A friend introduced us at a dinner. I noticed his southern accent. I loved the sound of it: warm and kind and soothing. I had only heard that accent in a hero from a cowboy movie and in the short stories of Flannery O’Connor. To hear it in the Canadian city where I lived was captivating.
After dinner, I walked alone with him to the subway station. The sky was black, and it was snowing heavily. Large, soft flakes fell around his head. He was smiling like someone who was happy and certain about something. He seemed to me like he was inside a snow globe. I knew then he would be someone important to me.
He made me laugh so much. He told me that where he was from, there was one traffic light in town. The supermarket was called the Piggly Wiggly. He said you could buy a pickled pig’s foot there and that he had eaten a pig’s intestines.
I had never heard of anyone else who ate that stuff. I thought it was just me, my family and Lao people like us. I thought, “Oh, he’d fit right in.”
When he met my parents and brother, they brought back all the parts of a cow a butcher would throw away and cooked it for him. They made a sauce with bile and told him to dig in. And he did.
We didn’t know each other very well, but two weeks after we met, we decided to get married. I was 30 and he was 34. No one tried to stop us.
We went to Toronto’s City Hall and invited our parents and a few friends. It was late March, and I wore a white vintage dress that cost $50. We didn’t have time to get our rings. He borrowed his father’s. It was a band that was too big for him, but he made it work. I had a ring my mother gave me when I was 13, and it fit.
There are photographs of that day and we do look very happy. Our friends and family look happy, too, but a little bewildered. We all went back to his place and ate cookies and drank warm cups of tea. His mother asked me if I was pregnant. I was not.
Before we got married, I asked him, “What if we get divorced? We don’t really know each other.”
He had no doubt or worry at all, and said, “Then the divorce will be with you. All that matters is that it’s with you.”
He didn’t see divorce as a failure or a thing to fear.
In our 12 years together, we spent so much time with each other. Just the two of us. We read so many books and listened to records and filled our home with these things. We traveled and took road trips. We had barbecues in the backyard and lit sparklers. Watched fireworks. I baked cakes and lit the candles.
We spent our summers watching baseball games on television. We agreed about everything, and didn’t have fights.
“That’s weird,” someone once said to me.
Couples are supposed to fight, be at each other’s throat about something. We were not like that. No one wandered into our lives unannounced. There wasn’t a big blow up.
There had been a friendly waitress at a nearby restaurant. She was pretty, I thought. And they liked talking about music and concerts they had both gone to as teenagers. I had hoped they would fall in love. I don’t know why I hoped that. It was just something I wanted for him. But we were both so loyal.
I loved his family. His mother, father, sister, niece and nephew. His aunts, uncles, cousins. His grandmother and best friends. I was included in everything. Their stories and their jokes. Every Christmas I woke up to so many presents waiting for me under the tree.
We didn’t have children.
We lived in Newfoundland when he was on sabbatical, and one day he bought three goats and put them in the backyard. I watched them from the window, and when they cried out at night, I wondered what they wanted.
We named them Bella, Baby and Droopy — the last because of how his ears hung at the side of his head. We fed them watermelon, cabbages, carrots and milk. Our yard wasn’t fenced, and our goats would often end up somewhere around town, eating grass. Someone would bring them back, or we would go get them, or they would come back on their own.
When the cold weather came, we felt maybe our place wasn’t best for them. We asked the man who sold them to us to take them back. When he arrived, he shook his head and said we weren’t raising them right.
When you know your marriage is over, it can be a time of great tenderness. I knew it would be our last year together before he did. It’s not something I can easily explain except to say every time I looked around, I felt I wasn’t supposed to be there. The place I held seemed to belong to someone else.
I didn’t tell anyone for a long time.
On my 41st birthday, a friend drove up to see me and over dinner alone with her, I told her and cried. She said, “Just because someone is lovely doesn’t mean you have to be married to them.”
I didn’t have a real reason. Just a calling, a signal only I could hear. And I knew I had to listen to that.
I didn’t want to do it, but I knew it was the right thing. I knew he would never, and between the two of us, I knew I had to be the one to do it. I thought the feeling would pass. The signal would stop, and I wouldn’t have to do anything about it.
I went to everyone’s baby showers and made quilts for them. I cooked family meals. I sat on the beach and watched the waves come in. I baked a chocolate cake and sang “Happy Birthday.” He filled our home with tiny pink wildflowers that grew in our backyard for no reason.
We could have continued like this and had a decent and fine life. But I wanted more for him, and I knew I could not rise to offer more. He probably knew that too, but he would never say.
Divorce is a gift. It’s what I think. And it was something I could give to him. I did it because I love him. I know that seems strange to say. But that’s the truth.
I wanted to be kind. I didn’t do him dirty, and maybe that is what was so difficult. There was no one else, nothing happened that was to blame or that I could point to. It was just me and what I wanted.
I was calm and serious. I told him one sad October evening. It wasn’t a long conversation. I ended things the way we got married: quickly.
“Don’t break my heart,” he said, and like every other night, we went to sleep holding each other. When we woke up the next day, he said, “But who will take care of you?” and started to cry.
I told him that I can take care of myself, and he knew I could. We lived together for a few days, and then he left. He didn’t take anything with him. Not even his underwear.
After that, we would still call and talk to each other on Sunday afternoons. We would talk about everyday things. Our friends, the weather, the news, work. If he got the oil changed or washed the car. We wished each other a happy new year. He traveled and sent me handwritten postcards or texted me photographs of landscapes and sky. And then they stopped for a while.
He was in Finland. Visiting an old friend. His first girlfriend actually. She had been an exchange student at his high school when they were 17. They graduated and went off to college and drifted apart.
They hadn’t seen each other in more than 30 years. But nothing seemed to have changed for them. They were both single. Three days later they decided to get married.
When he told me he got married, I was so thrilled for him. I didn’t leave for him to be alone. He found someone. I thought it was romantic that after so many years apart, they found each other again and ended up where they started.
Everything is as it should be.
Souvankham Thammavongsa lives in Toronto. Her first novel, “Pick a Color,” will be published in September.
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