Missing Persons by Clare O'Donohue

want.”
    I could hear grunting on his side of the phone. He didn’t want to do it, but he felt he had to. Whatever Theresa’s family planned to say about him had to be pretty serious.
    Finally he spoke. “Okay, I guess I can do it Thursday afternoon, but I’m not going to go into a lot of personal stuff. I’ll just say we dated and we broke up, and let people see that I’m a good guy.”
    “Absolutely. This is your opportunity to say whatever you want.”
    And then it will be edited to say whatever Crime TV wants.

Thirteen
    I felt a little sleazy after the phone call. I usually do, but I also felt like I’d accomplished something. It might seem odd to take pride in being good at a profession you don’t respect, but I did.
    Jason Ryder wanted to do the interview or else he wouldn’t have agreed to it. To misquote Eleanor Roosevelt, you can’t manipulate someone without their consent. He wanted to be heard. And if he really had nothing to do with Theresa’s disappearance, which he probably didn’t, then being on television might actually help him clear his name. So, in a way, I was doing a public good. Or, at the very least, I wasn’t really hurting anyone.
     
     
    I still had the photos of Theresa spread out on my kitchen table, but I pushed them aside. The haunted images from the past I was interested in were from my own. I opened up the first of several photo albums I had fished out of a box in the garage and started slowly leafing through them.
    They were the typical pictures: awkward teenagers in Christmas sweaters posing by the tree, prom photos with Frank making goofy faces because he hated being in a tuxedo, pictures of us in college looking lovingly at each other though we broke up every other week during that time, and finally about a dozen photos of my hand showing off a sparkling new engagement ring.
    The second album was all wedding photos. The official ones were staged, with smiles that were too wide to be real. After the ceremony the photographer posed us all on the altar, my family on my side, his family on his. If we were really becoming one big family, then the photographer should have mixed us all up and put his sister next to my dad and my sister next to his younger brother. Maybe the photographer knew that despite the niceties it would never really work out that way. Just like in the photo, for the rest of our marriage, most of my family aligned with me, and most of his with him.
    Still, as I looked at the photos from the reception, I saw genuine happiness. There was love in Frank’s eyes, and in mine. I’d forgotten how much in love we really were.
    Once we got back to the honeymoon suite, he called me his wife for the first time, and I stared at the gold ring on his left hand. I couldn’t believe this beautiful man belonged with me for the rest of my life.
    “You’re my next of kin now,” he said as we were lying in bed that night. “If I’m ever on life support, you get to decide whether to pull the plug.”
    “Looking forward to it.” I leaned over and kissed him. “But it better be a long time from now because I have big plans for our seventy-fifth wedding anniversary.”
    “That’s the night you’ll leave me for a younger man. Someone who can still get it up long after I’ve outlived my usefulness to you.”
    I laughed. “That’s when I’ll know it’s time to pull the plug.”
    Sitting in my kitchen fifteen years later, I could still feel my happiness from that night and I wanted to find a way to crawl back into it and stay there. But the phone rang. It was Alex. I hesitated. I was pretty sure he was calling to check up on me, and I didn’t think I could provide the appropriate mix of grief and shoulder to cry on. But I couldn’t just let it go to voice mail. He was still my father-in-law, kind of.
    “Hello,” I said.
    “Kate, it’s Alex.” He paused. “How you doing, kiddo?”
    “Okay. Just remembering.”
    “Yeah, me too. Lots of good