And I ask the question.
Every time, in some form, when the moment’s right, in the words he used with me on an afternoon in March when I had no idea I was being asked something he’d asked eleven hundred and thirty-nine people before:
“Tell me a true thing nobody knows.”
Most of them have one ready.
That’s the part nobody believes until they’ve done it.
They’ve had it ready for years.
I wear the tab.
Not on that finger — on a chain, because it’s aluminum and it was bent and I was going to lose it.
People ask.
And I’ve got a short answer and a long one, and the short one is the one I use, and it’s the only sentence in this entire story that I know for certain Alden Voss would have approved of, because he said a version of it to me nine days before he d*ed, when I asked him — casually, making conversation, with no idea what I was asking — whether he’d ever been married.
“Once,” he said. “Right now. For a week.”
“Alden. Was there anybody, ever? Before?”
And my husband of four days, who had sat with eleven hundred and thirty-nine dy*ng strangers and taken a pull tab from every single room, said:
“Willa, I’ve had eleven hundred people tell me the truest thing about themselves. That’s more marriage than most men get.”
That’s the short answer.
That’s what I say when people ask about the ring.
“It was my husband’s. He collected true things.”
THE END
