I’m on my way home from my run, just two streets over from the house when a car pulls up beside me. I know it immediately. It’s Mark’s. “Get in,” he says when the window is half down. “I’ll give you a lift home.”

“This makes no sense.” I motion toward my running shoes. “The point of this,” I say, “is to exercise.”

“It’s about Melanie,” he tells me, and that’s all it takes. I know I’m getting in that car.

The next thing I know, we’re sitting in my kitchen. “Have you been working out?” he asks, nodding at my upper body.

“A little.” It’s a lie. I’ve been working out every spare moment I have. I want to win Melanie’s affection. I want her to forgive me for sending her away. I want to show her I have rejuvenated myself, too.

“Melanie will be pleased. In fact, the reason I’m here is to tell you that she is on her way home.”

I don’t know what I’d expected, but it wasn’t this. I need to shower. I need appropriate attire. Mark has to go.

“I hope you’ll excuse me,” I say to him.

He takes the hint. “I’ll get out of your hair in just a moment. First, there’s something I want to discuss.”

I check my watch and calculate the time it takes to drive from downtown at this time of day.

“The women are not responding to plastic surgery well after June’s death. Plus, with Grant not around…they need someone they can trust.”

I don’t see what this has to do with me; I am not a physician.

“What makes older women feel inferior more than anything?”

I have forty-five minutes. Max. Mark doesn’t notice I haven’t responded and he doesn’t wait either. Thankfully. “The answer is, a younger, more attractive woman thrown in the mix.”

I still don’t offer anything up. I want him to keep talking, which he does. “I have a plan for Melanie.”

“A plan?”

“A recruitment plan.”

“Hmmm.”

“We need more young women in her demographic.”

“Was this your idea?” I have to know.

“Of course.” He lies, which can only mean Beth didn’t tell him it was mine.

“I see.” It’s nice to have reassurance the game you’re playing is going the way you want it to.

“Well,” he says, throwing up his hands. “What do you think?”

“If it keeps us in the black, what do I care?”

“Ah, Tom.” He stands, finally. “You’re always such a good sport.”

I walk Mark to the foyer, where much to my annoyance he pauses. “Now, listen,” he says, his expression turning serious. “I need you to fix this with her.”

“And if I can’t? I don’t know what they did in there. I don’t know how far they took it…with the reprogramming.”

I’m fishing for answers, but he doesn’t take the bait. “Whatever you did the first time…do it again.”

“It was illicit then. That made it more appealing.”

He shrugs. “So, make it that way again.”

I have no idea what he means.

“Oh and the other reason I came—I need an update. How’s the plan to take care of your wife’s past coming?”

I take a step toward the door. “I’m working on it.”

He smiles and holds my gaze. “Work harder.”

Mark tells me to make it illicit, and so I do. First, I hop on the internet and buy Melanie the car I knew from her browser history she had been eyeing. A Maserati. With her life more or less still on the line, I went with the lease option. I’m all for practicality.

Then, as the church accountant, I set up an expense account in her name, which I plan to call a recruitment fund. Surely, Mark will understand. I’ve seen his wife’s, so I have a healthy understanding what she spends on upkeep. Melanie will need money for a new wardrobe, a personal trainer, and a chef, all things I know Melanie has had her eye on. I assume these are the kinds of things all women have their eye on.

Next, I book us round-trip tickets. I email Mark and tell him he’s right. When you mirror your enemies, doing exactly as they do, they cannot figure out your strategy. This mocks and humiliates them, which causes them to overreact. By essentially holding a mirror up to their psyches, you seduce them with the illusion that you share their values; by mimicking their actions, you teach them a lesson.

I write that I plan to “make it illicit” with a second honeymoon. I explain that Melanie and I will be gone a week. Everything is in order on my end. He can take that to mean whatever he wants.

This leaves just enough time for a quick two-minute shower.

Then I sit back and wait for my bride to come through the door.

When Melanie comes barreling through the door, I’m not at all surprised that she immediately begins packing her bags. She doesn’t know what I know. “What are you doing?”

“I never signed up for this.” I look on as she grabs as much as she can muster from the closet and tosses it all onto the bed. “This is crazy.”

“You look amazing,” I tell her, and she does. She looks more like June than I thought possible. A younger, slimmer, more beautiful version, yes. But a transformation has taken place, and it’s visible.

“I lost our child, and you sent me to…you sent me away!”

“In many cultures,” I say, “women go away when they are menstruating. Historically, it has proven they have been highly successful in their relationships.”

“I wasn’t on my period,” she tells me as she throws her stuff into a bag. “I lost our baby, you fucking asshole.”

I back away and give her some space. “I read anger can be good for grief. It shows you’ve moved into the second stage.”

