The Lease My Husband Never Checked

I waited tables at the diner starting the summer I turned sixteen, and I kept waiting tables straight through the two years I tried at the community college in the next county, until the money ran out and I came home and just kept waiting tables, because it was steady and the tips were decent on Sundays after church let out. Ardell came in most Wednesdays with the men from the dealership, ordering the meatloaf special and leaving good tips of his own, and it took him about six months of that before he asked me to a movie in the next town over, because a man building a name for himself in Sabine Fork did not court the diner waitress where people could watch.

I fell for him anyway. I want to be honest about that, because it matters to the rest of it. Ardell at twenty-eight was funny in a sharp way, and he worked harder than any man I’d ever met, seven days some weeks, building that dealership up from one gravel lot with four used trucks on it into something people around three counties drove out of their way to visit. He proposed on the hood of a Silverado he’d just sold, which should have told me something about which one of us he loved more, but I was twenty-three and I said yes anyway.

We married at the Methodist church my mother had cleaned houses to keep me fed near, and for about a year, it was good. Or good enough that I didn’t look too hard at the cracks.