There was a boy,” my mother said. And suddenly it became clear to me why I’d been afraid.

It was the night before my wedding day and the house hung with that heavy silence that comes after a raging storm. Hours ago there had been flowers and dresses that looked like flowers, trays of food and faces wondering where something goes. Finally it was just me and my mother doing dishes. There was a faint hum of Sex and the City in the background.

For years I’d wanted to know if this was the real thing, if it was supposed to feel this way. We had fun together and my friends told me that was the most important part. He took care of me when I was sick and my mother told me that was the most important part. My father liked his career plans and my sisters liked his sense of humor.

But one night I couldn’t sleep and found a rerun of that show where they trade wives from different households for a few weeks. David was fast asleep next to me and the light from the TV was dancing around the dark room. This one wife was from a Southern white family, suburban; she wore jeans that came up to the waist and made her ass look round. The other wife was from a fairly conservative Jewish family, and everything in her house was in order, and her husband was a quiet man and looked like a Rabbi. I turned up the volume to drown out David’s snoring.

What I saw amazed me, not because it was so foreign, but because it was so familiar. At the end of the show the wives came back. And the man who looked like a Rabbi was crying, because he realized how important his wife is to the family. It really looked like he had missed her. And the other husband, the one with the wife in jeans, slapped his wife’s ass and asked her what’s for dinner. They laughed, of course, but my jaw dropped. It was just as casual as that, a slap on the ass, for a wife who’s been gone for weeks.

Maybe it’s not a big deal, I said to myself. Maybe they just have fun.

Over the next couple of months my anxiety kept growing. “David,” I asked, “if I left or something, and was gone for a while, what would you do?” To which he replied, “You don’t need to leave the room to fart, we’ll be married soon.”

But this was not satisfying to me. I imagined David being shipped off to the Army, or Navy, or someplace dangerous and far away. I would be one of those wives who’d wait by the mailbox, chew her nails by the phone in case something happened. I would work, of course, but in a spare minute I’d feel connected to somebody, drawn to somebody, in the way that hostage victims kiss their lovers when they’re released, with passion, and purpose, and as if for the last time.

“That urgency, mom… I want it.”

“I know, my dear,” she said as she clinked the dishes together. “It doesn’t happen like in the movies.

What I wanted wasn’t in the movies, it was in some shitty reality show. And I didn’t want it to happen; I wanted it to already be the case. I figured if I were to leave David he’d be curious as to why. After a few weeks of not returning his calls he might ask my parents where I was. By a couple months he’d feel like he got the hint and stop bothering. Within a year I bet he’d find somebody new.

I never knew how hard it was for my mom when dad died. I didn’t see her cry, but she was that kind of woman, to cry at night with an empty space beside her. But with death, the ultimate loss, you’d have to feel like a part of you died, too, like that connection has been severed forever. This is what love must be like. Painful.

So I asked her, “Mother, have you ever been in love?” And she said to me, “There was a boy,” and I knew she wasn’t talking about dad, or anyone else I’d heard about from her college years. I knew this was the love that has felt like a death to her all these decades, after all her kids. His name as absent as my father, his touch even more so.

I imagined him to be a boy of 14, throwing kisses at her with his eyes from across the classroom. Maybe he asked her out once. Maybe she even said yes. I imagined dark alleys of hand-holding and worse, escapades forbidden because they were both children and their parents disapproved, or something equally as dramatic. I imagined someone moved, or got sent away, or died. But I didn’t ask any more questions.

Tomorrow would be the biggest day of my life, and by association, hers. I helped her with the rest of the dishes and she kissed my forehead goodnight. The way she looked at me, like a mother, told me she would go up to her room, take off her makeup, slip into a nightgown, and sob into the ceiling. She’d sob as softly as a good virtuous woman, a good elegant wife and mother.

In the morning she smiled for all the pictures and the flowers and dresses like flowers swirled around me like a pastel tornado. When the doors opened and I saw the aisles of faces and David standing at the end, I knew I’d made the right decision. This was it, the wedding, the marriage, the reason why I want someone to miss me. I could see my mother’s proud and anxious face melt into tears by the time I got to David. And when I got there, I imagined her thinking it was the boy, her boy, with the same face and the subtle hands he must have had. If I had a boy somewhere I’d miss him like I was mourning, and sob to myself at night when David would fall asleep.

If David was the boy, here and now, I’d wake up one day when I was 45 and tell my kids about it, tell them there was a boy once, and we did it, we got married, and it either worked out or it didn’t. But I’d tell them there was a boy, I had one, and when they grow up, they’ll get one too, and they’ll miss each other to tears every day so much they wouldn’t even know it. I imagined them asking me, “Mommy, mommy, did you love daddy?” And I wouldn’t hesitate; I’d tell them.

“I do.”