(8/11) “Cheryl was innocent. The opposite of me. And that’s...

(8/11)  “Cheryl was innocent.  The opposite of me.  And that’s why I was so attracted to her.  I never wanted to date someone like myself: who drank, and smoked, and had a past.  Cheryl was soft.  Almost naïve in a way.  I never told her about my history, and she didn’t really press me.  I did tell her that I grew up in the South, which was true.  And that I’d come to New York City to try something new.  That was true too.  But I never told her about Walter Miller.  I didn’t see the need.  Walter died a long time ago, on that Greyhound bus out of Raleigh.  I was a new man.  I was Bobby Love now.  And if that was enough for her, why complicate things?  We got married in 1985.  Time went by.  We raised four children together.  I just couldn’t risk it.  My family in North Carolina kept telling me: ‘You’ve got to come clean.  You’ve got to tell her.’  But they didn’t know my wife.  Not like I did.  Cheryl is a righteous woman.  Most people, when they see a dollar dropped on the street, will put it in their pocket.  But not Cheryl.  She will stop everyone on the sidewalk, looking for the owner.  She’s that kind of woman.  And that’s not the kind of woman who could keep a secret like this.  I’m not trying to say that she’d have called the cops on me.  But she’d have made me call the cops on myself.  She’d turn up the heat.   So I just couldn’t tell her about Walter Miller.   And there was no need.  Bobby Love didn’t have a criminal record.  Bobby Love was a family man.  Bobby Love was a deacon at his church.  Every Sunday our pastor would preach about forgetting the past, and forgiving ourselves, and looking ahead.  And that’s exactly what I was doing.  That part of my life was buried back in North Carolina.  And it wasn’t coming back.“