Pam Says I Love You

A woman seeks out my husband daily and shows me how to be better at loving

There is another woman in our town who loves my husband. Her name is Pam. Every time she sees him, which is sometimes five days a week, when they part ways she raises her crumpled hand in the air and says, “I love you, Todd!”

Todd always replies, “I love you, too, Pam!”

One day over breakfast he said to me, “That’s what I’ve got, you and Pam. The people who tell me they love me.”

I laughed, about to protest, for surely this wasn’t the case. There were obviously more than two people on earth who tell my husband, “I love you.”

But then I stopped laughing because I realized that what he had said was true. His parents are dead. He never had siblings. His son does love him but doesn’t say those three words. I believe that my daughters, his stepdaughters, feel something like love for him, but they don’t say those words to him, either.

“I love you, Todd” — that’s me, and Pam.

The first time I met Pam, she stared me down hard from under the brim of her ball cap, the front of which was emblazoned with her name in puffy paint. She wore wire-rimmed glasses and an oversized navy-blue windbreaker. Her short grey hair poked out from under her pink hat. Her watery eyes locked on me and held.

“Who’s that?” she asked Todd suspiciously.

“That’s my wife,” he replied. “Her name is Kim.”