The Night He Finally Chose Us
My Mother In Law Came To The ER At Midnight To Take My Husband Home And He Finally Said No
The fever started on a Tuesday, the ordinary kind of Tuesday that does not warn you about anything.
I had Ruthie on my hip while I stirred a pot of beans on the stove, and I felt it before I let myself believe it, that heat coming off the side of her face where it pressed against my neck. She was fourteen months old. She had four teeth and a laugh that came up from somewhere deep, and she had been fussy all afternoon, pulling at her ear, refusing the little crackers she usually begged for. I told myself it was teething. Every mother in Caldwell tells herself it is teething. That is the first lie we are handed, and we pass it along like a casserole dish.
I want to tell you the whole of it, because I have spent a long time being the kind of woman who kept the whole of it to herself. I am thirty years old. I live three miles outside Caldwell, Indiana, on a county road where the mailboxes lean and the corn comes up right to the ditch in summer. My husband Caleb works the second shift at the stamping plant over in the next county, and I clean rooms three mornings a week at the little motel by the highway and keep the books for the Methodist church on Sundays. We are not people anyone writes about. We are the people who fill the pews and the bleachers and the folding chairs at the funeral home, and we are proud of that in a quiet way that does not need saying.
And then there is Lorraine.
Lorraine is Caleb’s mother. I need you to understand her, because this whole story turns on her, and if you only hear the midnight part you will think she was a stranger who wandered in. She was not. She was in our kitchen more than I was some weeks. She had a key to our house that I never gave her and could not seem to take back. She called Caleb twice a day, once in the morning before his shift and once at night, and if he did not pick up she called me, and if I did not pick up she drove out.
Caleb’s father passed six years ago, a heart thing, fast, no warning. Lorraine had been a wife for thirty-one years and then she was not, and I understood, I truly did, that she had poured all of that love and all of that need into the one child she had left. I told myself that for a long time. I told myself she was lonely. I told myself she meant well. I made myself small so that she could be large, because that is what keeping the peace costs, and I paid it for four years without once saying the price out loud.