The woman who got out of the rental car at six that evening was fifty six years old, with a gray wool coat and a leather satchel, and she looked more tired than angry. I am Lorna Bergquist, sixty eight years old, a dental receptionist from West Fargo, and I stood in my own doorway with my arms folded as she came up the walk through the snow. Behind me, Arnie sat at the kitchen table with his cap in his hands, as gray as the sky. She stopped on my porch and said, “Mrs. Bergquist, my name is Renee. I believe we have both been lied to.”
I let her in. I put the kettle on, because I did not know what else to do, and the three of us sat at the table, the husband and the wife and the second wife, with the casino folder between us. Renee opened her satchel and took out a certified copy of a marriage license from Clark County, Nevada, dated September of 2009. Arnold Bergquist had married her in a chapel on the Strip. He had told her he was a widower. “He said his wife of fifteen years had passed,” she said quietly. “I believed him until the television station called to confirm his name.”
Arnie put his head in his hands. “I was going to fix it,” he said. “I was going to tell you both.” I stared at the man I had made lefse for every Christmas for forty four years. Renee reached across the table, and without a word, she laid her hand over mine. Two women who had never met, strangers in a snowy kitchen, understood in one breath that neither of us had done a single thing wrong. The kettle began to scream, and neither of us moved to take it off.
A jackpot caught live on the evening news gave one dental receptionist the length of a drive from the airport to bring her husband back to the truth in West Fargo.
I gave my terms at the head of my own table, standing, with a dish towel over my shoulder. “Arnold, the marriage in Nevada is void, because you were never free to make it. The house in West Fargo is in my name alone, from my mother. The money in the Henderson account will be split by a judge. The lot at Desert Willow will be sold. You will pay Renee for the years you stole from her, and you will pay me for the same. And you will sit in that chair until you have said every word of the truth.”
Arnie wept, openly, an old man in a flannel shirt. “Lorna, I started going to Las Vegas in 2008 when the plant laid off the second shift,” he said. “I won a little, and then I lost a lot, and I met Renee at a restaurant there, and she was kind. I told myself it was a different life, and that the one in Fargo would never be touched. Every trip, I swore it was the last.” He wiped his face. “The jackpot was luck. The rest was cowardice. I never planned to leave you. I only did not know how to stop.”
But there was one more thing he could not stand to lose. Arnie suddenly lunged across the table, snatched the casino folder and the bank statement from between us, and ran for the mudroom, meaning to dash to his truck and drive to the airport. He pulled open the back door. In the snowy yard, wearing his old parka, stood his brother Lyle, who had driven from Grand Forks as soon as I called. Two neighbors came across the lawn with shovels. And the porch light flickered on.
Arnie stopped in the mudroom doorway with the folder against his flannel shirt, snowflakes drifting around his boots, and his brother in front of him with his bypass scar showing at the open neck of the parka. Lyle spoke gruffly. “Arnie, I lied to your wife for you, because you asked me to. I will not lie anymore. Give her the folder.” Arnie looked at his brother, at the neighbors, at the two women watching from the kitchen. Slowly, he lowered the folder and set it in the hand of Lyle.
The consequences were fair. The judge in Clark County annulled the Nevada marriage and, on the evidence of the license and the television clip, divided the jackpot between the two women, after taxes. The lot at Desert Willow was sold at a loss. Arnie moved into a one room apartment in Moorhead, took a job at a hardware store, and enrolled in a gambling treatment program. I did not divorce him at once, because I wanted to see who he would become. Renee flew home to Henderson with a check and a clean heart.
In the name of my mother Astrid, who passed in 2003, I started the Astrid Moen Fund. It pays for legal help and short term housing for older women starting over after a betrayal and for gambling treatment and counseling, in Cass, Clay and Richland counties. In the first year we helped one hundred and six women with legal and housing needs and paid for treatment for forty four people. One was a seventy year old retired nurse from Casselton who sat at our table with a cup of tea and said she had not felt this free in thirty years.
On a snowy Saturday in December, my kitchen in West Fargo smelled of butter and potatoes. Renee had flown in from Nevada, and she stood beside me at the counter, rolling lefse with a grooved pin, while Lyle sat at the table peeling a mountain of potatoes. Through the window, I could see Arnie, thinner, in a clean coat, shoveling the walk, as he did every week by my invitation. Renee nudged me with her elbow and grinned. “Lorna,” she said, “you roll it thinner than I do.” I told her that took forty four years.