The Wife Who Owned The Factory

The Wine

The dress was white silk, simple, the kind of thing I bought because it did not call attention to itself, which is exactly why my husband approved of it. We were standing near the dessert table at the Founders Night dinner, forty of Ted’s coworkers and their spouses scattered around folding tables draped in white cloth inside the Darke County fairgrounds Expo Hall, when his sister Miriam found me.

She was smiling the smile she has used on me for nineteen years, the one that looks like warmth from across a room and looks like something else entirely up close. She had a glass of red wine in her hand, three quarters full, and she tipped it forward slowly enough that I understood, the second it left the rim, that it was not an accident.

It ran down the front of my dress in a long dark stripe, warm at first, then cold, soaking through to my skin before I had even finished registering what had happened. The room went quiet the way a room does when everyone has seen something and nobody wants to be the first to react.

“Since you’re staff,” Miriam said, loud enough for the tables nearest us to hear, “you can clean that up.”

I did not move. I did not reach for a napkin. I stood there in a ruined dress with wine soaking through silk and I thought, very clearly, of a phone call I had taken six months earlier from the plant’s general manager, a call that started with the words “Valerie, we have a problem in the books,” and I understood that this dinner was not going to end the way anyone in that room expected.

My name is Valerie Marsh. I am forty four years old. I grew up two miles from the building we were standing in, in a house heated by a wood stove my father built himself, and for six years I had been the owner of the company that employed nearly every person eating rubber chicken in that hall, including my own husband, and not one of them knew it.