Nancy Pickard on awards: “I don’t care what anybody says–awards are nice. It’s encouraging to get one; it’s a happy, satisfying moment after the long trudge of writing. Awards have helped my career, and lifted my spirits, and given me courage to go on. I’m really grateful. I am especially grateful for the generous and warm local support I have received from readers, other writers, librarians, and other lovers of books from all over my native state of Missouri and my home state of Kansas. Actually, ‘grateful’ doesn’t begin to express it: I love them.”
And the woman has a lot to be grateful for: Nancy has won the Agatha, Anthony, Macavity, Barry, and Shamus awards for her short stories. She won the first-ever Anthony Award for Best Paperback Original Mystery for her second Jenny Cain novel, Say No to Murder. She has won multiple Agatha and Macavity awards for her novels, and is a 4-time Edgar Allan Poe award nominee. She is also a Mary Higgins Clark award finalist, and a recipient of a Lifetime Achievement award for suspense fiction from Romantic Times. In her hometown area she has received The Thorpe Menn Award from the Kansas City, Mo. branch of the American Association of University Women and the Don Coldsmith Award. Two of her novels, The Virgin of Small Plains and The Scent of Rain and Lightning have been named Kansas Notable Books. The Virgin of Small Plains was the Kansas Reads Book of 2009.
I’ve known Nancy for years, but it’s been a while since our paths crossed. I’m delighted to have a marvelous new story from her for At Home in the Dark.
IF ONLY YOU WOULD LEAVE ME by Nancy Pickard
The problem with being married to a nice man who adored you was that you couldn’t divorce him without looking like a jerk. “Why?” her mother would ask her if Melinda actually did it. “Did he have an affair? Did he hit you? Was he verbally abusive? Did he gamble? Was he addicted to something? Alcohol? Drugs? Leon has always seemed just wonderful to me. I thought you two were doing fine! This is so sad. Your dad thinks the world of him. I do, too. Has he done something to deserve this? He’s even improved since you married him. I’ve never seen the like of it. I just can’t believe you’d leave such a nice man who clearly loves you! Is it because you don’t have children yet?”
The incredibly frustrating answer to each of those questions that could be answered by yes or no was, “No,” a definitive, wildly irritating, honest, desperate, “No.”
He hadn’t done anything to deserve it.
He didn’t have any goddamn faults, he was too good for faults. My God, he even did his own laundry.
Well, there was one major fault that he couldn’t correct.
She couldn’t say it to other people, though. That would be terrible of her to actually confide to anybody, and especially to her parents or to his. His! Oh, my god, they thought she was perfect for their perfect son. How could she say, “He’s the world’s worst lover.” She couldn’t. Never, ever. She thought too highly of him to hold him up to that kind of embarrassment. He was far too decent a human being for her to blame a divorce on the Missionary Position.
It wasn’t as if she hadn’t told him, asked him, encouraged him.
He’d tried, kindly person that he was.
But his heart wasn’t in it, not any more, not even to please her.
His heart was stuck in slam, bam, thank you ma’am, as if he’d turned into a 1950’s advertising salesman with too much “respect” for his wife to bang her like he banged his secretary. Only, there was no secretary, just like there was nothing Melinda would call sex. Once every ten days. In bed. Under the covers. He hated doing it without sheets over them. “I feel so silly,” he’d admitted, sweetly, “with my butt stuck up in the air.” She’d offered to point her butt to the ceiling, instead, but he’d looked so 
shocked that she’d let that go, too. Oral sex was out of the question. The mere phrase, “oral sex” made his face go all “Ew.” She wondered if he was gay and either didn’t know it, or was still hiding it. In this day and age! Good grief. If he was gay, she would gaily support him and set him free.
She’d buy the condoms! She’d be their flower girl!
Please figure out you’re gay, she thought, often.
Counseling was out, because she didn’t actually want to save their marriage. She’d given up. Plus, a counselor was sure to ask, “Did you know this before you married him?” No, she could honestly say. But Leon was different then; they’d had sex between the appetizer and the entree back then, between dessert and coffee- after, to say nothing of between the sheets.
He’d liked it.
It was all the fault of the First Community Church of God.
When she thought about how her agnostic husband had suddenly got religion, Melinda wanted to push his face into a Baptismal fount. Oh, God–speaking of which–if only he’d have an affair so she could catch him. With a man, with a woman, with a pony, she didn’t care, just so long as he cheated and gave her a thank-God, socially acceptable reason to leave him. Maybe she was too caught up in what other people thought, but jeez, why should she have to go through life feeling condemned for leaving a nice man?
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Leon had hoped he could out-sweet her.
His wife loathed ooey-gooey pudding-mouthed people, especially sweet-talking, compliment-throwing men.
“You’re always so nice, Leon,” she’d said recently, in a tone in which she had also said, “Yuk. Our trash bin is sticky!”
He thought he was making progress.
Any day now she was supposed to get so fed up with his smarmy efforts to please her that she wouldn’t be able to take it any more and would leave him for a ruder, lazier man.
There was only one place he didn’t try to please Melinda.
She loved sex.
Before marriage, they’d done it three times a night sometimes. Definitely three times a week, usually more. Surely, she’d go insane any time now with his every-ten-days regimen, soon to drop to every two weeks if she didn’t get with his program.
He was surprised she didn’t suggest marriage counseling.
“Church?” she asked, dumbfounded when he’d told her he was going.
Church was his excuse for the change in him from loose and thoughtless to zipped up and punctilious. Church wasn’t where he’d met the beautiful young choir director, Staci, but it was where he’d followed her, a smitten lamb trotting along after her wagging tail.
There was nothing like naked sex in a bell tower.
Far enough away from the bells not to go deaf; close enough to reverberate like a couple of tuning forks and ring out hallelujah.
He couldn’t leave his wife; Melinda had to leave him.
The reason why she had to be driven to abandon a perfect husband was that her parents had given them as a wedding gift a million-dollar house. Leon wanted a For Sale sign on it, and a check made out to him, which he wasn’t going to get if she found out who chimed his bells…
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IF ONLY YOU WOULD LEAVE ME by Nancy Pickard is one of 17 impeccable stories in At Home in the Dark. NB: Ebook and paperback editions are on sale now for immediate delivery. DON’T try to order the hardcover, as it’s sold out at the publisher, and while Amazon is still taking orders they’ll be unable to deliver.
