«My Husband of Thirty-One Years Threw My Crutches Down the Church Steps in the Rain While His Mistress Filmed Me Falling…»
The Church Steps
I am fifty-four years old, and for six years I have walked with two forearm crutches.
Multiple sclerosis took my balance first, then my left leg.
On a good day I can cross a room. On a bad day my husband carries me to the bathroom.
Or he used to.
We have been married thirty-one years.
He was the first man who ever made me feel I was the funniest person in a room.
When I was diagnosed, he cried harder than I did.
Over the last year he changed.
He stopped coming to my doctor appointments.
He started working late, then very late, then not coming home until after I was asleep.
He started wearing cologne that I had not bought him.
I did not ask. I told myself it was stress. I told myself a man who had stayed through six years of hospitals could not possibly be leaving.
Last Sunday I went to church the way I always do.
It takes me twenty minutes to climb the front steps, and he always walked beside me with his hand under my elbow.
That morning he told me he would meet me there.
I sat in the third pew by myself, and he came in late, and he sat at the far end.
After the service, I stood at the top of the steps in the drizzle, holding my crutches, waiting for my husband.
He came out through the doors in his navy overcoat.
He was not alone.
Beside him was a woman I had never seen, thirty-three or thirty-four, in a tight red coat, with her arm through his.
She was smiling at me.
He did not say hello.
He reached out and ripped the crutches out of my hands.
I had no time to scream.
He swung them like trash and hurled them down the steps. They bounced on the wet stone and clattered all the way to the bottom.
My leg gave way.
I dropped onto the wet step so hard I felt it in my teeth.
Then I heard the laugh.
The woman in red had her phone up.
She was filming me. She was filming the woman on the ground, in the rain, with her handbag in her lap.
My husband stood over me, with his face twisted like I had never seen it, and screamed it down at me loud enough to ring off the church wall:
«Nobody wants you! Go home and rot!»
Thirty-one years.
I tried to pull myself to the railing.
He grabbed the front of my raincoat in his fist and dragged me sideways along the step.
The stone scraped my elbow through my coat.
My handbag turned over and everything came out onto the wet stone: my keys, my tablets, my lipstick, a little photograph of our wedding.
The woman in red stepped on the strap and laughed.
She said nothing. She did not need to.
I was sobbing. I was shaking. I was trying to reach the railing with a hand that would not close.
The rest of the congregation had already gone through to the hall for tea. The forecourt was empty.
My husband dragged me one more step along the stone by the front of my coat, and I heard my wedding photograph scrape across the ground.
The woman in red stood on my handbag strap with her phone up, still filming, still laughing.
I could not get my hand to close on the railing.
And then someone on those steps did something nobody expected.
What the Handyman Shouted
The handyman had dropped his toolbox at the corner of the building and run the length of the forecourt. He did not ask a single question. He reached my husband in four strides, took hold of the hand that was dragging me, and tore it off my coat as if it were a branch.
Then he went to the wall.
There is a coiled green hose on a reel at the side of the church, the one he uses for the gutters and the flower beds. He pulled it out, twisted the nozzle, and the pressure hit my husband in the chest and the woman in red in the face.
«I heard you sell her house behind her back!» he shouted over the water.
My husband skidded backwards and hit the side of his car. The woman in red screamed and dropped her phone into a puddle. For the first time in a year, I saw my husband look small.
I was still holding the railing. I was soaked from the splash. And I was laughing, which frightened me, because I knew it was not really laughter.
What He Had Overheard
The night before, the handyman had been locking up the car park behind the church. A car was idling by the gate. The window was down. A man was talking on the phone, quite loudly, because he thought no one was near.
«She’ll sign by Monday,» my husband said. «She always does. Three hundred and forty thousand is a fair price for a house like that. No, she won’t know until it’s done. She can’t even climb the stairs.»
The handyman did not say anything that night. He told me later that he stood behind a hedge for ten minutes with his heart pounding, thinking about what to do. In the morning he came to church early, saw my husband arrive with the woman in red, and decided he would wait. He had a feeling.
The house was my parents’ house. I inherited it eight years ago. It is the only thing I own outright. My husband had already found a buyer and drawn up a sale agreement. He had signed my name on a page, and he had practised it, I discovered, on the back of a bank statement.
The Attempt to Recover
My husband tried what every cornered man tries.
«This is a misunderstanding. He is lying. He is a church workman with a grudge.» He wiped his face with the sleeve of his good overcoat. «Darling, tell him. Tell him it was a joke.»
I looked at him, at the water dripping off his chin and the woman in red crouching to retrieve her ruined phone.
«You called me a thing to be thrown away,» I said. «In front of the church.»
He did not have an answer to that.
The handyman had already gone to collect my crutches from the bottom of the steps. He came back up, wiped them on his jacket, and set them in my hands one at a time, as carefully as if they were made of glass.
What It Cost Them
The elders of the church sat with me that afternoon in the vestry. The handyman wrote and signed a statement. On Monday morning my sister drove me to a lawyer, and by noon the forged sale agreement was declared void. The buyer withdrew. The bank froze the joint accounts while the matter was investigated, and my husband was told that he could not enter the house without an escort until a court had spoken.
The woman in red had left him by Wednesday. She had been told, I think, that there was a house at the end of this, and there was not.
I do not hate him. I am too tired to hate anyone. But I have changed the locks, and my sister now sleeps in the room that used to be his.
Months Later
The handyman builds me a ramp at the church every spring. He says it is for everyone, but we both know he drew the angle for me.
On Sundays I climb the steps in twelve minutes now. Sometimes people ask me how I managed it.
I tell them: with two crutches, and one man who was willing to walk to the wall and pick up the hose.
Would you have forgiven him if he had begged you to take him back? Tell us in the comments.
