The Faults Of Tom Jones

July 3rd had been their anniversary, she guessed it still was, but to Shirley Jones it was just another day.  Not that it had always cracked up to be such a special day when he was alive.  There were the war years, Korea, when she obviously forgave his absence, even found it romantic to receive his happy anniversary cards with a few sincerely scribbled words of love and yearning, anywhere from a week before to three weeks after July 3rd.  But then upon his return he was changed.  And she didn't read it as some sort of post traumatic syndrome but rather a part of Tom's makeup that would have clicked on at a certain time in his life no matter where he had spent the previous years or what he had been doing there.  He became distant (oh how she hated the cliche, was it really a noteworthy thing to say about any man, that he was distant, might as well try and distinguish your man from others by saying he had a dick.) But Tom after the war just seemed increasingly to get everything out of context.  There was the year little Jimmy had received his first bicycle on their anniversary (it was on sale honey, there are no good sales around his actual birthday), and the years he had simply forgotten but would sheepishly grinning bring her breakfast in bed days or weeks later (remember during the war when my cards would be delayed?), or the three or four hard years where there was no card or gift, or remembrance of any kind excepting that palpable angst arriving around the end of June like a ribbon wrapped box of shit.  She didn't consider herself blameless in all this, she could be a hard and unpredictable woman, sometimes irresistible and seconds later quite the opposite. But she had been good to Tom for the most part, there was no one that saw it any differently. Maybe it was all men, maybe they all really were shits, except for those ones you didn't marry but kept in your fantasies to puff up your self-esteem. Shirley however had not been married to all men, only the one, his name had been Tom, and for the last 17 years the only absolute certainty was that he was dead, and that despite his many, many faults (don't get me started on the faults of Tom Jones), she did (was she cursed?) miss him.