The Lock My Mother In Law Kept
I had watched that man fail to put it right for two months. I had stopped expecting it. So I was not ready for what he did, and neither was she.
He stood up. He was quiet. He walked down the hall past Megan, and he said, “Excuse me, Meg,” real polite, and he went into the spare room, and he came back with the flat pry bar and the drill he keeps in the closet for odd jobs, and he stood in front of the blue door, his door, the door his mother had painted the color of her ribbon, and he said, to the whole table, not to her, “I need everybody to hear this, because it has gone on too long and it has gone on in front of too many people, and it is going to end in front of all of them too.”
Carol said, “Wade, sit down, you are making a scene.”
“I am,” he said. “You taught me to hate scenes. That was always how you kept me quiet. Well, I am making one.”
He put the drill to the deadbolt and he backed every screw out of our fifty-year-old door, and the brass lock came off in his hand, and he set it down on the hall floor. Then he took the pry bar and he worked the pins out of the hinges, one, two, three, and he lifted the whole door off, the whole heavy blue door, and he carried it through the dining room past all of them and out the front and he leaned it against the porch rail in the cold, and he came back in rubbing his hands, and the doorway to our bedroom just stood there open, the way a doorway in your own house is supposed to.
“That door is not going back up,” he said. “Not that one. I’ll hang a new one, a plain one, no lock, because there are no locked doors between me and my wife in the house my wife and I bought with our own money. Both our names are on it, Mom. Both of them. This is Renee’s house as much as it is mine. More, honestly, because she is the one who makes it a home while I am at the elevator, and she has made it a home for two years while you have spent two months trying to take it from her a coffee can at a time.”
Carol’s face had gone white. “I am your mother.”
“You are,” Wade said, and his voice cracked, and he kept going anyway, which is the bravest thing I have ever seen him do. “And I love you, and I will drive you to Logansport for your eyes and I will mow your lawn at Fremont until one of us is dead. But you have a house, Mom. It is on Fremont Street and it is yours and I will take you home to it tonight. You do not have a room here. Nobody but Renee and me has a room here. And if you ever again tell one person in this town that my wife cannot keep her own house, you and I are going to have a different kind of talk, and you will not like it as much as this one.”