Mary Pauline Lowry

C H A P T E R 3 Mary Pauline Lowry

Surely Caitlyn had mailed out invitations to her other guests two months before, and a save the date had gone out two months before that. My invitation she’d kept squirreled away, perhaps hidden in plain sight on her bedside table, under a stack of true crime novels and plays full of characters who were always shouting and tearing at their hair in an attempt to express their toxic love. She’d probably lifted the books every couple of days and i ngered the invitation, asking herself: Should I? Shouldn’t I?

But of course in the end she could not resist. But why, oh, why hadn’t she just mailed it like a normal person? If the letter had arrived with my name and address written by a professional calligrapher, with a postmarked stamp, it would not have been half so unsettling. But the envelope in my hand was blank as an amnesiac’s memory. It was a purely Caitlyn prank, the sort of thing that had made me love her in the irst place. A prank that by design would ensure I would think of nothing but her in the week leading up to her nuptials. Oh, the satisfaction it would give her to imagine me standing there in my pajama bottoms and Wilco t-shirt, looking around at my neighbors’ houses to see if any of them might have slid the envelope into my mailbox. Perhaps Caitlyn had looked one of them up on Google Maps and then the reverse phone directory, had paid them God-only-knows how much to receive a plain brown envelope that inside had contained this creamy blank one. She’d asked them to deposit the invitation in my mailbox when I wasn’t looking. Or perhaps she herself was peering out of one of my neighbor’s windows right now! Maybe she would open the door of the Millers ranch-style three-bedroom two-bath across the street and come sashaying down the sidewalk toward me, wearing her characteristic sassy grin. But no, that’s the kind of madness she wanted me to be thinking about. I shook my head to clear it. Caitlyn, after all this time, was obviously trying to mess with me. But wait! What if it was a test? What if, for all these lost years, Caitlyn had been missing me, loving me, regretting the way we’d been so hastily torn asunder? What if this was a test? What if she was calling to me, a cry for help, veritably asking me to halt her impending nuptials to “Rayne”? (Was Rayne an actor, a wrestler, an aspiring photographer, a pretentious nobody? An uncomfortable curiosity burned inside me—or was it jealousy?)

Caitlyn’s drama was indeed like a riptide, pulling me from the safe shores of my yard’s edge out into a deep dark unknowable ocean. I stuffed the creamy invitation back into the envelope and walked down my sidewalk, determined not to be pulled out to sea. And yet, in the days that followed, I could think of nothing else. At night, as I lay awake next to Olivia, her soft snoring and occasional snort did not annoy me as they usually did, but rather charmed me. This is my wife, I thought to myself. My eyes, adjusted to the darkness, gazed upon Olivia with a sudden nostalgia. I sensed I was staring at a woman I was about to lose. It was the same feeling that had overcome me on the last day of church camp, when I was suddenly sad to leave a place that had so often bored me. Back then, I had known with a sudden lash of wisdom that I would look back on my irst mushroom trip as a wild and magical time that could never be recaptured. That was Caitlyn’s power. A twenty year absence and with one blank envelope she could make me know—even before I really even admitted it to myself—that I would blow my fairly happy, if mundane, marriage apart for her. On Caitlyn’s whim, I would take a powder keg to my life, I stayed in denial all week. Right up until the moment I told my wife—over a dinner of Digorno’s frozen pizza, arugula salad, and boxed wine—that my boss was sending me on a last minute assignment to Santa Fe to investigate a “prison poet” named Sammy Ortega Laurence. Sammy had grown up on the streets and had been incarcerated as a teen. After teaching himself how to read and write when he was in prison, he began to publish, widely and well, and by the time he was released he was polishing up his memoir and his irst book of poetry. Both nabbed rave reviews and sold better than anyone had ever imagined they would. That’s when Sammy started the visiting MFA professor

circuit, until he came home at the end of the spring semester from a gig at the University of Texas to his cabin in Santa Fe to ind the police waiting for him. Had he been framed for embezzlement and tax evasion and a host of seedier crimes? Or was he an innocent man targeted because his success had engendered jealousy in the literary rivals he loved to cultivate? Sammy Ortega Laurence and his arrest were real—my wife wasn’t an idiot and knew how to Google as well as the next person. But the truth was, I had not been assigned his story. But his timely (for me) arrest would provide the perfect cover for my trip to Santa Fe—to what? Stop Caityln’s wedding? Have one last night of passion with her before she wed the pretentiously named Rayne? Watch her laugh in my face for being, after all this time, still so malleable, so easy to manipulate? As I laid my carry-on bag on the conveyor built to go through security, I wished it could be so easy to see into my motivations, my own confused heart. Because a week before, I’d considered myself to be a relatively happy man. My work was not a drudgery, but a calling, and one that kept me engaged both with my own intellect and with the world. My wife—snoring aside—was frequently a delight.