The Lock My Mother In Law Kept

That was the first of the cold lines, and I want you to notice there was no heat in it at all. She was not angry. She was explaining the facts of the world to me as she understood them. I had married into her house, her family, her son, and I was renting space in all three, and she had just made it official with a blister-pack deadbolt and a ribbon around her neck.

I went to find our things. She had not thrown them out. I will give her that much. But she had packed my clothes, my dresses and my work slacks and my underthings, into black garbage bags, and lined them up along the wall of the spare room like trash set out on a county road. Wade’s clothes she had hung up neat in the spare closet. Mine were in bags on the floor. She had moved her own quilts into our bedroom, I could see through the little gap under the door, and a framed picture of Wade as a baby, and her good pillows. She had made it hers. She had even repainted the door. Our door had been the same cream as the hall. She had painted it a pale dusty blue, to match her ribbon I suppose, and the paint was still tacky at the edges.

I sat down on the floor of the spare room next to my clothes in garbage bags, and I waited for my husband.

Wade came in from unloading the truck. I heard him in the hall. I heard him stop at the painted blue door. I heard him say, “Mom, what is this?”

And I waited to hear him put it right.

He did not put it right. Not that night. That is the part I have had to make my peace with, because I almost left him over it, and I want to be honest about how close it came.

What Wade did that first night was what Wade always did with his mother. He smoothed. He came and found me on the floor and he crouched down and he said, low, “Just let it ride tonight, okay. She’s tired, I’m tired, we drove four hours. I’ll talk to her. It’s just a door, Ren.”

It’s just a door. I have heard those four words in my sleep since.

“It is not just a door,” I said. “My clothes are in garbage bags, Wade. She called me a guest in my own house.”

“She doesn’t mean it like that.”

“She means it exactly like that. She meant every word of it. She was smiling.”

“Ren.”

“Where are we going to sleep tonight?”

And he looked at the spare room, the little room, the single bed that was in there from before we had a guest to put in it, and he could not answer me, and that was its own answer. We slept in that single bed, the two of us, back to back, not touching, and down the hall my mother-in-law slept in our bedroom behind a locked door with the key around her neck, and I lay awake and listened to the furnace cycle on and off and I thought about my grandmother’s clock turned to face the wall.