She always brought cherry.
On the seventeenth Tuesday, I asked her to marry me. On a napkin. With a ballpoint pen.
She wrote yes underneath. And then, but you’re still wrong about the pie. 