The Card My Mother In Law Carried

Behind Thelma, Yvonne made a small sound, as if she had been struck.

“Girlfriend,” she said. “He told me you two were separated. He said you had moved out of the house two years ago, and that his mother was helping him through it.”

I looked at her. She was a pretty girl with a stricken face and one red heel still on her foot, because nobody had ever told her to take them off. She was not the villain here. I want to be clear about that. She was a young woman who had been handed a story by a man who was good at stories, and she had taken it because it was easier than not.

“I live on Cottonwood Road,” I said to her, gently. “In the house he lives in. We have been married eleven years. He leaves for work every morning and he comes home every night, and on Thursdays he tells me he has a sales meeting. I’m sorry nobody told you. I truly am.”

Yvonne looked at Kip.

Kip said, “Syl, not here.”

“You picked here,” I said.

He tried to take my elbow. I stepped back and he let his hand drop, and I saw the church women see it. I saw one of them close her mouth and the other put down the tube of hand cream she was holding.

“Sylvia,” Thelma said, in the old voice, the one with the crown in it. “You are making a scene in a public place. You have embarrassed this family.”

I thought about that for a moment. Then I said, quite pleasantly, “Thelma, I called the bank at 12:40 this afternoon and removed your access, and Kip’s, from every account I hold. The black card, the department store card, the gas card, all of it. I did it from the second-floor walkway while you were on your knees putting a shoe on this young woman’s foot.”

I did not say it unkindly. I said it the way you read a total off a ticket.

“I wanted to see how it would go,” I said. “I’m sorry to have watched. But I wanted to see it before I decided.”

Nobody spoke.

Beside me the church woman who had brought the ham said, softly, “Oh, Sylvia, honey,” and I could not tell whether it was for me or for Thelma.

Yvonne took off the red shoe.

She did it slowly, hand on the counter for balance, and she set it down on the glass in front of Thelma, and then she bent and unbuckled the other, which was in her hand, and set that down too. She stood there in her bare feet on the department store carpet in her white sundress.

“I’m going to call my sister,” she said. “I’m going to call her to come get me. I’m not riding ninety minutes in a car with the three of you.”

“Yvonne,” Kip said. “Baby.”

“Don’t,” said Yvonne.

She walked out. She went barefoot through the store and into the mall, past the fountain, with her sandals dangling from two fingers, and I will say that I have never respected a stranger more. Nobody tried to stop her.

Thelma stood at the handbag counter with her hands flat on the glass, the scarf and the little butter-colored bag still in front of her, and the church circle watching from five feet away. For the first time in the six years I had known her, my mother-in-law did not have a single thing to say.