Julie allowed her mobile phone to keep ringing. She had put it on silent but vibrating mode.
It was the twelfth time in the last hour that Frankie had tried to reach her. Not that she was counting. Okay, so she was counting.
Burning her husband in the crematorium had shocked her into rethinking her affair with Frankie. It was one thing to enjoy sex with her lover while her husband was at work or at home. It was quite another thing to see her husband being fed into the oven, with the flames rushing up to devour him.
She cried then, not the tears she pretended to shed in the funeral parlor, but real tears, tears of repentance, tears of guilt, tears of – yes – love.
She loved her husband. Yes, she did. It was the sex that made her cheat on him. The sex he never really gave her.
With him, it was always let's do it, there it's done, good night. With Frankie, it was always let's do it, yes, but later, much later, meanwhile let's kiss, fondle, touch, talk, enjoy the moments before I enter you, before I give you what you've been asking for for a whole hour now. With her husband, it was him loudly snoring immediately after, but with Frankie, they were always awake for yet another hour, talking about things that seemed to matter at that time though she could not really recall them now, except that she would reveal to him all the childhood anxieties she had, how she hated her parents, how she thought that they did not bring her up secure and happy, how they denied her all the pleasures of childhood, how she wanted to take her revenge on them by being principal of an elementary school that was secure, predictable, and solid because it had not changed at all but had stuck to the old ways of doing things, the way she herself had been brought up, how she had turned away anything that would disturb the universe of her school, like all those newfangled ideas about why children should be allowed to be themselves and about how the classrooms should not be designed like a college classroom with the professors talking down to students who would dutifully take down notes, how she had kept the school alive through her insistence on the old and time-tested values, how her job was her life, how Frankie was now her life, how she wished she had not married so young or at all.
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Love After Heaven
RomanceA murder victim gets a chance to return to earth to meet his wife and her lover. He still loves his wife, despite her complicity in his murder. But he returns to earth not as himself but as a priest! How can he and his wife come together again? What...
