The Box My Husband Left Behind

His first wife, Dana, had died when Josie was eighteen months old. An aneurysm, out of a clear blue sky, standing at the kitchen counter shelling peas. Walt found her. He did not talk about it, except once, late, when he told me that the peas were still in the colander three days later because he could not make himself empty it. I never forgot that. A colander of peas, and a man who could not touch it.

I was a waitress at the Dinner Bell in Haydon when I met him, and I had about given up on the idea that my life was going to be anything other than coffee refills and double shifts and a rented half of a house on Spring Street. I was not a beauty. I want to be plain about that, because it matters to the story. I was a broad, strong, plain woman with a laugh that was too loud for church, and I had made my peace with the notion that nobody was coming for me. Then Walt Mercer started coming in for the meatloaf plate on Thursdays, and then on Tuesdays too, and then just about every day, and it took me the better part of a year to understand that a man does not eat that much meatloaf unless he is working up to something.

When he finally asked me to supper, he brought Josie. That was the first thing about him I loved, that he brought the child. A lot of men would have hidden her, would have wanted to win me first and spring the kid on me after. Walt put her right there in the booth between us with her crayons and said, “Ruth, this is Josie, and I’ll be honest with you, she comes with me, we’re a set.”

Josie looked up at me with those Mercer eyes, gray-green like creek water, and she said, “Do you have any kids?”

“No, honey,” I said. “I never did.”

And she said, “Then you can practice on me.”

Walt about choked on his tea. But I did not laugh. I felt something turn over in my chest that I did not have a word for. Four years old, and she had handed me the thing I had wanted my whole life, just handed it across the table like it was a crayon.

We were married that fall at Pine Grove Baptist, small, just family and a few of the regulars from the Dinner Bell. And here is where I have to tell you about Arlene.

Arlene was Walt’s older sister. She lived in the big white house on Jefferson Street that had been their parents’, with the wraparound porch and the hostas and the historical marker out front because some Confederate colonel had supposedly watered his horse there. Arlene had never married. Arlene taught fourth grade for thirty-one years and had opinions about everyone she had ever taught, which, in a town the size of Haydon, was everyone. Arlene sang the solos at Pine Grove. Arlene organized the funeral dinners. Arlene was, by every public measure, a pillar, and I want to be fair to her, she did love Josie. I never doubted that she loved Josie.

But Arlene did not think I was fit to be the child’s mother, and she did not take pains to hide it.