The House I Emptied In A Day

The women who tried to warn me

I was not without people who loved me. That is the part I have to own. I had a whole town of people who saw it and tried to tell me, and I turned my face away from every one of them because the truth was too heavy to pick up.

Aunt Carol never let it go, but she learned to say it sideways so I would not shut her out completely. “How’s your account looking, honey,” she would ask, and I would hear the whole sermon inside that one small question. Pastor Dale’s wife, Linda, sat next to me at the quilting circle one afternoon and said, real quiet, “Dana, a man shows you what you’re worth to him by what he lets you carry alone.” I changed the subject to the border stitching.

My friend Sherry from the clinic was the bluntest. Sherry did not do sideways. One night over coffee at the Koffee Kup on Main she set her mug down hard and said, “You are the most married single woman I have ever met in my life. You’ve got all the bills and none of the vows. That man has you doing wife work for boyfriend wages, and he’s not even paying the wages. You’re paying him.”

I got mad at her. Actually mad. I told her she did not understand what Travis and I had, that she was bitter because her own marriage went bad, that not everybody could see the vision. I did not talk to Sherry for a month. She was right about every word, and I punished her for it, because it is easier to be angry at the person holding the mirror than at the face in the glass.

The one who got through, a little, was my grandmother, and she had been dead for years. I would be standing in her kitchen and I would hear her plain as day. You show love by showing up, Dana. But then I would hear the second half that I had spent nine years pretending she never said. And you make sure, girl, that the person you’re showing up for is showing up too. Love that only runs one way isn’t love. It’s just labor.

I heard her. I just was not ready. The heart holds on to what it holds on to until the day it cannot anymore.

That day was the night of the plates.