Our Souls at Night

14

In the end I came to admire some of her qualities, Louis said. She was a good person, with a definite inner direction. She wouldn’t do what others expected of her. We were pretty poor some of those years in the beginning, but she never wanted a career. She had her own ideas. She wanted her independence. I don’t know if it made her happy, though. People talk about life being a journey now, so you could say that was what she was doing. She had a number of women friends here. They would get together at someone’s house and talk about their lives and what women wanted. She talked about us, I’m sure. Women’s liberation was just coming on big then. But we had some other problems too. And it was at least interesting to me that I would be taking care of Holly at night while her mother was at somebody else’s house complaining to her friends about me. It seemed a little ironic. And there was that time with Tamara.

I thought you said she forgave that, Addie said.

I think she did. I think she wanted me back at the time. But I’m sure it came up in their talks. I could tell her friends thought differently about me. But she loved Holly. From the beginning. They were very close. Diane confided in her at an early age. I thought it wasn’t right, talking to her that way, telling everything. But she did anyway. She kept Holly drawn in to her.

You haven’t said how you met.

Oh. Well, we met like you say you and Carl did. We met in college in Fort Collins. We got married after we both graduated. She was a beautiful young woman. We didn’t know anything about making a home or setting up a house. She’d never done any cooking growing up or much housework, her mother did all that. I grew up here in Holt.

Yes, I know that.

For a couple years after we graduated, I was teaching in a little school on the Front Range and when a job opened up in the high school here they hired me and I came back home and have been here ever since. Forty-seven years now. We had Holly, and as I say Diane didn’t go to work when she might have after Holly started school.

I didn’t really have a career either.

You worked. I know you did.