The Lock My Mother In Law Kept

I tried to talk to Wade a dozen times. Every time it went the same way. He loved me. I never doubted that he loved me. But he had spent thirty-six years being managed by that woman, and he could not see the bars because he had been born inside the cage. “She’s my mother.” “She doesn’t have anybody but me.” “Dad told me to look after her.” “What am I supposed to do, put my own mother out on the street?” And then the one that stopped me cold every time: “If I make her choose, I’ll lose her, Ren. You don’t know how she gets.”

“And if you don’t,” I said, one night in that single bed, “you’ll lose me.”

He did not have anything to say to that. He reached over in the dark and he found my hand, and he held it, and he still did not say the words I needed, and I decided that night that I would give it until Thanksgiving, and if the door was still locked at Thanksgiving I would go home to my father’s and I would let Wade keep his mother and his house and his locked room, because I would not raise children in a house where I was a guest.

What changed it was not me. I want to be honest about that too. I had run out of road. What changed it was Carol herself, because cruelty like hers cannot help but reach too far, and in the second week of November she reached too far in front of exactly the wrong people.

Carol decided to host Wade’s birthday supper. At our house. In November Wade turns thirty-seven, and Carol announced, not asked, announced, that she would do a family supper on the Sunday, and she would cook, and she wanted everybody. Troy and Megan would drive up from Indianapolis. Her sister, my aunt Lorna by marriage, would come from Peru. A couple of the cousins. Nine or ten people in my small white house, and Carol at the head of it, presiding, because to her mind it was her house now and this was her table.

I almost did not stay for it. I had my overnight bag half packed. But Lorna called me the Friday before, and Lorna is the one person in that family who ever treated me like I was really in it, and she said, “Renee, honey, I am hearing some things about you and that house, and I do not believe a word of them, and I want to see for myself. You stay put.” So I stayed put. I think some part of me knew that if it was ever going to break, it would break at a full table, because a woman like Carol performs for an audience, and so, it turned out, does a man finally finding his spine.