The Lock My Mother In Law Kept

I need to tell you about the next three weeks, because the lock was not the whole of it. The lock was just the thing you could photograph. The rest of it was in the air.

Carol did not leave. That was the thing none of us said out loud. She had come to house-sit for nine days and she simply did not go home. Her little house over on Fremont sat empty and she stayed in our back bedroom, and every morning she was up before us, in my kitchen, in an apron, rearranging. She moved the coffee cans. She relabeled the spice rack in her own handwriting. She put a little dish of hard candy by the door the way her mother used to. She threw out my dish soap and bought the brand she liked. Little flags planted in my ground, one after another, this is mine now, this is mine, this too.

When I set the table my way she reset it her way. When I ran the dishwasher she ran it again because I had loaded it wrong. She did it all pleasantly, humming, and if I said anything she would get a soft wounded look and say, “I am only trying to help, Renee. I thought you would be grateful for the help,” and then I was the ungrateful one, the hard one, the daughter-in-law who could not accept kindness from a widow.

She told people things. That was the worst part, the part that went outside the walls of my house. At the church, at the feed store, at Casey’s where everybody in Bracken ends up by Tuesday, she started dropping little remarks. That she was staying with Wade and Renee because, well, somebody had to keep an eye on things. That the house got away from me a bit. That she was helping get it back in order. By October half the town believed I could not run my own home, and that saintly Carol Hollis had moved in to rescue her son from a wife who let things slide. I would be checking out a patient at Dr. Pruitt’s and I would see it in a woman’s face, that little pity, and I would know Carol had been talking.

And every night that painted blue door stayed locked, and the key stayed around her neck, even when she slept. I checked once. I am not proud of it. I stood in the hall at two in the morning and I eased the key where it hung on the hook by her bed, because she had taken to hanging it there at night, and the door was deadbolted anyway and the key did not fit the hall bath which was the only other thing I could have wanted it for. I just wanted to hold it. I just wanted to know what it felt like to hold the key to my own bedroom. I put it back. I went and lay down next to Wade in the single bed and I cried so quietly he did not wake up, and that was when I knew something had to give, because a woman should not have to cry quietly in her own house so she does not wake her husband in the bed they were forced into.