The Wife Who Turned Off The Stove
What Providing Actually Looked Like
To understand why that laugh was such a mistake, you have to understand what our house outside Dothan actually runs on, because it is not what Troy tells his brother at the kitchen table.
Troy works second shift as a line supervisor out at the poultry plant off Highway 84. It is decent, steady work and I have never once said a word against it. But a line supervisor’s check, after the truck payment Troy insisted on for a truck he insisted on, does not cover a house, two grown kids who still eat like they’re twelve, his mother’s medications when her insurance drags its feet, and whatever his brother needs help with that month. It covers about sixty percent of it, by my own arithmetic, which I have because I am the one who sits down with the bills on the first of the month while Troy is at the deer lease telling other men about the doe he almost got.
I cover the rest. I have covered the rest for years, and I did it quietly, the way you’re taught to in a marriage where a man’s pride is treated like a load bearing wall. My mornings at the feed store bring in a real paycheck. My afternoons baking bring in cash, and more of it than Troy has ever asked about, because asking would mean admitting he needed to know.
I fed us. I fed his mother, Jody, when she came by on a Tuesday because her own kitchen felt too quiet since Troy’s father passed. I fed Melvin and his wife, Courtney, when they’d stop in “for a minute” that turned into supper four nights out of five that summer their air conditioner was out. I made the sheet cakes for the football boosters that get Troy backslapped at the Piggly Wiggly all fall, because everybody in this county knows whose wife baked the cake even when they can’t remember who the coach is.
None of that had a name in our house. It was just Sheila being Sheila. Troy providing was a line item. Sheila being Sheila was weather.
I want to give you one more number before I move on, because it is the one that used to keep me up nights doing math I never told anybody about. The feed store pays me a little over eighteen dollars an hour, forty hours a week, which is honest money and I am grateful for it. My baking, on a good month, clears another six hundred to nine hundred dollars in cash, depending on how many funerals the county has and how close it is to football season. Troy’s check, after the truck note and his union dues and what he sets aside for the deer lease every fall, comes home smaller than either of us likes to say out loud. Put it together and I was carrying close to half our household on paper and closer to two thirds of it in practice, because the things I did that never touched a bank account, the cooking, the cleaning, the driving his mother to her appointments when Melvin’s shift ran long, never got weighed against anything. You cannot itemize a Tuesday. I had stopped trying years before Troy ever opened his mouth about okra.