My mother has been married three times, which she might sheepishly admit to you only after three or four glasses of wine at a really good party. Her second husband is my father; her third my stepfather. My mother might tell you the story, if you were one of the guests huddled across from her at the table in a quiet corner of the host’s home, as simply as follows: First Husband was an Army man, which my mother liked at nineteen, though she will adamantly insist that soldiers are no longer her type. A month after marriage, she went home for the summer, and he fell in love with a stripper while she was gone. Upon her return and discovery, the divorce was as swift as it was inevitable, and my mother moved on to greener-tinted pastures. She won’t linger on any details or punch down at anyone else throughout the retelling. It’s not a TV drama, she might say, it was just my dumb life.

If you had heard this short anecdote about my mother’s first husband as a party was winding down, it might slip your mind before morning. The woman, whose thick brown hair fell straight and sleek past her collarbones, seemed happy and jovial that evening. The recount was barely a blip in the night, another confession in the sudden slush of guilt you had slipped through at the end of the night as overpoured drinks unlocked lips and held shame aside. Even as you pull yourself and your beloveds and your belongings into the Uber home, you might have already forgotten half of what was told to you, and half of what you told to others. You might even forget, as you stroke their forehead, what your child heard and what they will remember. A child’s memory builds. It is not static. Something made her stick; perhaps it was her brown hair, or her kind green eyes, or the moment when she pulled the Spider-Man cup out of the highest cabinet nobody else could reach. Perhaps it was because your child sat next to me as I listened, with saucers for eyes and my mouth inching open, as my mother recounted her first husband for the first time with little fanfare before the next adult began to over speak.

If you were one of too many guests at a dinner party with too much wine at a home with too many rooms, like my mother and I, then you too might have heard my mother’s version of her first husband. If your children huddled with me, where children do, they might still think about my mother’s first husband. I invite us all to add our interpretations here, if you are among the lucky to remember them. If my mother’s first husband was yet unknown to you before now, let me give you my best reconstruction of events. I don’t wish to insult the others in the room, but the details I can add to my retelling can’t be matched by any other who was there that night.

BettyAnn Garlough née Nosenzo left Montana on a flight to Washington, D.C. when she was 18. Her dreams – to work with children as a nanny, to meet a boy who would be kind to her, to party and enjoy her youth – sprouted from the absence of a childhood amidst an abusive and turbulent family. She met women from around the world who had traveled to D.C., like her, in search of employment and freedom from past and present trauma. She quickly formed bonds with her fellow workers. Her colleagues came to her terrified when their bosses (the parents of the children they cared for, who could also act as landlords and immigration officials) threatened their livelihoods and newfound stability. When Mr. Murdock cut bad checks or Mrs. Dempsey lied about where her jewelry went, BettyAnn offered gin, a cigarette, and a shoulder to cry on. The next day, Mr. Murdock might receive a threatening letter on well-forged IRS letterhead, or Mrs. Dempsey may find her family approached by the pawn broker she sold her necklaces to. BettyAnn knew the world was out to get her, and people like her. Her family’s mantra rang clear in her young mind – you and yours must survive.

James Morrison knew he would be in the army from a very young age. Growing up in Northern Virginia, his father was an army colonel, and his mother was dead. Care came in the form of day trips to his father’s office and hearty slaps from his older brothers. He was 19 when he met my mother, the same age she was, at a party he had snuck out of his army base to attend. They struck up a conversation about his name, shared with the rockstar, a topic upon which he could jovially recount anecdotes for hours. My mother was charmed by his East Coast swagger and common human decency. He held the lighter for her cigarette as the fall breeze brushed her hair around his shoulders. She never got to finish her smoke, as a woman stumbled out of the house to puke and moan. BettyAnn flicked her cigarette away from her and walked over to console the hunched figure. James slipped back into the party, giving the women their privacy while assuring himself that this would not be his last conversation with BettyAnn. He found her again at the end of the night as she pushed her drunken friends into a taxi. He offered her a ride home, which she declined. He offered her his phone number, which she accepted. They parted ways amicably, and BettyAnn thought about his laugh as she watched the street signs blur by the taxi window, her hopes of love buoyant above the wretched stink of the crowded backseat.

Their relationship was rocky. James drank, sometimes at work, sometimes before driving, sometimes while gazing blankly through his television. BettyAnn drank too, but preferred James when he was sober and more inclined to pay attention to her. They fought at their friends’ parties, loudly and unabashedly, as his wandering hands always seemed to find themselves on another woman’s hips. BettyAnn would storm outside, cigarette already lit. James would laugh her off and return to his Army buddies, heroic regardless. By the time the men stumbled outside, BettyAnn had flicked the butt into the snow and solemnly forgiven James without a word. He’d put his jacket around her shoulders, and they’d walk off to his car together, James whispering jokes into her ear until she finally cracked and showed him a smile. James could always make her laugh.

