The homeless man I married always drank his coffee black outside the subway station I used every day. After his funeral, his final letter began with an apology I couldn’t understand and sent me straight back to the courthouse. There, a clerk opened an old record book, found his name written across hundreds of pages, and asked which Larry I had married.
“Sarah, I need to apologize before I thank you.”
I read that opening sentence twice.
Larry’s letter reached me six days after his funeral, sealed inside a thick white envelope covered with the same shaky handwriting I had seen on his hospice paperwork. The postmark showed it had been mailed the day before he died.
Larry’s letter arrived six days after his funeral.
I had smiled when I first saw it.
I assumed Larry had written me a final goodbye. This was a man who couldn’t accept a cup of coffee without thanking me three separate times.
Then I reached the next sentence.
“Nobody was going to bury me as a John Doe.”
All the color left my face. I lowered myself into a chair.
“No.”
The blood drained from my face.
Less than a month before that, Larry had been sitting outside my subway station with a cardboard sign resting across his knees.
MARRY ME. I HAVE ONE MONTH LEFT TO LIVE.
I had known him for two years.
I HAVE ONE MONTH LEFT TO LIVE.
Every weekday morning, I stopped at the kiosk beside the station and bought two coffees. Mine came with cream. Larry took his black.
Larry never asked me for anything.
Some mornings, we talked about the weather. On others, he complained about the pigeons or informed me that my office shoes looked like they had been designed by “somebody who hated feet.”
Larry never begged me for anything.
Most days, I stayed for about five minutes before hurrying off to work.
But on that bitterly cold Tuesday, Larry looked awful.
His skin carried a yellow tint, and his hands shook when I passed him his coffee.
“What is this?” I asked, pointing at the sign.
“What is this?”
“The clinic gave me about a month.”
For a moment, the sound of the traffic seemed to vanish.
“What?”
“Liver failure.”
I lowered myself onto the freezing concrete beside him.
“Larry, I’m so sorry.”
“The clinic gave me about a month.”
“Don’t make that face.”
“What face?”
“The one people make when they’re already at your funeral.”
Even then, he somehow managed to make me laugh.
But there was nothing funny about the sign.
“Why marriage?”
But the sign wasn’t funny.
Larry lowered his gaze toward the coffee in his hands.
“I don’t want to die belonging to nobody.”
“You don’t.”
“That’s nice to say, Sarah. It’s different on a form.”
He told me that without any legal relatives, strangers would eventually be responsible for dealing with his remains.
“It’s different on a form.”
“I just want somebody who can say, ‘He’s mine. I’ll take him.'”
I wasn’t married.
Larry was dying.
And throughout my life, I had always been much better at solving a problem than turning away from one.
Two days later, we walked into the courthouse together.
He was dying.
Larry wore a clean blue shirt someone from the shelter had given him. I had on my navy work dress.
When the clerk mentioned rings, Larry searched his pockets.
“Knew I forgot something.”
I laughed.
Eleven minutes later, legally, I became his wife.
I wore my navy work dress.
Exactly three weeks later, I sat beside his bed in the state hospice facility and watched as his breathing gradually faded away.
Now, according to his letter, the reason I had married him hadn’t been true.
I’d married him.
I forced myself to keep reading.
“The liver failure was real. The month was real. The lie was why I asked you to marry me.”
For a moment, I lowered the letter.
Then I immediately picked it back up.
“The lie was why I asked you to marry me.”
“My arrangements were already handled. I knew somebody from hospice or the county would deal with the paperwork. I wasn’t going to disappear without a name.”
I shot to my feet so quickly that the chair scraped against the floor behind me.
“What did you do, Larry?”
“I wasn’t going to disappear without a name.”
My anger had nowhere to land.
Larry was already dead.
I couldn’t phone him.
I couldn’t demand that he explain himself.
I couldn’t even force him to sit there and look at the expression on my face.
I couldn’t call him.
Still, I continued reading.
“If I gave you a problem you could solve, I knew you’d solve it.”
That sentence hurt more than anything else.
Because Larry was right.
For two years, I had constantly offered him things.
Coffee.
Food.
Socks.
Numbers for local shelters.
That was the line that hurt.
Once, during a week when temperatures fell below freezing, I spent nearly half my lunch break calling shelters until I located an available bed.
Larry thanked me every single time.
But it had never occurred to me that he might have spent those years learning exactly what kind of request would make me say yes.
Larry had thanked me every time.
At the bottom of the page, he had added:
“Before you decide what kind of jerk I was, go back to the courthouse where we got married. Ask for Margaret. Tell her you’re my wife.”
I almost threw the letter into the trash.
“Tell her you’re my wife.”
Instead, one hour later, I found myself standing inside the courthouse lobby.
Couples occupied the rows of plastic chairs.
A woman wearing a white jumpsuit adjusted her lipstick while her fiancé held onto her bouquet. Nearby, a toddler crawled underneath two chairs as his father tried to catch him.
I was standing in the courthouse.
Three weeks before, Larry and I had waited in that exact same row.
He had repeatedly rubbed his palms against his trousers.
“You’re shaking,” I’d told him.
“I’m dying. I’m allowed to shake.”
“You’re shaking.”
At the time, I accepted that explanation without question.
Now I wondered how many other things I had accepted because asking another question would have been harder.
At the records counter, one of the clerks directed me toward an older woman wearing red glasses.
“Margaret?”
She raised her head.
“Yes?”
I’d accepted that explanation.
“I’m Sarah. Larry’s wife.”
Her hands immediately froze above the keyboard.
“Larry?”
I nodded.
She pushed her chair backward.
“Oh, honey.”
She walked around the counter and wrapped her arms around me.
I remained stiff inside her embrace.
“I’m Sarah. Larry’s wife.”
When she stepped back, her eyes were already wet.
“When did he pass away?”
“A week ago.”
She turned her face away.
“I knew he was sick. I didn’t realize it was that close.”
