The Wife Who Owned The Factory

The Floor I Grew Up On

My father’s name was Wally Bittner. He ran a machine shop on the edge of Redbud called Bittner Precision Tool, a low brick building with three lathes, a mill, and a coffee can full of drill bits by the back door, and from the time I was tall enough to see over a workbench, that shop was where I spent my Saturdays.

He did not have a son, and he never once acted like that was a problem to be solved. He taught me to read a blueprint before I learned to parallel park. He taught me the difference between a good weld and a weld that would fail in a Ohio winter frost heave, and he taught me, without ever once saying it out loud, that a person’s worth in a shop had nothing to do with what family they came from and everything to do with whether their work held up.

Redbud is the kind of town where everybody’s father worked with somebody’s uncle. Population just under six thousand, a grain elevator on the north end, a Friday night football stadium that fills up more reliably than most of the churches, and a strip of small manufacturers strung along the county road that fed the farm economy for a hundred miles in every direction. Millrace Farm Implement was the biggest of them, a maker of grain augers and planter parts and skid steer attachments that had been running since 1949, and half the men I grew up around either worked there or wanted to.

I never wanted to work the line at Millrace. I wanted to own something, though it took me years to admit that to myself, because nobody in Redbud raised their daughters to say a sentence like that out loud. What I did instead was learn the numbers side of my father’s shop, the invoicing, the payroll, the margins on a job quoted too low, and by the time I was in my twenties I understood a small manufacturer’s balance sheet the way other people understood a favorite recipe.

Marsh Family Manners

I met Ted Marsh at a wedding when I was twenty five, at the reception for a cousin of his I barely knew, and he asked me to dance in a blue suit that fit him like it had been chosen with more care than most men in Redbud put into a wedding of their own. He was handsome in the particular way of a man who has been told his whole life that he is going places, and I liked, at first, how sure of himself he was.

The Marsh family had a certain standing in Redbud that the Bittners never did. Ted’s father had sat on the school board for two decades and had his name on a plaque at the county fairgrounds. His mother ran the hospital auxiliary rummage sale every spring like a small military campaign. They were not wealthy, not by any standard outside of a town of six thousand people, but they carried themselves like people who mattered, and somewhere early in our marriage I understood that Ted needed me to carry myself that way too, and that I did not quite know how.

Miriam, his older sister, made that clearest of anyone. At our engagement dinner she asked me, in front of the whole table, whether I planned to keep “doing whatever it is you do at your dad’s little shop” once I married into the family, and she asked it with a smile so pleasant that anyone watching would have sworn it was kindness.

I married Ted anyway, because I loved him, and because for a long time the small cruelties felt like something I could out-work. If I kept the house perfect and raised our daughter Bonnie right and never embarrassed him in front of the people who mattered to him, I told myself, eventually he would stop needing me to prove myself and start simply seeing me.

That day never came. It just got quieter, the way these things do, until it was simply the shape of our marriage and I stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing a draft in a house you have lived in for twenty years.