The Wednesday Sisters(104)

As for Kath, no, she didn't divorce Lee, and Lee didn't move back in. But there was a shift in their relationship, a little of a letting go by Kath. I think she might actually have left him back then but for the children, but Linda says no, Kath will never leave Lee, hard as Linda has tried over the years to make her. “‘Life and livin’ aren't the same,’” those conversations always end, Linda throwing one of our favorite Kathisms right back at the source. Kath has had her reasons over the years. Health insurance is the one she touts most often now, which is ridiculous, of course, because she has her own health insurance, through her publishing house. But if you point that out to her, you get back that you never know when a girl might be fired, and anyway, she's fixin' to leave publishing to write her own novel any day. Never mind that she now heads up the West Coast office. Never mind that she's thrown out that “fixin' to leave” line for years, without ever once meaning it.

“You never know,” she says. “I might could just up and quit tomorrow.”

And we're talking about the woman who rammed her husband's car while speeding down the freeway, the one who, when the rest of us were hesitating in that hotel room, set the electric shears to her hairline right smack-dab at the peak of her forehead and cleared a path across the top of her head before she could lose her nerve. Yes, Kath “might could” do just about anything. She “might could” even divorce Lee someday.

And Linda?

Well, Linda is a survivor, going on thirty-five years now. But then, she always was.

We all were, it turns out.