The chapel on San Francisco Street in Santa Fe was lit with a hundred white candles on the sixth of December, and I stood at the back of it in my good black coat with the invitation in my hand and the other woman at my side. I am Gloria Montoya, sixty three years old, a teacher from Albuquerque, and I had driven sixty miles through the snow with the woman who was to be the bride. Sandra Lee Pacheco, sixty one, was a tall, quiet widow in a pearl gray suit, and she was holding my hand as if we had been friends all our lives.
It was Sandra who had said the unexpected thing, on the telephone, at midnight, when I called her in a cold fury. She had been silent for a moment, and then she said, in a slow voice, “Mrs. Montoya, I am so sorry. Richard told me his wife passed in March. He cried when he told me. He showed me a photograph of a headstone.” I had sat on the edge of my bed in the dark with the telephone in my hand and understood that I was a woman who had been mourned while still alive.
We met for coffee the next morning in a diner on Rio Grande Boulevard, two strangers with the same man between us. Sandra owned a gallery and a house on Canyon Road worth two million dollars, and the ring receipt for eleven thousand four hundred dollars that I had found in the glove box of Richard was for her. She had spent two weeks of nights wondering why he would never let her meet his family. By the time we finished our second cup of coffee, we had a plan, and we were laughing in a way that startled the waitress.
A wedding invitation in the morning mail gave one teacher the length of a midnight call to bring her husband back to the truth in Albuquerque.
I gave my terms in the chapel vestibule, at the very hour of the wedding, when Richard Alan Montoya came up the stone steps in a charcoal suit with a white rose in his lapel, whistling, and saw the two of us standing there arm in arm. “Richard, close your mouth,” I said. “You will walk down that aisle with us, and you will tell the priest and the guests the truth, in your own words, about your wife and about the money. If you try to run, I have a camera, and twelve friends, and a very good lawyer.”
The white rose dropped from his lapel and rolled across the flagstones. Richard, sixty four years old, a handsome silver haired salesman of commercial real estate, looked from one of us to the other. Then he spoke, in a flat, tired voice. “I lost three hundred thousand dollars of our retirement in a land deal in Arizona. I was afraid to tell you, Gloria. I met Sandra at a gallery opening and thought, if she were my wife, the debt would go away. I told her you had passed. I thought I would divorce you quietly after the wedding.” He wiped his face with a trembling hand.
But fear got the better of him, and when the organ began to play, Richard whirled around, snatched the marriage license and the velvet ring box from the hands of the best man, and bolted down the steps toward his car in the snow, meaning to flee to the highway with the evidence of everything he had done. His polished shoes skidded on the ice. The guests turned in their pews. The priest gasped. And at the foot of the steps, the twelve friends who had come with me, all teachers in their winter coats, formed a line across the street.
Richard stopped on the snowy sidewalk with the license and the ring box clutched to his chest, a line of twelve teachers in wool coats standing shoulder to shoulder in front of him, the candlelight spilling across the snow behind. The oldest of them, a retired principal named Mrs. Ortega, spoke in her calm hallway voice, the one that had silenced a thousand schoolboys. “Mr. Montoya, you are going back up those steps to apologize to this church. And then you are going to sit down.” Richard looked at the twelve faces. His shoulders sagged. He turned and walked back, and the line parted to let him pass.
The consequences were swift and clean. The district attorney in Santa Fe charged Richard with attempted bigamy and fraud, and he pleaded to a lesser count and repaid a portion of the money from the sale of his car and his share of a rental property. I filed for a divorce that very week, and the judge granted it with great speed. Sandra and I had lunch every Friday for a month, and then every Friday for a year, and she paid for a new roof on my little house in Albuquerque, which I allowed on one condition: that she come see it.
In the name of my mother Esperanza, who passed in 2012, I started the Esperanza Baca Fund. It pays for legal help and counseling for people whose spouses have lied about a marriage or hidden money, and for emergency housing for those who must leave in a hurry, in Bernalillo, Sandoval and Santa Fe counties. In the first year we helped one hundred and seven people. One was a fifty eight year old nurse from Rio Rancho who held the keys to her own small apartment and told the counselor it was the first thing that had ever been only hers.
On the first Saturday of spring, I sat on the sunny patio of Sandra on Canyon Road in Santa Fe, with a plate of sopaipillas between us and a pot of green chile stew simmering in the kitchen. A small gold ring lay on my table, the one from the receipt, the one that had never been mine. Sandra slid it across to me and smiled. “I want you to have it,” she said. “You are the best friend I ever made at midnight.” I laughed, and then I wept, and then I put it on my right hand.
