The Locks My Mother In Law Changed

The viewing happened that Friday, in the chapel, at the original time after all, because Constance handled the rescheduling call for me while I finally slept eleven hours in my own bed, in my own house, under my own curtains, which I hung back up myself the day Sudie’s moving truck pulled away. Half the town came. The boys from the bike shop stood in a row in their good shirts, awkward and red-eyed. Pauline the nurse sent a card. Sudie came too, in the back pew, alone, and I let her stay, because Ransome had asked me to go easy where I could, and there is a difference between mercy and forgetting what someone did to you on a Monday morning in January.

It has been eight months now. The wedding china sits back in its cabinet, all twelve place settings, because I found the rest of it boxed in Sudie’s garage and Constance got it back for me with one polite letter. I still walk the Katy Trail most mornings, past the bridge where Ransome and I met, past the bike shop the boys still run in his name, and past the porch his father built with his own hands, the one that is now, on paper and in every way that matters, entirely mine.

Sudie sent one note last month, three lines, asking if she could come by sometime to see the garden she used to keep. I have not answered it yet. I think, when I do, I will let her in for an hour, in daylight, with the door unlocked the whole time, because that is the version of strong I want to be now. Not the woman who screamed on a cold porch. The woman who didn’t have to.

Ransome was right about one thing he never got to finish saying. I did earn that house twice over. I just needed his handwriting, taped under a workbench, to make sure nobody could ever tell me otherwise again.