Logan McConnell sighed and leaned back against the hard wooden pew. It had been a good turnout, he thought. He looked around the chapel. Yellow roses — Cindy’s favorite — were everywhere. A huge bouquet sat atop the coffin. Bright ribbons and bunting softened the bland, sad interior of the nursing home chapel. He smiled. She would have been pleased. She hated sad, somber funerals. She preferred celebration. In life and now, in death. His eyes misted as he thought of her, always the life of the party and the spark of his life. Just when I thought I was cried out.

Logan embraced the silence. It may have been the first time he could remember being alone — other than the cruel hours of the early morning when everyone is always alone — since Cindy passed. He shuddered at the thought of that cold, soulless hospital room, with its unhelpful bells and buzzers. The silence of the tiny chapel was a welcome contrast to that memory.

It was time to go. His daughter would wonder why he hadn’t joined the reception. His hip complained as he stood. His ankle and knee added their cries to the protest as he limped to the coffin and gave the embalmed, waxen figure posing as his wife a peck on her forehead. He turned and walked up the aisle between the pews.

“Am I late?” A voice asked from the entry.

Logan looked up to see a handsome older man in a tweed jacket and tie.

“I am so sorry,” the man said, “It seems like I’m always late these days.”

“She’s not going anywhere,” Logan joked, trying to place the face. “By all means, please, come in. Logan returned to a pew and watched the man, of about his age, make his way slowly toward Cindy.

The man crossed himself as he passed the cross and then stood over Cindy for some time. He was whispering something, perhaps a prayer. Whispers turned to sniffles, and then to suppressed sobs. Logan was touched, if a bit confused, by the man’s emotion. He walked up and placed a hand on the man’s back.

“I apologize, sir, but I'm afraid I’ve forgotten your name,” Logan said.

“Frank,” the man said, wiping tears away with the back of his hand.

“Ah, Frank,” Logan said. “I’m so embarrassed to say that I don't remember you, Frank. How did you know — ?”

“We were lovers,” Frank cut Logan off with a gravelly throat.

Logan looked at the man with amusement. Odd time for a joke, he thought.

“What’s that?” Logan asked, his amusement quickly fading.

“Yeah, 1977…78. Best sex of my life.”

Logan flared. Muscle memory from a summer of Golden Gloves at thirteen fired instantly. Logan squared his shoulders and sent a right cross toward the liar’s chin. In his mind, the bastard was sent sprawling to the fake wood laminate floor. Instead of landing, however, Logan’s fist hit nothing but air.

The hyperextension sent a shock of pain from Logan’s shoulder to his spine. The loss of balance caused him to stumble. What was left of his right knee gave out and Logan fell to the faux oak floor with a thud. Unable to catch himself with his shoulder, Logan’s “good” knee and his ribs absorbed the impact. He lay on the floor, breathless, his brain overwhelmed with the lightning bolts of pain emanating from what seemed like his entire body.

“Good lord, man, what the hell happened?” Frank exclaimed with surprise, apparently oblivious to Logan’s enfeebled attempt at assault. Frank groaned an old man groan as he knelt in slow motion at Logan’s side. “Here, let me help you up,” Frank said, suffering from the illusion that he actually could.

The two octogenarians proceeded to string together enough rolling and crawling motions to make it to a pew. They pulled themselves up with the vigor of a pair of old sloths. Logan slumped against the arched pew end, nearly paralyzed with pain and confusion.

“My god, what a woman she was,” Frank said, plunging back into his remembrance. “We met at CBGB in the East Village. Fucking Talking Heads were playing, I shit you, not. Sixty people in there, tops. I was thinking I was a little too old for the scene when I spied this hot thirty-plus babe across the dance floor. She’s in leather pants, a tight t-shirt, braless, and I’m in fucking love.”

Logan processed this slowly with a brain that was still in shock. The woman this odd man was describing could not possibly have been my wife. In ‘77 we would have still been in Queens with two young children. Cindy did go into Manhattan now and then to see girlfriends. And she was into new music, but...

