He had begged her not to go, telling her she wasn’t well, but she told him simply, “I’m perfectly well, and I can’t stay here any longer. It’s time I made something of my life.”

“Made something of it? Wilma? The—children!”

Well, he would never understand. His life had been everything he wanted, whereas she had gotten on the wrong train, all those years ago. Yet, she had spent nearly fifty years wrenching faithfulness and duty out of her recalcitrant heart. Such arduous effort—and then to find out he had not reciprocated! He had expected more of her than he was willing to give.

As a consequence, she considered her obligations to him rendered null and void.

Her staggering guilt over the feelings she’d quietly harbored for Gust, too, seemed ridiculous, in light of what John had done, especially since he didn’t even seem remorseful. And that he would think to blame the rumored “curse”!

She had heard a whisper or two of the curse in the early days, from the women at church, but she had never paid them any mind—she had assumed the ladies were only trying to make her more uncomfortable in her position in Pine Rapids than she already was. After the first year or so, they didn’t mention it again. And, as John had never spoken of it, she had put it out of her mind. She had been surprised to hear him bring it up; apparently, he had been allowing the possibility of the curse’s veracity all along.

Well, maybe there was something to it. Would God allow such a thing? Perhaps He would. Perhaps she could take comfort—as John had—in the thought that the yearnings of her heart might have been the product of something other than her own iniquity. And she could begin anew, without the yoke of guilt that had settled around her neck and weighed her down all these years.

She looked out the window at the bare trees streaming past in the gray day, and couldn’t suppress a smile. Beginning anew! It was a lovely thought.

She supposed she loved John. She couldn’t have lived forty-nine years with him without coming to care for him, long ago. But now his transgressions had set her free. For that, she loved him perhaps more than she ever had.

Chapter 82

I urge wives to try to stifle their pride. A woman can’t help being hurt. But if she genuinely wants to keep her husband, she must work at it.

—“The Other Woman Is Often the Creation of the Wife,”
Look, August 2, 1949

Pine Rapids
Friday, August 4, 1950

The dreadful realization struck Dolly a moment later: Having left the Mickelson house, she had nowhere to go but Byron’s bungalow.