Part 2: Teresa
I stood up so fast that the wooden chair legs scraped loudly across the floorboards.
“What did you actually do?” I yelled at the empty apartment, a surge of anger rushing through me.
My anger had nowhere to go. He was already dead and buried in the earth.
I couldn’t call his phone, demand an explanation, or make him look me in the eye.
I forced myself to read the next paragraph.
“If I gave you a clear problem that you could solve, I knew you would step up and solve it,” he wrote.
That sentence hurt more than anything else, because it laid my nature bare.
For two long years, I had pressed things on him that he never asked for.
I bought him hot coffee, warm socks, sandwiches, and list after list of shelter phone numbers.
During one brutal cold snap, I spent my whole lunch break calling facilities until I secured him a bed.
He always thanked me politely, but I never realized he was studying me the entire time.
He had worked out exactly what it would take to make me say yes.
Near the bottom of the first page, he had written a very specific set of instructions.
“Before you decide what kind of terrible person I was, go back to the courthouse where we got married,” the letter read. “Ask for a woman named Teresa at the records desk, and tell her you are my wife.”
For several minutes, I considered throwing the whole letter into the kitchen trash.
Instead, an hour later, I was standing in the marble lobby of the Saint Paul courthouse.
Dozens of nervous couples filled the plastic chairs around the bright central hallway.
A young woman in a white jumpsuit fixed her makeup while her fiancé nervously held a red bouquet.
A toddler crawled under the seats while his tired father tried to catch him by the coat.
Three weeks earlier, he and I had sat in those very same chairs, waiting our turn.
I remembered how he had kept rubbing his trembling palms against his jeans.
“You are shaking really badly,” I had remarked to him back then.
“I am dying, so I think I am allowed to be a little nervous,” he had answered with a small smile.
At the time, I accepted his simple explanation and asked nothing more.
Now I wondered how many things I had believed only because digging deeper seemed inconvenient.
I walked up to the heavy wooden counter, where an administrator pointed me to a desk in the back.
An older woman in distinctive red reading glasses looked up from a stack of legal files.
“Are you Teresa?” I asked, clutching my handbag against my coat.
“Yes, I am,” she answered, pulling off her glasses to look at me.
“My name is Hannah,” I said, my voice quivering slightly in the quiet room. “I am his wife.”
Her hands froze above her keyboard as she stared at me.
“Whose wife?” she asked softly, leaning forward across the desk.
“His name was standard on the marriage certificate,” I explained, saying his name aloud for the first time that day.
Her chair rolled backward as she rose quickly from her desk.
“Oh, sweetheart,” she whispered, coming around the counter to wrap her arms around me.
I stood stiffly in her warm embrace, completely surprised by her sudden emotion.
When she stepped back, I saw that her eyes were filled with real tears.
“When did he pass away?” she asked quietly, wiping her cheek with a tissue.
“Just about a week ago,” I replied, watching her carefully.
“I knew he was very sick, but I did not realize he was that close to the end,” she said.
I stared at her in total confusion and asked, “Did you actually know him?”
“Of course I knew him,” Teresa said, glancing around the large, historic office.
“How did you know him?” I pressed, trying to fit the pieces together.
“He worked right here in this building,” she explained gently.
“He worked here?” I repeated, my mouth falling open in disbelief.
“He was an administrator here for twenty-eight years before his retirement,” she revealed.
I leaned against the wooden counter and asked, “Then how on earth did he end up living on the street?”
“His health started failing right after he retired, and medical bills completely drained his life savings,” she explained softly. “Then he lost his apartment, and he was simply too proud to ask any of his old colleagues for financial help.”
“What specific job did he do here?” I asked.
“He mostly processed marriage licenses and managed the civil ceremony schedules,” she answered.
She took off her glasses again and asked, “Did he really never tell you any of this?”
“No, he never mentioned a single word about his past,” I answered truthfully.
“That sounds exactly like him,” she said with a faint, fond smile.
“What does that mean?” I asked, stepping closer to her desk.
She paused, glanced at the quiet hallway, and then gestured for me to follow her.
“Come with me down the hall,” she said, leading me toward a set of heavy mahogany doors.
