The Locks My Mother In Law Changed

I tried it twice, thinking my hands were just shaking from the cold, or from crying, or from both. Then I went around back for the spare we kept under the loose stone by the porch step, the one only Ransome and I and his mother knew about, and that one didn’t work either. I stood there in the flower bed in my hospital clothes, holding two keys that no longer meant anything, and through a gap in curtains that were not mine, dark green velvet where my yellow cotton ones used to hang, I saw moving boxes stacked against the wall of my own living room. I saw a pink throw pillow on my reading chair that I had never owned in my life.

The door opened before I could knock. Sudie Jessup stood in the frame in a cardigan I recognized, because it used to hang in the hall closet for guests, holding a cup of tea in my wedding china, the pattern with the gold rim that had come down through my grandmother and survived four moves and one basement flood.

She looked at me the way you look at a delivery you didn’t order.

“Didn’t expect you back so soon,” she said.

I asked her, and I remember my voice cracking on it, why my key didn’t work.

“Because, dear,” she said, in the same tone she used to correct my gravy, “you don’t live here anymore.”

I want you to understand that I did not scream. I did not push past her, though God knows I thought about it. I had spent every ounce of fight I owned in that hospital room watching a monitor go flat, and there was nothing left in me to spend on a woman who had been waiting a long time for a door to open in her favor. So I said the only true thing I had. I told her I was his wife. She smiled the way she smiled at church raffles she’d already rigged, and she began listing reasons I supposedly didn’t count, the way you’d list ingredients that had gone bad. I was too tired to argue with an inventory. I turned around, got in my car, and drove away from my own house with my hands shaking so hard I had to grip the wheel with both of them.