Michael and Susan

Epilogue (Michael): Reward

Copyright © 2024 by GroveltoHEA

In the fall, Susan and Mrs. Engel stood on her porch and watched me rake the bright red leaves that had fallen from the maple tree in her front yard. When Susan teasingly called out that I'd missed a leaf, I walked up to her, looking picture-perfect in her black wool pants and rust-red sweater, and I put her over my shoulder and tumbled us into the pile of leaves, my wife giggling the whole time. 

"You look like an autumn goddess," I told her, plucking a couple of stray leaves out of her hair.

Mrs. Engel had gone inside, laughing at our tomfoolery, as she called it, when I'd carried my wife off the porch. My wife's bright red lips were impossible to resist, so I swooped in and kissed her.

"Any progress, Michael?" she asked.

"Yes, honey. I'll take you next weekend, see what you think."

She looped her arms around my neck and kissed me, and I had to be careful not to push us deeper into the pile of leaves. Eight months without my wife was too long.

Just weeks earlier, the Avon fall campaign catalogs had come out, and the three of us had poured over each page, happily exclaiming each time we came across Susan's picture. We exclaimed quite often. Then we'd celebrated with a trip to Sherman's drugstore where the soda jerks were beginning to know us by name. 

"You look gorgeous," I told my wife as we toasted to her success with malts and a float. "You have to be the most photogenic model in the history of the company."

"Here, here," Mrs. Engel agreed.

I'd taken a stack of the catalogs and passed them out at work, everyone astounded that my wife had modeled for Avon. The secretaries were especially impressed and some asked me if Susan would mind taking their orders.

"You look proud as a peacock," Nancy had told me when she'd taken one of the catalogs from me.

"I am," I said simply. "My wife is quite a woman."

"Behind every great man is a woman, but for every great woman, there's a man who isn't afraid of her greatness."

"Very true," I agreed.

My secretary had fixed me with her all-knowing stare. "I don't and won't pretend to know what happened with you and Mrs. Davenport. I suspect but would never speculate given your unhappiness that followed you like a raincloud. However, I will say, Mr. Davenport, that these last five or six months, you seem happier than you've ever been, and you were always a good-natured man for most of the time that I've worked for you."

Part of that happiness came from knowing that Susan had forgiven me and would be returning to me as soon as I squared something away that she wanted. Part of it came from knowing that I saw my wife now in a new way, a way that most of my contemporaries had never seen their own wives. 

We were raised that men were kings of their castles. Women took care of us and our castles, and we protected our women and provided for them. We all had our roles, our expectations, our duties.

Susan had turned it all upside down when she left me. Instead of accepting what I'd done, she'd told me, in no uncertain terms, no. Her leaving had not been part of the play book. Wives stayed and got over things so life could get back to normal. But my wife wasn't going to tolerate anything that I'd done, and her message was as clear as if she'd sent me a telegram.

While I'd fumbled around, trying to adjust to the way she'd thrown out our roles and expectations with the bathwater, my wife had remained firm. If I wanted her, if I wanted her back, I was going to have to step up to the plate and realize that my wife didn't need me; she no longer depended on me and that made her independent. Susan had a place to live and she had a small income. She'd traded her homemaking skills for much of her bed and board and had negotiated the use of a car as well.