The Groceries My Mother In Law Threw Out

When Ray’s heart gave out in the hayfield, Lorraine moved into a little rental in town, two miles off, because she said the farmhouse was too much quiet for her now. But she never really left it. She had a key. She let herself in most mornings before I was up, and I would come down to find her at the counter with her coffee, inspecting. Not visiting. Inspecting.

She would open my refrigerator and name the things that were wrong with it. She would pick up a package and read the label out loud in a voice like she was reading evidence in a courtroom. She would open the trash to see what I had thrown out and then open the pantry to see what I had bought, and somewhere in there, more weeks than not, my groceries would end up in the garbage or set out on the porch “to go back,” as if the store would take back an opened bag of rice because Lorraine Harmon had decided it was the wrong rice.

“You waste money,” she told me once, holding up a bag of frozen peas like it had done something to her. “You buy and you buy and half of it rots. I kept a house on nothing. You would not have lasted a week in my day.”

Here is the part I never said out loud to her, not once in nine years. Almost none of it rotted. Almost none of it was wasted. There was a reason I bought and bought, a reason the receipts were longer than they should have been for a family of three, and the reason was not that I was careless or stupid or raised wrong.

The reason was Ada.

Ada was Lorraine’s mother. Wes’s grandmother. She lived alone in a little white house with green shutters over in Verdell, which is about fifty minutes from us by the county roads, longer if the Katy bridge is out, which it often was. Ada was eighty-four the summer I married Wes and she was eighty-seven the summer all this came to a head.

The first time I met Ada was at our wedding, and she held my face in both her soft hands and said, “You have a kind mouth. I can always tell.” Then she pressed a folded ten dollar bill into my palm and told me to buy myself something foolish, and I loved her on the spot the way you sometimes just do.

What I learned over that first year, in bits, was that nobody was really looking after Ada.

Lorraine said she was. Lorraine said it a lot. “I take care of my mother,” she would announce at church, at the feed store, at the Linden Grove Methodist potluck, anywhere there was someone to hear it. “I do everything for her. Nobody knows what I carry.” And people nodded, because Lorraine was the kind of woman who told you what to believe about her often enough that you stopped checking.

But Wes mentioned once, not thinking much of it, that his mother had not driven over to Verdell in a couple of months. “She calls, though,” he said. “She calls Grandma on Sundays.” I did not say anything that time either. I was learning that the way to survive Lorraine was to watch, and to be quiet, and to do what needed doing without making a flag of it.