James was funny in a sly, witty way that never failed to make the weakest in the group into the butt of the next joke. BettyAnn hated to believe that she liked the feeling of laughing along at someone else’s expense, even though she joined breathlessly every time James began his routine. They pushed and prodded each other to go too far, one always egging on the other to say what makes the room go still. Someone might sniffle valiantly, or storm off with coat in hand, but James would react to the consequences of his bad behavior with persistent nonchalance. He’d slip further into the sofa, or reach forward to paw at more party snacks, wondering out loud why everyone always takes him so seriously.

James complained about money a lot. BettyAnn kept her money quiet, piling her untaxed earnings in her savings account until she could afford a decent used car, a pair of concert tickets, or a 3-star Florida vacation. James thought this was ridiculous. He lived everyday like it was his last, unloading his money on guns he bought from a catalog during boozy nights. He struggled to pay off his credit card debt month to month and took offense that BettyAnn stubbornly refused to lend him money. As much as she loved him, parting with money turned her blood cold, filled her head with flashes of her childhood bedroom as she suffocated, completely out of control once more. Money was freedom; James would have to figure his out on his own. Which, he did. Married military men make more money than their unwed counterparts. Normally, a wedding is too expensive to justify the higher salary, but James didn’t think that BettyAnn would be difficult to impress.

James popped the question at his friend’s house, and BettyAnn let him slip the ring on her finger without protest. The 20-somethings cheered and used the moment as an excuse to pop a bottle or three of champagne, overjoyed at anyone else’s expense. BettyAnn had just turned twenty that October, a month and a half before the proposal. Nobody had popped champagne bottles then. It had been unmemorable, time wasted at bars in D.C. where James “knew a guy”. BettyAnn spent the night turning the ring over and over on her finger. It was too big – James never asked for her ring size.

BettyAnn visited home that summer, returning for the first time since she had escaped the house whose shadows still haunted her. She invited her husband to join her, but he couldn’t get leave from the base. They parted ways at the airport. James hugged her tight to his chest. She could feel the pulsating warmth of his blood rushing just below the stubbled surface of his neck, where her bare cheek pressed against his skin. He pulled back and handed her the bag she had packed last night while he had stared in somber silence from the couch.

James didn’t pick up the phone when BettyAnn called him from her arrival gate at Glacier Park International Airport. She frowned, settling the phone back in its receiver. He had promised to pick up. She called her mother. Suzanne’s familiar wry tone filled the line, scolding her daughter for missing dinner. BettyAnn bit back a retort and apologized instead. Suzanne sighed and lamented that BettyAnn’s portion of pork chops had gone cold. Richard is already on his way to the airport, she informed BettyAnn, who finally grinned. BettyAnn asked if he was in the truck or on his bike. Suzanne laughed bitterly.

Richard Garlough picked up his stepdaughter from the airport, tying her bag down across the back storage bars he had installed. As BettyAnn held on to his corpulent belly, the bike roared down dirt roads and highways alike, whipping past Montana’s calm scenery with Montanan recklessness. They reached speeds that make your heart drop below your stomach as your insides attempt to liquify in protest. Or perhaps, if you’ve grown up with Montana daredevils of all stripes all your life, your stomach has hardened in a way to make the fast turns over cliff sides exhilarating instead of terrifying. If you go too slow up there, you might cross paths with a mama grizzly, or glimpse an abandoned car riddled with bullet holes. Better to pick up the pace.

James didn’t pick up the phone for the entire summer. She hedged around the question when she called her friends to ask questions. Have you seen James around? No, not really, they would say. He wasn’t at Marty’s last weekend or Dave’s for the 4th of July. Everyone is sure he is fine, though. BettyAnn flew back to D.C. in a wreck, sure that James was dead, and everyone had just forgotten to tell her. Oh! They would say, recognition finally entering their eyes. You were asking about that James, the one who drove his car into a wall/collapsed from liver failure/choked on his own puke/got himself killed in a knife fight. Yeah, that son-of-a-bitch is long gone. The lack of information was her friends’ blasé ignorance, or worse, malicious evasiveness. She had become a widow. Nobody had cared enough to tell her.

