The Coworker Who Knew My Wife

Rae Ann Colter

Her name, before it was Nora, was Rae Ann Colter.

She grew up two hundred miles south of Delford, down in the hollows near a town called Beckum that is even smaller than ours and a great deal poorer. Her daddy was gone before she could remember him. Her mother cleaned rooms at a motel out on the highway and took in ironing. Rae Ann was the oldest of three. The baby was a boy named Danny, eight years younger, and she had half raised him herself while their mother worked, and he had loved her the way a boy loves the sister who is more of a mother to him than his mother has time to be.

The man crying at my kitchen table was that boy. Danny Colter. He had changed his name to Vane, his grandmother’s name, years ago, for reasons that were going to become clear.

Rae Ann got out of Beckum the only way girls got out of Beckum, which was to marry the first man who offered to take her somewhere. His name was Boyd Rickert. He was ten years older, he had a truck and a paycheck from the quarry, and when he came around he was all charm and flowers and promises. She was nineteen. She married him and moved three counties over, away from her mother and Danny, into a rented house at the end of a gravel road with no neighbors close enough to hear anything.

And then, she said, Boyd stopped pretending.

She did not tell me everything that happened in that house. She told me enough. She told me how it started with a cruel word here and there, and how it stopped being a thing that happened sometimes and became just the weather of her life, the thing she lived inside of. She told me about the year she stopped being able to remember what her own face looked like when it was not braced for something.

She tried to leave twice. Both times he found her. The first time she went to her mother’s, and Boyd showed up on the porch with that charm all switched back on, and her mother, who had her own reasons to fear a man’s temper and no money in the world, let him take her home. The second time she got as far as a bus station in West Plains, and he was waiting in the parking lot when she came out, because he had guessed, because he always guessed, because a man like that spends all his cleverness on one thing only.

After the second time, she said, he told her what would happen if there was a third time. He was specific about it. And he told her that if she ever thought about running to her family again, it would not be her who paid for it. It would be Danny. He knew the boy walked to the quarry road for the school bus. He said it plain, so she would understand him.

She understood him.