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Jim Thompson entered his house
whistling. He'd shot a great round of golf that morning with his fellow
retirees, then lunched at the club and had a few drinks afterwards. He
felt great.
"What are you
doing, honey?" he asked his wife Alice, who was in the kitchen,
standing on a ladder and reaching into one of the upper cupboards.
“Trying to get these dishes out so I can wrap them,” she answered. The
Thompsons were moving into a new retirement community, one which boasted
of a championship golf course. Alice had been packing things for the last
month even though the move wasn’t for another three weeks.
She’d spent the last few days packing all of her books and now
the boxes filled the living room.
“We’ve got plenty of time,” said Thompson.
“You don’t realize how much has to be done.
You promised you’d look at the things in the attic this
afternoon.”
“All right, all right. Just
let me have a drink first and I’ll do it.”
The attic, when he climbed up there, was dim and dusty and filled with
many boxes. Most of them contained
Alice’s things. She was a regular
packrat, thought Thompson, never threw anything away.
He looked at the nearest box. It
was labeled “Odds & Ends” with a marking pen.
At least Alice always neatly labeled everything.
Thompson opened the box. It was
filled with old things that only Alice would keep:
high school text books, year books, letters, postcards, playbills,
menus, pictures. It was a good thing
he never kept old letters, like the ones his
secretary Lydia had sent him. She
hadn’t understood that the affair was over and her letters had been
pitiful. Luckily, Alice had
never gotten hold of them.
There’d been other affairs over the years.
Thompson was a large, ruggedly attractive man.
His friends called him Big Jim.
He’d been a successful insurance salesman, then he’d taken over
his father-in-law’s agency. It
wasn’t that he didn’t love Alice, in a way.
But the other women had always been there for the taking and he
couldn’t resist it. Hell,
he’d been a pretty good husband.
Why shouldn’t he have some fun on the side?
And it had been so easy. Alice had
never suspected anything. She was a
college teacher, immersed in her books, a little unworldly.
She never questioned him about late nights at the office or all
those business trips.
Suddenly he came upon a framed picture of Jim Peters.
Jim, also an insurance salesman but not that successful, had been
his best friend. They’d been known
as Big Jim and Little Jim. Little
Jim had died suddenly ten years ago,
a heart attack, two years after his
wife had passed away with cancer. It
was too bad. He and Little Jim could
have lived in that new retirement community together and golfed every day.
Funny, he hadn’t known they had that picture of Little Jim.
He put the picture aside and looked through the books.
One was a small volume of poetry. He
lifted it up and a letter fell from it.He read “Dearest Alice.”
Just then some insect buzzed in his ear and, startled, he dropped
the letter.
“Damnit,” he muttered.
Where had the letter
gone? There it was. He read
on. It was evident that the
writer was in love with Alice and that they’d been having an extended
affair. It was also evident
that the writer, now that his wife had died, wanted Alice to get a divorce
and marry him. Jim Peters.
It had to be Little Jim.
Thompson continued to read with fascination.
The letter had been written to accept Alice’s decision to break
off the affair and stay with her husband, despite his drinking and playing
around. She felt her husband needed
her and she couldn’t leave him. Sure
enough, the letter ended “With all my love, Jim.”
Thompson suddenly felt dizzy. He
looked up and saw the attic roof whirling around him.
He heard Alice’s voice. “Jim,
what are you doing up there? Are you
all right?”
He took a deep breath. “Yes,
I’m fine,” he called down.
He put the letter back into the book of poetry and put the book back into
the box. Some “odd,” he
thought, or was it an “end.” He
closed the box securely with masking tape. So,
all the time he’d thought he’d been totally in control, his wife had
been having an affair with his best friend.
And she knew all about him. This
changed everything, everything. He
put one hand on the railing to steady himself.
He’d have to think about it. First,
he’d better go down and have another drink.
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