The Wife Who Owned The Factory

What Happened To Ted

The Vice President of Sales title went to a man named Reggie Wooten who had earned it fair and square over eleven years of steady, unglamorous work, and Ted did not contest it, because there was very little ground left under him to contest anything from.

We did not speak much, that first week. Bonnie came home from school for a weekend she had not planned, sat at our kitchen table, the same one where I had reviewed six years of Millrace’s books after Ted went to sleep, and asked me, carefully, whether her parents were getting divorced. I told her the truth, which was that I did not know yet, and that was the first time in longer than I could remember that I had told anyone in that family a fully honest sentence without softening it first.

Ted moved into his brother’s spare room for six weeks. I did not ask him to. I did not stop him either. I spent those six weeks doing the thing I am apparently built to do when a situation gets hard, which is going quiet and working, except this time the work was different. I finally told Verlon the whole truth about my marriage, which he had half-guessed anyway, and he told me something that stayed with me longer than almost anything else that whole year.

“Your daddy built things that outlasted him,” Verlon said. “The question in front of you isn’t whether you’re strong enough to run this plant without your husband’s respect. You’ve been doing that for six years. The question is whether he’s willing to become a man who deserves to know you now that he does.”