The Mother In Law Who Stayed

The crying came later. The crying came the next three weeks, mostly at night, mostly over small things, a sock I found under the bed, the way the coffee maker made enough for two out of habit. I called the bank about the lease. I called the hospital in Louisville and a woman named Patrice walked me through the financial aid paperwork and did not once make me feel like a charity case, and I will love Patrice forever for that. I picked up extra shifts at the Blue Spoon on the register until Dolores told me, gentle as she could, that she could not have me there past the due date, insurance and all.

I did not tell many people. That is the thing about a small town. Everybody knows everything eventually, but there is a stretch of time where you can still hold a secret, and in that stretch I held mine like a coal in my hand. I was ashamed. I know that is backwards. He left me, and I was the one who felt ashamed, like I had failed at something, like a marriage going bad was a casserole I had burned.

My own mother was gone, had been for four years, cancer, fast. My daddy was in a care home in Bowling Green with a mind that came and went like a radio station you drive in and out of. I had a cousin in Ohio I talked to twice a year. That was my family. That was the whole of it.

Which is why, when I say what happened next saved my life, I need you to understand I mean it plainly and not as a figure of speech.

It was a Tuesday. I remember because the Blue Spoon does meatloaf on Tuesdays and I had brought a plate home, and I was standing at the sink picking at it when a car I did not know pulled up the gravel. An old Buick, gold, clean. I watched through the window over the sink the way you watch anything out there on a county road, with a little animal wariness, because nobody drives all the way out to the end of our road by accident.

A woman got out. Short, broad through the shoulders, gray hair pinned back, a cardigan even though it was warm. She stood by the car for a second looking at the house, and then she reached back in and pulled out a suitcase. A hard-sided suitcase, old, the kind with a plaid pattern worn pale at the corners.

It was Lorene. Travis’s mother.

I had met Lorene maybe six times in the three years Travis and I were together, and none of them had gone especially well. She lived two hours east, up in the hills past Hazard, in the house she had raised Travis and his two sisters in after her husband drank himself into an early grave. She was a hard woman to read. Quiet. She watched you. At our wedding, which was small, at the fire hall, she had sat in the back and barely spoken, and Travis had told me afterward that was just how she was, that she did not warm to people, and I had taken that to mean she had not warmed to me.