The Shower My Mother In Law Planned

The Reyburn Land

The Reyburn family owned four hundred acres along Highway 82, most of it timber and pasture, but the piece that mattered was a strip of frontage right where the new bypass was going in. Calloway Building Supply needed that frontage for a fourth store, the one Hazel had been talking about at every board meeting for three years, the one that would put the company’s name on the biggest highway sign in three counties.

Old man Reyburn did not sell land. Everybody in Cotton Bend knew that. He had turned down two grocery chains and a hotel developer, and he told anyone who asked that Reyburn land left the family the same way it arrived in it, which was to say it didn’t.

I did not know, at the time, that his daughter worked three days a week doing the books at the Calloway Building Supply main store on Court Street. I did not know Orlan had started staying late on the days she worked. I found out the way most wives find out, which is to say slowly, and then all at once, and then in the worst possible room in front of the worst possible people.

What I did not find out until much later, from a man who had no reason left to protect Hazel Calloway, was that Hazel had known about her son and the Reyburn girl for almost two years before that shower. Not suspected. Known.

And that she had done nothing to stop it, because she had never wanted it stopped.