The Lock My Mother In Law Kept

Then he did the thing that undid me. He walked down to the foot of the table, where Carol had put me, and he took my hand and he pulled me up gentle, and he walked me up to the head of the table, to the chair that his mother was sitting in, and Carol got up out of it, I think more from shock than grace, and Wade sat me down in it, at the head of my own table, in front of his whole family, and he said, quiet, just to me but everybody heard it, “I am sorry it took me so long. You should have been sitting here the whole time.”

I did not cry at the table. I do not know how I did not. Lorna did, a little, and she reached over and squeezed my wrist, and she said, “Good,” just the one word, “good,” and she looked at Carol when she said it.

Carol left that night. Wade drove her home to Fremont Street, and he carried her quilts and her good pillows and the framed baby picture out to his truck, and he carried the black garbage bags of my clothes back into our bedroom himself and set them on our bed, and then he came and found me on the porch where I was standing next to the blue door in the cold, and he did not say anything, he just stood next to me, and Biscuit leaned against both our legs, and we looked at that door leaned up against the rail.

“I’ll take it to the burn pile Saturday,” he said.

“No,” I said. I surprised myself. “Leave it. I want to see it there a while.”

We hung a new door that next Saturday, a plain six-panel from the hardware in Logansport, cream to match the hall, no lock, no bolt, not even a privacy latch, because I did not want anything on it that could ever be turned. I painted over the blue trim myself. We put my grandmother’s clock back on the mantel and turned it to face the room, and it has been ticking right ever since. I unpacked my clothes out of those garbage bags and I hung every single piece, and I threw the bags away, and I have never in my life been so happy to hang up slacks.

I will not tell you it fixed everything with Carol, because that would be a lie, and I promised myself I would tell this true. She did not speak to us for the rest of that November. She told her sister I had turned her son against her, and Lorna told her to her face that she had done that all by herself, and the two of them did not speak for a while either. Christmas was hard and quiet. Carol came, because Wade asked her, and she sat at my table where I put her, which was not the head, and she was polite, and it was stiff, and that is all right. Not every story ends with everybody hugging. Some of them just end with everybody in their right chair.