No Ring, No Name

Mara Ellison has run her husband's farm supply store for eleven years and slept on the far side of the bed for at least three. Then Wade tells her — on the porch, before dinner, the night before their anniversary — that he's taking a job in Omaha. There's a woman, he says. There isn't an affair yet. Just a plan he made without her, which is somehow worse. Mara doesn't cry. She goes to the county clerk in the morning. What follows is nineteen years of a marriage come apart in three-quarter time: a business to divide, a town to disappoint, a nineteen-year-old daughter furious at both of them, and a man who has to learn what he actually threw away. There is no grand apology here. There is a diner, two months after the papers, and one honest question.