Matt has pink cheeks. He has blonde grey hair, or as his nephew says, grey hair. He’s always being told he looks like an ambassador or at least like an ambassador should look. Tall, slender, great tailoring, impeccable manners, he attended the right schools and he’s even a Mayflower descendant. Matt is a marvelous athlete, scratch golfer, very easy going, graceful, courteous, fun. At night, I have met the other side. This side comes out when he has fallen asleep, light on, book still held upright in his hands. Now I’m not talking about the snoring which is variable in volume and in sound effects. (He can poof like the wind or sound like a gravel driveway as herds of cattle run over it.) I’m talking about the body he garbles about, the one he buried in Cape Cod. It has taken me several years to get the whole story from his nightmare ramblings. At first I just thought it was a carry over from the books he reads – WWII tomes. But as he continued to chat about stabbing, the bloody knife, progressing to burial, I became a bit disconcerted. I mean we are talking about a conservative republican, a good, honorable man who at night digresses to transgressions like murder. "Stab her or not. I can’t" Hamlet-Macbeth nightmares.

One day I told him about his nightmares and he laughed them off. But three months later I awoke about 2 a.m. with a terrible thought. What had happened to his first wife?

Should I move out or get earplugs?

By Tina