The Box My Husband Left Behind

At our wedding, in the fellowship hall after, with the sheet cake and the nuts in the little paper cups, Arlene took my hand in both of hers, smiled her Sunday smile, and said where three or four people could hear, “Well. I’m sure you’ll do your best with her. Dana set such a high bar, but then Dana was her mother.”

Cold. Not loud, not ugly, just cold, the kind of cold that slides in between your ribs so neat you do not even feel the cut until you are bleeding. I smiled back. I had waited tables for twelve years. I knew how to smile at a person while they insulted me. But I carried that sentence home with me, and I carried it a long time. Dana was her mother. The implication being that I was not, and never would be, no matter what I did or how long I did it.

The thing you have to understand about a sentence like that is that it is a seed. Arlene planted it, and then for years she watered it, a little at a time, so patient about it that I do not think she even knew she was doing it anymore. When Josie skinned her knee and came to me, Arlene would say, “She’s missing her mother’s touch, poor lamb.” When Josie did well in the Christmas pageant, Arlene would say, “She gets her voice from the Mercer side, you know.” When I packed Josie’s lunch, when I sewed her Halloween costume, when I sat up with her through the croup, Arlene had a way of letting me know, gently, Christianly, that I was a stand-in. A placeholder. The woman who was raising Dana’s child until some truer arrangement could be understood by heaven.

And God forgive me, I started to believe it.

That is the part that is hard to say. I started to believe that I was the hired-on, the one who did the work but did not get the name. I loved Josie with everything I had in me, but I loved her the way you love something that is not quite yours, with a little flinch always held in reserve, a little bracing for the day she would wake up and know I was not the real thing.

Then Walt got sick, and then Walt died, and I made my promise, and after that it was just the two of us, me and Josie, in the little house on Pigeon Fork Road.

Josie was seven when we buried her daddy. I remember Arlene at the graveside in her good black coat, and I remember her reaching for Josie’s hand, the one I was holding, and I remember the small cold war of that, two women each holding one of a child’s hands over an open grave, neither of us willing to be the one who let go. Josie did not seem to notice. Josie was watching them lower the box. She asked me later, in the truck, “Is Daddy going to be cold down there?” and I had to pull over on the shoulder of Route 9 because I could not see the road.

In the weeks after, Arlene made her move. She did not call it a move. She called it “what’s best for Josie.” She sat at my kitchen table, the same table where Walt used to eat his eggs, and she told me that a child needs stability, and that a single woman with no blood tie, working double shifts at a diner, was no proper home, and that she, Arlene, had the house and the standing and the time, and that if I truly loved Josie I would want what was best for her.