“You’re insane.”

To prove her wrong, I explain further. “Understanding anger as a natural but volatile stage in the grieving process can lead to better methods of coping, healing, and support after loss or death.”

“I don’t even have words…”

The doorbell rings. Her eyes meet mine.

“That’s probably your car.”

“My car?”

“The Maserati. The one you’ve been looking at online.”

Her head tilts slightly. “You bought me a car?”

Leasing something isn’t exactly the same thing as buying it, so I say, “You needed something to drive, so we don’t have to downsize and move downtown.”

Melanie’s eyes grow wide. It takes a split second before she makes a beeline for the door. I am pleased to see she is healing well.

“Mom?” Her voice is shrill. “What are you doing here?”

This is unexpected. I have yet to meet my in-laws. Melanie has assured me we won’t like each other and judging by the look on her mother’s face when I go to the door, it seems she was right.

We exchange pleasantries. “I had to see for myself,” her mother says. “My daughter. Married.” Her eyes light up. I see a bit of my wife in them. “I can hardly believe it.”

“And to an accountant,” Melanie adds, which is ridiculous. I don’t know a more respectable profession.

I invite her in. Melanie looks at me funny. Her mother gives me a similar look as she takes a seat on the new couch. I can tell it isn’t her taste, either.

The doorbell rings again. I look to my wife. “Your father? Third cousin? Best friend from high school?”

Melanie rolls her eyes.

I open the door. It’s the car delivery people.

A clipboard is passed my way. I sign to show I am taking possession. I haven’t even finished half my last name before Melanie is grabbing me. She plants a kiss on my mouth. And they say it’s just men who have a thing for cars.

“What a lovely gift,” her mother says.

“Tom is the best.” Melanie is beaming. How easily she has forgotten she was trying to walk out on me.

“I hate to cut this short,” I say, glancing at my watch. “But our ride will be here in half an hour.”

Melanie’s brow furrows. “Our ride?”

“Yes, to take us to the airport.”

“Airport?” she and her mother say in unison.

“A honeymoon. I wanted to surprise you,” I tell her, feigning disappointment.

Melanie’s mother crosses her arms. “You had me really worried.”

“About that—” she says. It’s clear she’s hiding something.

Her mother turns to me and places her hand on my forearm. “Melanie wrote me this crazy letter. She gave this address and said she was being held against her will. Scared the daylights out of me. So here I am.”

I glare at my wife.

“I should have known better. My daughter has always had a very vivid imagination.”

Melanie’s eyes are locked on mine.

“She said some nonsense about being in a cult, and I rushed all the way here…only to find she’s done quite well for herself.”

Melanie laughs playfully and then she throws her hands up. “Surprise!”

I laugh too.

Melanie’s mother looks from her daughter toward me and then back. She’s not sure what to think.

“Looks like I’d better get packed,” Melanie says.

“Good thing you got a head start.”

Her mother’s expression is expectant. “Okay, then. But you’ll have me for dinner when you return.”

“Maybe—” Melanie starts.

“Of course,” I say. “We’d love to.”

Her mother looks practically giddy. She’s glowing. “Your father is going to be so happy.”

I wave as she backs out of the drive.

She lets down her window and waves back. “You two be good.”

“You be good,” my father said.

I was none of it. I shook my head, stomped my feet, and clung to his leg. I was only five, so he still tolerated small acts of defiance. “Why do you have to leave again?”

“It’s my job, son. A soldier can’t bail on his duties.”

I hadn’t thought to ask him why he couldn’t say the same for his duties as a father. It was what it was. “Plus,” he added, patting my head. “It puts food on the table.”

That part was a lie. I don’t think I told him that either. At least not then.

When my father was deployed, which was most of the time, he left me in the care of his sister, my Aunt Jeanie. Jeanie was a dreadful woman. She was addicted to men and booze, and was emphatically not addicted to raising a child that wasn’t hers.

I’m not your mother, she used to say. As though I could forget.

My mother died a few years after I was born.

At least that was the story I was told. Another lie in a long string of them.

Later, I would learn some truths are better left unknown.

Take, for example, the fact that cockroaches littered our house. Ants crawled up the wall. I was young and inexperienced. I thought everyone had them. I assumed everyone lived like that. Aunt Jeanie used to say the roaches would outlive us. They could outlast a nuclear explosion. I read it in a book, so it made sense. Until the first and only time I brought a classmate home, and I learned other people did not, in fact, live in filth. Jeanie had a very unique housekeeping schedule, which usually picked up right before my father was due home on leave. This was back before I learned how.

“I’ll send you something special when I send the money for the month,” my father said each time he walked out the door. Maybe it absolved his guilt, maybe he really meant it. I’ll never know.