“We fucked for the first time that very night,” Frank went on, now mostly talking to himself. “We walked over to my place on the Westside. She was so horny we almost didn't make it there. I nearly just took her there in the street. When we finally did get to my apartment she was naked before I even got my shoes off. It was a normal teeny Greenwich Village apartment, but it had a fire escape that I used as a makeshift balcony. It was hot so she had me fuck her out there. Well, she fucked me to be truthful. I can still see her…driving down on me like a goddam Amazon. And then cumming like crazy, her head back, screaming at the moon, waking up half of Bleeker Street.”

Logan pushed himself upright with a groan. He was a muddled mixture of enraged, confused, and bemused. Cindy was a magnificent lay, he reminded himself. Did she share that with more than me? Nah!

“But that wasn't the last time?” Logan asked, looking to find holes in Frank’s madly implausible story.

“Oh my god, yes. It was usually after a show, but sometimes she’d come just to fuck,” Frank said staring blankly ahead as if he was calling up visions of this supposed torrid past.

“She didn't live in the Village?” Logan asked.

“No, I wish,” Frank scoffed. “She was from one of the Boroughs. She had a family and the whole nine. She’d make some excuse and come in on the train.”

Logan’s blood returned to boil. Could it be?

“I loved her, man. That’s the truth. Yeah, she was the sexiest creature I’d ever been with. I mean, she fucking spoiled me for life. I was with a lot of women after her, but none compared.”

“So, you were together, a lot?” Logan asked, wincing with as much emotional pain as physical pain at this point.

“Not often enough for me, but yeah. Sometimes we’d have hours together, sometimes it would just be a quickie. I met her up at the Guggenheim, once…” Frank began another story. Cindy loved the Guggenheim, Logan thought as he slumped against the back of the pew.

“… I wanted to fuck, of course, but she was into the art, so we ran out of time. As a consolation, she blew me right there in the museum,” Frank chuckled. “To this day I can't look at a Kandinsky without getting hard.”

Logan began to consider the possibility that Frank could actually be telling the truth about him and Cindy.

“So, why did it end?” Logan asked.

“Believe me, I didn't want it to. I loved her. I really loved her. My restaurant had started to take off. I was making enough to open another uptown. I bought a nice condo. I could offer her a good life. The life I thought she wanted,” Frank answered, tears welling in his eyes.

“And…?” Logan probed.

“Turns out I was wrong. It wasn't the life of hip Manhattan that she wanted. It wasn't hot sex with me. Turned out I wasn't even a drop in the bucket of her full and happy life. I was a diversion. A cheap side piece. Nothing more.” Frank ended his story in a whisper, his head in his hands.

They sat in silence. Logan thought of his wife in her physical prime. He thought of their own great sex. Did she really have room for more?

Maybe it was the rush of oxygen that came when he could once again get a full breath. Maybe it was Frank's defeat. Maybe it was that his wife, the woman who had given him beautiful children and a beautiful life, deserved whatever she wanted. Did a meaningless affair devalue sixty years of marriage?

Logan smiled at his initial reaction. He smiled at the beauty and sexiness of Cindy. He forgave her. And, he forgave this odd stranger.

“Oh, thank god!” A voice came from behind the two old men. “Mr. Cimino? Mr. Cimino. Now, how did you get down here, again? Let’s get you back to your room, shall we?” It was one of the nursing home staff in pink flowered scrubs. The tiny Filipina nurse Logan knew as Suzy walked down the aisle and put a hand on Frank’s shoulder. “We have the chocolate chip cookies you like.”

Frank looked up at the mention of the cookies, a flash of resignation on his face. He stood with effort and the nurse guided him in the direction of the chapel doors.

“I’m sorry, Mr. McConnell, Frank here is from the memory unit on the top floor. This is the third memorial he’s snuck into in the last two months. God knows how he does it.”

Logan laughed out loud as the heavy chapel doors shut. Then he closed his eyes and imagined Cindy in leather pants and a white t-shirt, dancing to the Talking Heads.