The Card My Mother In Law Carried
Orrin took the three items off the counter and put them back, one at a time, and said to nobody in particular, “I’ll just reshelve these.”
And then I turned to go, because that was all I had come to do. I had not come to gloat. I had not come to scream. I had come to stop paying, and I had stopped, and the rest was only the world catching up.
“Sylvia,” Kip said behind me. “Syl. Please. We can talk about this at home.”
I stopped in the doorway, and I turned just enough to look at him.
“Kip,” I said, “you should check whether you still have a home.”
I want to tell you what I did next, because it is the part nobody asks about, and it is the part that mattered.
I did not go home and cry. I did not call my pastor, or my cousin, or any of the people you are supposed to call. I walked out to my truck in the far lot, and I sat in the driver’s seat, and I took out the legal pad I had been carrying in the glove box for three weeks, and I called Lowell.
“It’s done,” I said.
“I heard,” he said. “The department store called the bank to verify. Word travels.”
“Lowell, I need the rest of it. The autopays.”
He did not ask me whether I was sure. He said, “Tell me what you want, in order.”
I read it off the pad in the voice I use for an elevator inventory. The automatic draft on Thelma’s house note. Stopped. The Cadillac lease, which I would not default on, because that is not who I am, but I would not draft again, and the leasing company would get a letter saying so. The country club dues. The gas card. The cell phone plan I had been paying for two adults who both owned better phones than mine.
“I can do it all by three,” Lowell said.
“Sylvia.” He paused. “Your father would have done it in the first year.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s why I’m doing it today.”
I drove home with the radio off, and when I pulled into the drive on Cottonwood Road at a quarter past three the house was exactly as I had left it: the porch that sags on the east end, the pot of rosemary by the step.
I called a locksmith I know from the Rotary, who asked no questions and came out in forty minutes.
Then I packed. It was not a woman throwing clothes onto the lawn. It was quiet, almost tender. I folded Kip’s shirts the way I had folded them for eleven years, and I put in his good boots and the framed photograph of him and his father at a football game. I put the wedding photo in face down, because it belonged to him as much as to me.
I set the suitcases on the porch. I locked the door. I made myself a cup of tea, and I sat at my father’s kitchen table, and I waited.
They came at twenty past five.
I heard the Cadillac before I saw it, that long low purr of a car whose lease I was no longer paying, and it pulled into the drive behind Kip’s truck. The doors opened. Kip got out of the driver’s side, Thelma from the passenger side, and they stood in the yard looking at the suitcases on the porch like two people looking at a headstone.