The Tired Wife Who Owned Everything

When the general manager’s chair came open at Pruitt Stamping three years into our marriage, I did something I am less proud of. I had Mr. Abernathy’s firm run it through a regular recruiter, a clean process, no favoritism visible from the outside, and Rexford applied on his own, on the strength of his own resume, because by then he’d left fasteners for a plant management course at the community college and wanted exactly this kind of job. He interviewed with two people who did not know I was his wife. He got the offer because he earned it on paper. I told myself that made it fair.

What I did not account for was what three years of being handed real authority over ninety people would do to a man who had never had it before, especially once he decided, somewhere along the way, that the reason he had it was entirely his own doing.

“You should hear the way Doyle talks to me now,” he told me one night, early on, meaning Mr. Doyle, the plant manager for our biggest customer’s Detroit operation. “Man used to barely look at me. Now I’m the guy who keeps his brake brackets moving. I built that relationship from nothing.”

I let him believe he had. It seemed like such a small kindness at the time.

Small Currency

The trouble with letting a man believe he built something himself is that he starts spending the credit like it’s real money, and eventually the bill comes due somewhere you didn’t expect.

It came due first in small ways, the kind of thing that is almost impossible to point to on its own. At his mother’s table he’d say, “Fern helps out at the office a couple days a week, keeps herself busy,” in the same tone you’d use for a hobby, a scrapbooking habit, something harmless and slightly beside the point. At the VFW fish fry he introduced me to a man from his old sales territory as “my wife, she does some part time filing over at the plant,” and laughed along when the man said something about how nice it must be to have an easy job.

I did not correct him. That was the arrangement I had built, and I told myself the cost of it was mine to carry alone.

But it widened. He started narrating our finances like they were entirely his doing, telling his brother over Thanksgiving dinner about “what I’ve built up over there,” listing off numbers that were, in fact, my grandfather’s numbers, grown under my hand, not his. He started talking over me in meetings about our own household budget, waving off my objections with, “I run a ninety person operation, Fern, I think I can manage a grocery bill,” as if running the floor and understanding what it actually cost to keep the lights on in our own kitchen were the same skill, and as if I hadn’t been managing a company’s books since before he’d finished his plant management course.