“Paige Mercer married Andrew Lawson,” I said.
“Eighteen months ago,” Ruth said. “Paige told us her parents were both gone.”
I heard the word “both” and understood immediately what it meant. My husband really was dead. I was not.
“My husband passed away seven years ago,” I said. “I am still very much here.”
Ruth’s face went through something I could not fully read. Not shock, exactly — she had the quality of a person who was quickly processing rather than purely reacting. Something that was compassion and something that was recognition that she was in the middle of a complicated situation and needed to think clearly.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, and I believed her.
We looked at each other for a moment in the fellowship hall with the planning meeting reconvening around us and neither of us quite sure what the next step was.
We exchanged phone numbers. We agreed, without having to discuss it much, that this was not the place to continue the conversation. The planning meeting finished. I drove home. I sat in my kitchen and tried to think about what I knew and what it meant.
What I knew: Paige had been married to Andrew Lawson for eighteen months. I had known about Andrew — known his first name, known she was with someone, known they had gotten married in a civil ceremony that Paige had described to me as purely administrative, a courthouse thing, no parents on either side, a party later that had never materialized. I had not been surprised by the no-parents framing because Paige and I had been in a delicate place in our relationship and she had framed the courthouse approach as simpler for everyone.