His First Wife

“Okay,” Jamison said. “Take your time. I’ll get the baby in the car.” He kissed me on the cheek and smiled reassuringly.

I got up from the pew and started walking down the aisle.

“Where she going?” I heard Jamison’s mother ask.

I was still full of emotion as I stood in the bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror. I’d managed to get my eye makeup off with a wet tissue but inside I was still crying. Tears or joy, wonder, fear, anxiousness. It was all inside of me.

I opened my purse to get my lip gloss and when I raised my head to see my face in the mirror, there was a woman standing beside me. She had a short, strawberry blond bob and looked very familiar but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I smiled and tossed my tissue into the trash can.

“Pastor got you all riled up?” she asked.

“I guess so,” I said, closing my purse.

“Have a good day,” she said.

“Happy Thanksgiving.”

Walking across the back of the church, toward the parking lot, I remembered where I’d seen the girl in the bathroom before. She actually worked at the gym I used to go to before I was pregnant. She did the advanced step class.

“That’s it,” I recalled, closing my purse. Only, when I looked down, I realized that I’d left my lip gloss sitting on the counter in the bathroom. I tried to head back to pick it up, but when I turned, I stepped on someone’s toes.

“I’m sorry,” I said, sure it was the woman from the gym.

“It’s okay,” the woman said, looking down at her shoes to be sure no damage had been done. She stepped back and raised her head.

I was smiling, but this quickly changed. It wasn’t the woman from the gym behind me. It was Coreen.

We stood there, face-to-face, in silence for a few seconds. I was stunned to see her, and by the look on her face I might as well have been a walking corpse.

“What are you here for?” I finally said. “Are you following us?”

“This is my church,” she said tensely. “This is not what you think.”

“Don’t you tell me what I’m thinking.” I stepped closer to her. “I just need you to know that you can stop whatever you think you’re doing. I’m not going to let you ruin my marriage. So, whatever it was you thought you and Jamison had, it was nothing,” I said angrily. “You were just a good-time girl for the moment. There’s no way he’d ever leave me for you.”

What I said must have stung Coreen just as much as I’d intended, because tears almost immediately began to fill her eyes.

“Really,” she said, her voice shaking. “Well, I hope you know that his mother did all of this anyway. She hooked us up.”

“What?”

“That’s why I’m here. This is my church. No one was following you and Jamison,” she cried. “This is my church.”

The same alarm that was sounding in my heart the night I ended up at Coreen’s house was rattling throughout my body at that mo

ment. Either Coreen was telling the truth or she was really desperate enough to follow Jamison to his mother’s church. While I had little trouble believing both takes on the situation, my heart just believed her.

“His mother?” I asked.

“She gave me Jamison’s contact information . . . his e-mail, and told me to go after him. She begged me to. She said she didn’t want you to be with him and that he needed,” Coreen said, “someone like me . . .”

“Look,” I said sharply, “I don’t care what’s going on. I just want you to stay the hell away from my husband.”

“Well, you need to tell him to stay away from me,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“Check his e-mail.”