My Only Wife Read Free

phoned my father. I told him about the engagement. My dad asked me to put my wife on the phone. I told him she wasn’t with me and that I was heading to the mall.
    He asked why. I explained and he was confused. “Couldn’t she wear the ring until you found another? Why won’t she come to pick out a new one at the store with you? A ring is a ring.”
    I tried to explain that the ring was not the problem, but where it had come from. I tried to tell him that if I was going to spend the rest of my life with this woman I wasn’t going to mar this day by forcing a ring on her that she hated.
    I could practically hear the shrug of his shoulders over the phone before he digressed, “I’m happy for you. Send her my congratulations.”
    I parked the car in the lot and ran into the mall to explain the situation one more time.
    I was delirious with joy. She had said she would be my wife.

5.
    M Y WIFE DIDN’T ALWAYS FIND it easy or enjoyable to tell people’s stories to that tape recorder. Some of the stories my wife collected were difficult.
    On the evenings when this was the case she ’d come home and put on a record. My wife and I only owned an old record player with a radio dial. I often offered to buy us a newer stereo but she forbade it. She said she had come to require the warp that vinyl records inevitably developed. It was like sleeping by the ocean; the subtle waves in the sound made each song a lullaby. She said, “A rocking chair couldn’t work half so well.”
    Most commonly my wife put on old soul records she let sit by the radiator too long. They’d distort in and out, the sound twisting out of shape as she lay on the couch in a daze, letting the music bend around her while she tried to grasp how to tell a story.
    My wife never told her stories for sensational effect. She liked to tell them in a way that would make them quiet and interesting. She wanted people to lean in. She liked to foreshadow huge events to come. She did this even when the stories were simple and straight forward. She gave hints when there was nothing to hint at.
    The way the people told the stories to my wife would be out of order in the least interesting way. Often these acquaintances tended to share with my wife the hardest bit of their life first.
    There was a sense that my wife could handle it, that telling her might lessen the blow each time these people would think about the event in the future.
    There was a warm openness to my wife in the beginning of the story, like she was making some kind sacrifice to take on such a burden.
    My wife never directly asked someone to tell his story, but she was adept at gently steering the conversation.
    In the beginning my wife seemed generous, but by the end there was hunger.
    She needed those stories to be told as much as the teller needed to relay them.
    When my wife returned home, she would sit on the couch and evaluate how a listener wanted to be teased, eased into a story.
    My wife would flip the arm of the record player all the way to the left to click it off. She didn’t have one of those fancy little mini-tape recorders. She had one of the bulky ones that were about the size of a hardcover novel, with a slide-out handle. She clicked the RECORD button and spoke.
    Sometimes she talked for only a short amount of time: not everyone was open with their lives, not everyone was aware of what was fascinating about themselves. Usually my wife could seek it out, but this is not to say there weren’t exceptions.
    Sometimes my wife would go on for over an hour. She would carry on and carry on.
    Usually she clocked in around twenty minutes.
    What seemed most fascinating about my wife’s project, as she tried to explain it to me once in the beginning, was that whenever included herself in the story. She never interjected how something made her feel or how she felt she was affected.
    On the nights when she would flip on those old soul records, it may have been that the only way she could imagine