My eyes met Jeanie’s. By that point, we both knew any money my father would send would be blown on liquor, unemployed men, and other stuff I was still too young to know about. Real food, sustenance, was an after thought. “Sorry, it’s pasta again,” she would say. “And, yes, without meat. Have you seen the price of ground beef these days?” she’d ask, taking a long pull on her cigarette. That’s what I remember most. To this day, pasta still tastes like Marlboro Reds to me. You’d think I’d hate it. They say you never really get away from that which you know.

When I was older, I brought her the grocery store flyer. I pointed out the price of ground beef. Then the price of her beloved Jack Daniel’s. I surmised that if we cut her consumption in half, we could afford meat a third of the time she cooked. She thanked me with a broken nose.

It wasn’t always bad. We did have meat and other food that consisted of more than noodles right before my father was due home. Jeanie made sure of that. I was so happy during those times, I’d mark the days on my calendar. Often, I’d eat so much I’d throw up. The rest of the time, it was NoodleO’s. That is unless one of Jeanie’s men was joining us, and then she’d go the extra mile and boil the pasta herself.

“Sorry, kid,” she liked to remind me. “Money’s tight again this month.” She’d look at the man sitting at our table. “They send our men over there to fight and pay them diddly squat.”

I got tired of Aunt Jeanie saying that, so I wrote a letter to the president once. When a response came, I was awarded with two black eyes. I had to miss school. After that, I stopped writing letters.

It was probably for the best. One day when I was home sick I found all the letters I’d written my father in a stack in my aunt’s nightstand. It hit me why she hadn’t sent them. There was too much truth inked on those pages. All of a sudden, it made sense why my father never answered my questions or wrote about any of the things I was interested in. He had no idea. He didn’t know me at all.

Not long after that, I vowed I would never be poor again. I learned everything I could about money.

Senior year, when the money I’d stashed away went missing, I intercepted the check my father sent that month, cashed it, and took what was mine. Maybe I should have let it go. But this was important. I was taking a girl to the prom, and even though it wasn’t a real date—she made it clear she just didn’t want to go alone—I couldn’t exactly let her down at the last minute.

When Aunt Jeanie realized what had happened, she showed up to the gymnasium drunk, railing. “You think a girl like that could ever want you?” she yelled. She walked right on the dance floor and accosted a poor kid that wasn’t even me. That’s how drunk she was. “You’re fooling yourself. Look at her. She pities you. There’s a difference, Thomas.” Everyone knew who my aunt was. She didn’t have to say my name. “And someday,” she slurred. “Someday you’ll learn what that is.”

It wouldn’t have been so bad if that had been the worst of it. It wasn’t. A few weeks later, I came home from school to find Aunt Jeanie on the couch staring at the ceiling. Her eyes were glazed over. I thought she was dead. The doctors said she’d had a stroke. Eventually, she woke up, but she wasn’t the same person. She was worse. Combative and angry, even more so than before. The doctors diagnosed her with dementia, likely brought on by the excessive alcohol use. She did get better after a few weeks in the hospital. But not much.

We didn’t have money to keep her there, or anywhere else for that matter, so I brought her home. My father was supposed to come home on leave, but then some conflict broke out somewhere and he couldn’t.

Every day Aunt Jeanie would make my father a cake in preparation for his arrival. Every day, the conflict was not resolved. After two weeks, I explained there could be no more cakes. But Jeanie insisted. She cried like a small child. She reverted into herself. Dementia is a horrible disease. Eventually, I gave in. This time Jeanie was convinced it was my father’s birthday, so I stocked the house with cakes until her use of the oven became a concern. It was the least I could do. I’d come home from school and a cake would be waiting. It was the same day, every day. At least to her. I would celebrate with her and she would insist that I blow out candles. At first, I wished for my father to come home. Then I wished for Aunt Jeanie to die.

She called me Anthony when she sang. My father’s name.

In the beginning, I cared to correct her. I’d say, “No, I’m Tommie, remember?”

“That’s right. You’re Thomas.”

I’d tell her stories to help her remember. It’s the only thing that keeps you sane when there’s no one left to remember everything you thought you knew.

“Anthony,” she’d say in the next breath. “Why don’t you get a job here in town? Surely the lumberyard would hire you.”

“No, Aunt Jeanie. I’m Thomas.”

“But that boy needs you,” she said. “You know I don’t like kids.”

When I left for college, my father put her in a home run by the state. Even after he was discharged, he never came back from wherever he’d been, not really. She couldn’t be alone, he’d said, and I couldn’t stay. I’d drive sixty miles one way on Sundays, after work, to see her. She always called me Anthony when I walked in the door.

Eventually, when she forgot both of our names, I stopped going all together.

Not long after that, my wish finally came true.