Peggy got down on her knees and asked God to send her a good man. She thought she had one in Jack but her friends told her that he wasn’t a good man, or if he was, he was good in the way that men are good which is different from the way that women are good. Something about the difference between a deal and a contract.
Peggy thought all goodness was the same and maybe the goodness in Jack was hiding. For six months Peggy and Jack had dinner once a week until one day he stopped answering her calls. “He’s just not that into you,” her friends said. But wouldn’t he have said that around the time they promised that they would always be honest with each other? And couldn’t he have said that before or after he told her, I feel like I can tell you anything?
She called his house at doubling intervals — one day, every two days, every four days, every eight days, every sixteen. “Stop calling,” her friends said. “He’s going to think you’re crazy.” But just in the way Peggy knew Jack was good, she knew she wasn’t crazy, so why should it matter.
“What if he’s dead?” she asked. “What if he’s hurt?” Then one or another friend would say they just ran into him in the supermarket. So Peggy got back down on her knees. “Kind and capable,” she thought, that’s all I want God. Then she spoke it out loud in case God wasn’t listening with his brain-ears. “Kind and capable, please.”
She had three recurring dreams about Jack. In the first one he was smothering her with a pillow. In the second he was holding her under the waves while she drowned. In the third, which was the most violent, he was stabbing her in the bony place between her breasts while she held her hands up and tried to take the knives in the smooth basket of her palms instead.
The dreams were eerily silent, like the moment before Jack’s automated voicemail kicked in. The only voice in the dream was Peggy’s, always asking the same question: “Why are you doing this?” Years passed and God sent Peggy several ok men. Jack died, not from suffocation or drowning or stabbing, but prostate cancer. For months after his funeral Peggy told anyone who would listen that she was disappointed in the catering. “Jack hated horseradish,” she told her friends. “Jack hated cold cuts. Anyone who knew him would know that.”