The Locks My Mother In Law Changed

By noon that Monday I was in a motel off Highway 240, the kind with a coffee maker bolted to the dresser and a Bible in the nightstand drawer, staring at a paper cup of gas station coffee I couldn’t make myself drink. I called my sister that afternoon, mostly because I needed to hear a voice that wasn’t asking me to leave a room. She offered to drive down from Kansas City that night, offered to call Sudie herself and say things I’d never let myself say, but I told her not yet. I did not know, sitting on that scratchy motel bedspread, what I was waiting for. I only knew that driving back over there with nothing but my own anger in my hands felt like a fight I would lose before it started. Tuesday morning I called Rocheport Memorial Chapel to move the viewing back two hours, because I could not face a receiving line with no home to receive anyone in afterward, and the woman on the phone was so gentle about it that I had to hang up before I fell apart on her.

Tuesday afternoon, I drove back into town and parked behind the row of cedars two houses down, the way you’d watch your own life from a rented car. I waited until Sudie’s sedan pulled out toward the grocery, then I let myself in through the side door off the mudroom, the one with the latch that never quite caught, the one that had been broken since before Ransome and I married and that his mother, in all her years of key-holding, had apparently never noticed.

The house smelled wrong. Lavender, thick and unfamiliar, layered over every room like she’d sprayed it herself, room by room, while I was watching machines breathe for my husband. The photographs that used to line our hallway, our wedding, his father’s old shop, a picture of the two of us on the Katy Trail bridge the summer we met, were gone. Not rearranged. Gone.