The Woman Who Called Me Her Granddaughter

The Bench on Route 9

I want to start with the number, because Sherwood always cared more about numbers than he ever cared about me: forty six dollars. That is what my husband decided my life was worth reconsidering over.

It had gone toward my mother’s blood pressure medicine, the ones she needed after her gallbladder surgery, plus a little gas and a sack of groceries I picked up on the way home from the pharmacy. Nothing wild. Nothing selfish. I had not bought myself so much as a coffee.

But when Sherwood looked at the bank app that night, he did not see medicine or groceries. He saw a decision that had been made without him, and in twelve years of marriage I had learned that was the one thing he could not let go unanswered.

He did not yell. Sherwood never yelled. Yelling would have meant losing control, and control was the only thing he had ever really wanted from me.

Instead he was quiet the whole drive to my mother’s house the next afternoon, quiet all through the visit, quiet until we were back on Route 9 with the fields going gold on either side of the truck in the late light. Then he pulled onto the shoulder outside the old Conoco station, the one that has sat boarded up since before we got married, and put the truck in park.

“Get out,” he said.

I asked him what he meant. He reached across me, popped my door, and told me again.

He took my purse before I had both feet on the gravel. My wallet. My debit card. The forty six dollars in cash I had left over. Then he leaned across and slid my phone out of my coat pocket like he was collecting evidence.

“You need to learn the value of what’s mine,” he said. “Figure out how to get home without it.”

Then he drove away, and his taillights went small and red down the two lane until the curve past the water tower took them.

I stood on the gravel a long time before I made myself sit on the bench. It was cracked clean through the middle, one rusted armrest, an old church revival flyer taped to the sign post so long it had gone the color of weak tea. Across the road, the Conoco’s windows were still boarded from the flood two summers back. I did not know exactly how far I was from town. I did not know which direction would get me there faster.

Buses came through twice while I sat there. I did not have fare for either one, and I did not have a phone to call anybody who might have paid it for me, because two years of Sherwood deciding which of my friends were a bad influence had left me with almost nobody left to call.

The sun dropped. The air went from warm to sharp the way it does in Mississippi in October, fast, like somebody threw a switch. Every truck that slowed down near the bench made my whole body go tight before it passed on by.

I do not know how long I cried before I heard the cane.