Prologue: Heartbreak Town
You can die of a broken heart. I never knew that, but it’s on Good Morning America, so it must be true. A Kentucky soldier got killed overseas, the tank he was riding in blown up by a mine, and one week later, his wife back home dropped dead in her kitchen, right in the middle of making pancakes, gone before she hit the floor. I stop pouring water into the Mr. Coffee to look at the TV. Her brother’s the one telling Diane Sawyer about it, a heavyset man in a brown suit, his face unshaved and sagging, hard luck and sorrow pulling everything south. “She always said if anything happened to him over there, she’d just up and die,” he says, his voice cracked and rough as horsehide, “and danged if that in’t what she did.”
“So you’re saying, Mr. Oakley, that she died of a broken heart?” Diane Sawyer asks in her low, creamy voice. She’s wearing a sweater the same color as her eyes and I quit thinking about that woman on the kitchen floor just long enough to wonder how Diane Sawyer manages to get tricked out like a million bucks at an hour when most of us are still in our nightclothes with our teeth unbrushed.
“Know it for a fact,” the brother says, and nods his chin hard, one time, like he’s daring her, or God, or us watching at home, to argue.
I shiver, pulling my robe tight around me, and switch on the coffeemaker. I can see it all so clearly—that lady staggering into her kitchen, her hair a mess and her sweats mismatched, taking out the batter bowl and the Bisquick, wanting even in her haze of grief to do something ordinary, to try to get back a piece of her old, normal life. Did she feel it, I wonder, the splitting of her heart, like a chisel cracking rock, dividing in two the heavy purple muscle? Or did it just sputter once or twice and then give out, like the battery in an old radio? I see her hand rising to her chest in surprise, her head turning one last time to look at the sun slanting through the curtains, the carton of eggs on the counter, the icebox door covered with to-do lists and kids’ artwork and a snapshot of her husband wearing his uniform and a shaky grin, a promise—I’m coming back to you, baby, nothing can keep us apart—that maybe even as the shutter clicked he knew he couldn’t keep. Did she understand what was happening? Was she sorry? Or was it a relief, knowing that the work of getting on with her life, minute after minute, one slow, heavy footstep at a time, was over? I admit it, for the space of a heartbeat I envy that lady who, if you believe in such things, is at peace now, reclining on some pearly cloud with her husband and Jesus and the angels. But part of me despises her just a little bit, too. Dying of a broken heart is the easy way out; the rest of us just build cages around the wreckage, shoring up the ruined bits with ropes and scaffolding, pulling ourselves upright, stumbling on.
A face appears, filling up the screen, chubby and smiling under a bad home perm. The lady’s name, Diane Sawyer says, was Lucy Grubbs, and she was forty years old. For a second it takes my breath—she has the same first name as me, and we’re the same age exactly.
Outside my kitchen window a bar of sunlight crests the trees and angles through the glass, bisecting the table like a golden sword. I can hear the dogs rooting around on the screen porch, wanting breakfast. The water and ground beans I fed into the Mr. Coffee start to drip, filling the glass pot with hot, fragrant liquid. In the next room, my son is awake and singing to himself: I’m a honky-tonk man, and I can’t seem to stop.
Rest in peace, Lucy Grubbs, I think, and switch off the television. The rest of us have work to do.
From the novel Heartbreak Town to be published June 2007 by Three Rivers Press. © 2007 by Marsha Moyer. All rights reserved.
