My Husband Said He Was Going Fishing Every Sunday but His Tackle Box Had Never Been Opened

Walter is not from a fishing family. Neither am I. So when he came home one afternoon in the spring of, I want to say 2021, with a tackle box and a rod and a bucket and whatever else, and announced he wanted to get back into fishing from when he was a kid, I didn’t question it. He’s a plumber, he works with his hands, he’s the kind of person who needs to be doing something physical on his day off or he gets restless. I thought this made sense.

He started going on Sundays. Early, like 6 or 7am. Back by early afternoon, usually. Sometimes he’d bring back an excuse for why he didn’t catch anything. Too warm, too cold, wrong time of day. I know nothing about fishing so I had no reason to push back.

I’m Denise. I’m 46. Walter is 49. We’ve been married 21 years and we have two kids, Marcus who is 19 and Tamika who is 16. I work as an office manager for a dentist, pretty normal life, nothing that would suggest I should have been paying closer attention.

Six months ago — and this is embarrassing to say out loud because it means I should have noticed sooner — I was looking in the garage for something, a box I thought was near the back shelves, and I pulled out Walter’s tackle box to move it. It was extremely light. I set it on the floor and it fell over a little to one side, the way an empty container does. I opened it. Nothing in it. Like, nothing at all. Not even a hook. Just the little plastic compartments he’d never put anything into.

I put it back. I didn’t say anything. I went in the house and made lunch and felt strange for the rest of the afternoon but I didn’t say anything because what would I say. Your tackle box is empty? He’d have an explanation. He always has an explanation. Not a liar exactly, or not the kind of liar who has to work at it. The kind who just says something and waits for you to accept it.

For about six months after that I would look at him on Sunday mornings gathering his stuff and getting ready to leave and I’d tell myself there was probably an explanation. Maybe he borrowed a friend’s gear. Maybe he fished from shore and I didn’t understand what equipment that required. I genuinely tried to believe that.

Last month I couldn’t stand it anymore. I told him I was going to visit my mother. He left at 7:15. I pulled out about five minutes behind him.

He drove about 35 minutes. Got onto a highway, some roads I don’t normally go on, ended up in a neighborhood on the other side of the county. Newer houses, small yards, one of those developments where all the houses kind of look the same. He parked on the street in front of a beige house and got out of his truck.

I was parked about half a block back. I could see clearly.

He knocked. A woman came to the door. She was maybe late 30s, I don’t know, dark hair, wearing jeans and a work-type shirt. She let him in.

About ten minutes later he came back out. He had a small child with him on his hip, a boy, maybe around 2 years old. They walked to his truck and he buckled the kid into, and I don’t know where the car seat came from, he must keep one in the truck, and they drove away. I let them go. I didn’t follow.

I sat in my car in that neighborhood for about 20 minutes. Then I drove home.

The boy had Walter’s ears. This sounds like something you’d say to be dramatic but it’s just what I noticed. Walter has these slightly over-large ears that Marcus and Tamika both got. This kid had those same ears.

I went home and I made dinner. Sunday dinner, pasta, nothing special. Walter came home at about 2 and gave me some story that he didn’t catch anything again and I made some normal response and we ate. I don’t know how I did any of it. I was running on some combination of shock and routine.

I confronted him about a week later. I had asked around, my cousin Greta knows people in that area, and without giving her much context I described the house and found out the woman’s name was Renee. That’s all I needed.

The conversation with Walter was not loud. That surprised me. I thought it would be loud. I’d imagined it being loud. But I said her name and he looked at the floor and he sort of deflated, like air going out of something, and the quiet after that was about the worst thing I’ve ever heard.

He has a son. The boy’s name is Elijah. He’s 2 years and 4 months old.

I’ve been doing the math. Twenty-one years of marriage and he has a son who’s two. Walter was driving off to see this child every Sunday for two years, minimum. And before that, however long the thing with Renee was happening. The math on that goes back further than I want to think about.

Marcus doesn’t know yet. Tamika doesn’t know. I’ve been carrying this for two months and I don’t know how to tell my own children that their father has another child.

Walter is living in the house still, which I know, but the conversations with lawyers on both sides have been going on for a few weeks. He cried once. I left the room. He didn’t follow me.

My mother-in-law called to ask if everything was okay because Walter had apparently seemed off at a family thing. I said we’d been stressed with some financial stuff. I wasn’t ready to explain it to her.

Every Sunday now Walter stays home. He hasn’t mentioned the fishing in a while.