Repossession

          When David Hunter put a gun in his mouth and blew off the top of his head he left three estranged sons and one bewildered wife named Jan. Jan was sitting on their bed looking at herself in the mirror, as she’d taken to doing for hours at a time, when the IRS knocked on the door to take away all the things he’d bought with embezzled money. She was motionless as they removed the Italian leather living room set, and the antique dining room table with authentic Killarney inlay. The men who took her things wore jeans and thin t-shirts, with thick leather straps supporting their lumbar regions and squeezing the fat of their stomachs into two different sections. It reminded her of the time David had stood in the mirror, staring at his growing stomach and commenting that he’d have to lose ten pounds before the next city council election. He’d done it; he’d never made a claim he didn’t keep, including when he’d promised he would give her everything she wanted.
          He was well-versed in proposing by the time her turn came around. He’d been married four times before to four women in four different states who all had hair above their shoulders and figures below a size 8. Jan was blonde, five-foot-three and thirty-five years old when she’d agreed to marry him. Maybe if she’d seen pictures of his other wives, or maybe if she’d thought to ask about them she would have been wary of putting herself in their place, but at the time she was only concerned with the fact that his eyes could flash like light on a razor blade, and his hands were strong and warm.
          He rarely spoke of his sons and it had taken her three years to decide whether there were two or three because he’d named two Paul. She’d never met them until the funeral when they sat on the other side of the room with the rest of the family. They sat, quietly slackjawed and appalled as the most prominent men in Omaha stood up and read their prepared speeches about how much David Hunter had done for the city, and what a dedicated, entrepreneurial businessman he’d been. Both Pauls and David Jr. sat together in the third row behind their mothers in the second row, and David’s sister and her family in the front.
          The eldest Paul was a professional mountain biker who’d been touring Austria when his mother had called and said Your father’s dead, Paul - no, your real father. I’m sorry, right, biological: you still have to come home. And he’d left his gear with friends he’d made in Vienna, packed a bag for one week and purchased a round-trip ticket. David Jr. and the younger Paul were informed similarly and each made plans to travel to Nebraska for the services so they could stoically pay their respects. They were fine, Jan thought, just fine.
          The family hadn’t come to the house after the service at the cemetery, but Jan had heard them as they waited for the hearse to be loaded.
          I wish you could have known the man they talked about, they said to the sons, and his sister just shook her head and held onto her husband’s hand with white knuckles and a tense elbow. Their father had committed suicide when David was only 18. He told her how he’d been home and heard the shot and found his father in the bathroom. But that was just like his sister to begrudge David the means of his own annihilation. She, who’d had the nerve to stand in their doorway while her husband sat in the car they’d driven all the way from Missouri that very night, and say out loud her horrible delusions.
          Tell me, David. Tell me you didn’t kill him, tell me the neighbors were wrong, that you’d been fighting much earlier... He’d thrown her out with a red face and an angry arm, and banged his fist against the door so hard that the side of his hand was bruised for a week. She’d put him in a terrible mood for weeks. He’d walked around with his hands clenched, mumbling when he thought she couldn’t hear that it had been forty minutes, forty minutes exactly between their last shout and the shot and that he knew it was exactly that long because he’d had time to watch the news and fall asleep.
          But the family had gone away quickly, and Jan knew that soon the reporters would forget and she wouldn’t have to read anymore quotes from his sister saying that no, she was afraid he had never been to college, and that his daddy hadn’t been a lawyer, but a farmer who’d ridden the last Orphan Train until he was 18 and they’d left him in Versailles, Missouri. And the expose’s on exactly how he’d pinched just a little from every account, and how much he’d spent on their Condo in Denver, and what a shock it had been to the whole community, and all the editorializing slander that went with it would just disappear into the annals of some library where no one would ever bother it again.
          She’d thought about that a lot as she sat there staring at herself in the mirror. Things would be better and she could just settle down and be sad as soon as everyone forgot all about it. Then it would be just her, suffering quietly, dignified in grief as the widow of a very important man who had done so much for the community that the community had awarded him thirteen certificates of appreciation in only ten years. She kept those, their honeymoon photos and his date book and calendar in the trunk of her car.
          A large man wiping his forehead with a black handkerchief knocked on her bedroom door and said that they would have to begin moving things from the bedroom. Jan looked out the window as they took the bedroom set and the dresser, her vanity and the television. They’d set up a radio in the front room and the noise carried through the emptied house all the way to her ears where it sounded vaguely familiar. She followed the noise, through the empty kitchen and dining room to the living room which had grown to the size of a cavernous ballroom without the heavy oak tables and tasseled rugs. She found the radio leaning against the radiator and bent down to adjust the knobs and remove the fuzz from the station. But try as she might she couldn’t get it to go away. It was there, faint beneath the sound of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, now a bit louder under Britney Spears until finally, when she landed on a station broadcasting a furious Baptist sermon she heard it clearly beneath the hellfires: a chorus of condemnations.           Tell me you didn’t kill him . . . each month one hundred dollars was removed from each account . . . left his wife to clean up the mess of embezzled funds . . .
          It became clearer with every turn of the dial until she tore open the window and threw the radio onto the sidewalk. The men loading the trucks looked at her and one was about to yell that she would have to pay for that, when she spoke.
          “He loved me,” she said, wrenching her body forward as if the words had been ripped from her ribs. “He loved me,” she cried again, thumping her fist against her chest, and slamming down the window on their shouts of surprise.