The Shower My Mother In Law Planned
The Room Above The Old Feed Store
People imagine, I think, that a woman in my position spends her days plotting. Mostly I just worked.
I had trained as a bookkeeper before I married into a family that considered bookkeeping beneath its women, and I had let that training go soft for nine years the way you let anything go soft that nobody around you values. I dusted it off. I put a small ad in the Cotton Bend paper and on the community board at the Baptist church my mother still keeps books for, and within six weeks I had eleven clients. The diner on the square. Two farm families who needed their equipment loans tracked properly. A widow named Mrs. Pruitt who ran a fabric shop and cried the first time I balanced her books correctly in eleven years, not because the numbers were good, but because somebody had finally looked at them carefully.
I went to church potlucks again, the small kind, folding tables in a fellowship hall, banana pudding in a chipped bowl somebody’s grandmother had used for fifty years. I went to a Friday night football game in October and stood in the cold with people who had known my father, and nobody once asked me whether I had any news.
It was not a triumphant season of my life. I want to be honest about that, because the story people like best is the one where the wronged woman rises immediately, gleaming, ready for revenge. Mine was slower and plainer than that. I paid my rent. I balanced eleven sets of books. I slept better than I had in years, which surprised me more than anything else, because I had expected grief to keep me up and instead it was the marriage that had been keeping me up, quietly, every night, without my ever naming it.
I heard things, the way you hear things in a town of nine thousand people. The Reyburn girl was showing more by November. The wedding, I heard, was being planned for the spring, quietly, tastefully, the kind of wedding a family throws when it wants the whole town to agree the story had always been this way. Hazel was campaigning, not too subtly, to chair the country club’s membership committee in the new year, the position she had wanted for a decade and never quite had the standing to claim.
I did not think, back then, that any of those three facts were connected. I know now they were the same fact wearing three different coats.