The Waiver My Husband Forgot He Signed

Zebedee signed it without much of a fight. He told me later he barely read it, that he was twenty six and in love and would have signed anything with my father’s pen. My father filed it with the deed at the recorder’s office, the way he filed everything, because he did not believe in handshake agreements, not even with people he liked. Then he never mentioned it again. Neither did I. Ten years passed. My father died. My mother died the year before that. And somewhere in the last two years, the man I married started listening to his mother more than he listened to me.

It started small, the way these things do. Yetta began stopping by more, always with an opinion about how the house should look, which rooms she’d take if she “ever needed to move in,” how it was a shame a house that size sat there with “just the two of us and no children to fill it.” She’d walk the property like she already owned it, running a finger along the porch rail my father sanded by hand, telling me the shutters wanted repainting in a color she’d already picked out. I laughed it off the first few times. My mother had a saying about Yetta, that she measured other people’s houses for curtains before she’d even been invited to stay the night, and I understood exactly what she meant the longer I watched it happen.