The Locks My Mother In Law Changed

I want to back up, because none of this makes sense without Ransome, and none of it makes sense without knowing what that house actually was.

I met Ransome on the pedestrian bridge over the Katy Trail the summer I turned twenty-eight, back when I was renting a duplex in Columbia and driving out to Rocheport on weekends just to walk somewhere quiet. He was renting bicycles out of a card table and a garage back then, nothing like the shop it became, and he offered to fix my chain for free because he said I looked like the kind of woman who’d tip in pie instead of cash. He was right. I brought him a peach pie the next Saturday and never really left. We got married eighteen months later on that same bridge, in October, with the bluffs going orange behind us and his mother sitting in the front row in a hat nobody else had worn to an outdoor wedding in the history of Boone County.

Ransome grew up in that house. His father built the porch with his own hands the summer before Ransome was born, and when his father died, Sudie kept the place immaculate the way some widows keep a shrine, dusting mantels nobody sat near. When Ransome and I married, his father’s will left the house to him outright, not to Sudie, a fact she never fully made peace with, though she never said so directly. She simply stayed close. She had a key. She had opinions about where the furniture went. For the first ten years of our marriage I told myself that was just what mothers did, and I made room for it the way you make room for a stone in your shoe, because the walking still gets you where you’re going.