Confessional
Evelyn put her hands on the table and felt her head spilling over to the floor. But it wasn't, this was all that morphine they put into her mixing things up. In fact she wasn't sitting in her kitchen, her hands on the table, although it felt and looked real. The truth is she was strapped into machines. But that didn't matter now, all she ever wanted she had, all she ever needed, she got. She lived a full life, in more ways than one.
I want to tell you a story, it was a year before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor that I met your uncle Rafe. Listen son, because this will be fast and I don't have time. You might not like some of the things you hear, but they are true, all of it. I was working as a nurse, having volunteered to the Navy, the war was raging in Europe and I fell in love with Rafe. I didn't tell you this then, neither did your father and me, because we knew you wouldn't understand. Uncle Rafe told you about the time he got shot down by the Germans, didn't he? He didn't tell you that he promised me that he'd be back, that we were getting married when he did.
We, your father and I, thought that he died, we received the notice and we held a funeral. And the strangest thing happened, Dan, your father and I fell in love. We knew it was wrong because, Rafe and him had been the best of friends and much later, I found out they were even more.
It has been a year since I last confessed my sins.......... But I'm afraid this is one that I have kept inside of me for a long time, and I know that it is not a sin in my heart of hearts, the only sin I committed was not telling the world. I had been afraid of what they might say.
I've lived in the same place for nearly thirty years. Through my bedroom window I can see our crops grow and fall through the years. This bedroom shared with my husbands. You know one as Danny and the other Rafe. There was a time when I could have chosen only one of them. But the horrors that I've seen, what men can do to each other, frightened me. I had lost my love for men then. But I saw them then, the night before they flew off to bomb Tokyo, I saw what two men were capable of. They were capable of tenderness and warmth and love, I felt the heat of passion and joined them.
Danny, Rafe and me.
Do you understand what I'm saying father? The three of us were in love with each other.
She took both their hands and rested them on her navel, Danny and Rafe smiled at her and she was glowing.