Particularly John had not noticed. She had really tried to be a better wife to him; he seemed to take her efforts as his due. Which made continuing said efforts doubly challenging. And then one evening in June of 1940, just as they were finishing supper, his face had turned terrifyingly purple. He clutched at his chest, gasping for breath. She urged him into stumbling with her out to the Packard; he passed out as he fell into the passenger’s seat. Wilma raced around to the driver’s seat, fired up the engine, and peeled out of the driveway, arriving at Wausau General, more than thirty miles away, in twenty minutes, where he was rushed into emergency care.

Jack had been angry with her, hurrying into John’s hospital room later that night, after John was already stable and sleeping. “Why didn’t you call me, Mom? Or call the doctor? You barely know how to drive,” he had said. It was true that Wilma hated to drive, and had done so relatively few times in her life. But, from her chair by John’s bedside, she had looked at her son and said, “Well, I was going so fast, everyone had to get out of my way.”

The truth was, she had panicked. She didn’t know what she would do without John. He was the only one who always seemed able to forgive her, and though she couldn’t fathom why he did, the thought of being without the one person whom she could count on for forgiveness was terrifying.

Of course, since then, she had not been as good to him as she had told herself she would be. Sometimes she still dreamed of Gust, and in those dreams she was young again, and there was always the possibility that Gust might kiss her.

She only hoped that God could not see inside her dreams; He would never let her into heaven, then. There was no amount of punishment He could dole out in this life that would discipline her heart sufficiently for being so unfaithful to her husband all these years. But she had finally realized, after so many years of seeking, that what she was seeking would not come to her until she had reached heaven.

In heaven, she imagined, she would be a child again, with all of a child’s innocence. Gust would be there, but she would be content just to be near him, just to see him; she would want nothing more than that. Chasey would be there, too, a boy with a bag of marbles in his pocket, a cap pulled down low over his eyes. He wouldn’t recognize her as his mother, and he would invite her to a game. They would sit cross-legged on a soft field of grass, playing marbles forever, letting each other almost win time after time, but never quite finishing the game. At least, that was what she hoped heaven would be.