James wasn’t dead. He was just an asshole. BettyAnn divorced James soon after her return because he had fallen in love with a stripper. She’s a lovely woman, BettyAnn will assure you. But a stripper? She can’t help that she needs to feel better than the other woman.

BettyAnn drowned in her shame. She dated men she didn’t like and dumped them after a month. She flirted with men at bars while sipping a drink someone else had bought her. She cheated on everyone before they could cheat on her. She got pregnant again and got an abortion for the first time. A nanny friend had picked her up from the clinic. The other girl couldn’t be expected to understand the intent of BettyAnn’s sobs, how her tears didn’t fall for the fetus she no longer carried but for the daughter she had carried to term and given up for adoption who was already turning five. The girl remained in Montana, in a city a few hours from her birthplace, with a Christian family who had seemed kind to BettyAnn. They let her into their home for dinner quite a few times during her pregnancy, when she was still dirty from adolescence and awkwardly weighted on gangly teenage legs. They fed her delicious meals, seasoned exorbitantly with things she couldn’t name from her tongue alone, after teaching her a proper prayer to say before supper. Dessert was always served in their house, Lynn had told her, and Bill had laughed big and full from behind his belly, which he always clutched with one hand. BettyAnn smiled at the memory as the strip malls turned into highways and her tears began to slow. She knew her daughter got three meals a day, every day. A lot of mothers don’t know that, she reasoned. Here she was, feeling sorry for herself over what everyone told her was a blessing.

It was with a faceless boyfriend at a nameless bar that BettyAnn met my father. Boyfriend number whatever was fucking around with the pool table, setting up and breaking and setting up and breaking in a desperate cry for someone to play with him, like a puppy who sets his slobbery tennis ball on your knee and whines pitifully. BettyAnn was uninterested in the bait. This boyfriend could be more competitive than her at times; a simple game of pool might escalate to an embarrassing sight for the two of them in front of the Friday-night crowd. She sat at the bar and flirted with the bartender, who deadpanned back, unimpressed. She sucked noisily at the bottom of her drink through her straw, eying the man to her left who was about to open his mouth when a body slammed between them. The man now occupying BettyAnn’s left leaned far over the bar, obnoxious in his obvious efforts to get the bartender’s attention, who seemed to enjoy ignoring him.

“Bartender isn’t gonna notice you down here,” BettyAnn told the stranger. “I wouldn’t waste your time.” He looked at her, for the first time noticing that she existed in his proximity.

“How’d you get a drink, then?” He asked with a grin.

“Nicer guy with longer arms waved him down,” she returned. “He left right before you got here, though.” The stranger laughed and it filled the whole bar with the resonance of an overstuffed brass section. BettyAnn smiled. She introduced herself and he took her hand in his.

“I’m Nate. Wanna leave? Since the bar sucks so bad.”

“Yeah. Let’s get out of here.”

BettyAnn left her date at the pool table playing by himself with balls and cues. Nate and BettyAnn got married in 1998 and had a child in 2001 who convinced them not to get a divorce in 2004 so they could have another child in 2006. This was what BettyAnn had been waiting for. A husband and two children of her very own. She didn’t particularly like Nate anymore, but there were too many reasons not to leave him. He would never cheat on her with a stripper, for one.

It would have been impossible for a 28-year-old BettyAnn to predict her future with her second husband. She knew very well that Nate let his laundry, dishes, and trash pile up without care or thought, a behavior he learned from his youngest-sibling father and one that was supported by his stint in a frat house. She couldn’t have been expected to know how much the excess of her second husband’s existence would weigh on her. It must have been like this for each offense, growing stealthily from a sliver her wide heart would forgive to a stake that pierced her back. What did Nate care? He told his first wife that he didn’t mind living in filth; if she was to be upset about the chores, perhaps she might do less of them. And for each piece it went like this, in which Nate could concoct a solution that solves nothing but absolves him of further investment in the scheme.

Does anyone care what comes next? That wasn’t what my mother shared with us at the dinner party. Did you notice that the story I wrote had other secrets? I couldn’t help but share more, an involuntary flex of the weight of my knowledge of my mother. Who says to me, the child, that my account could be wrong? Exaggerated? Fictional? What do you know of the secrets she shared on the deck of our home when I was fourteen? You, who overheard at the dinner party, are not privy to secrets, for what we tell you is shared freely. We still own the real secrets, even if you rage, and read this story a hundred times and tell me you have found its truth. I rage too. Where is the truth? My mother’s life was full and complex before she held me for the first time. Not all of it is easy for her to share, to speak again to the memory. I entertain us both by filling her life with my speculations.