The Daughter Who Cleared My Name

Bellwood Creek is the kind of town where the whole community shows up for a Friday night football game even when neither team is any good, and where the church ladies keep a rotation of casseroles ready for anybody who has a baby, a surgery, or a funeral. We hosted the youth group’s fall bonfire in our gravel lot every year. Garnett coached Hettie’s tee ball team two summers running. We were, by every measure a small town uses to judge a family, doing fine. Better than fine. I used to lie awake some nights doing the math on the loan we’d finally paid off and feel something close to disbelief that two people with no money and no connections had built a building with our name on it, out of nothing but stubbornness and long hours.

I tell you all that so you understand what it cost me to hear my own husband stand up in a courtroom and tell twelve strangers that I had stolen from it.

It started with a fall. In the spring of the year Hettie turned eight, I slipped off the loading dock behind the store carrying a fifty pound bag of feed and tore ligaments in my knee badly enough that I was laid up for four months, first in a brace, then in physical therapy three days a week in the next county over. I couldn’t get up the two steps into our office without help. Garnett said not to worry about the books, that he would handle things until I was back on my feet, and he hired a young woman to come in three days a week and help him keep the accounts current while I recovered.

I want to be honest. Something in me did not like her from the start, and I told myself that was just an injured, tired, jealous woman talking, and I was ashamed of the thought, so I buried it. She was polite to my face. She brought me a casserole once, the week after my surgery, and stood in my kitchen making small talk about the weather while I sat with my leg propped on a folding chair, and I remember thinking, this is fine, this is nothing, get a hold of yourself, Genevra.