The Salary My Mother In Law Wanted

“Do You Make More Than Me?”

Back to the pie.

When I told them I earned more than every person at that table combined, nobody believed me. That was the first thing I noticed. Dwight laughed his short dry laugh, the one he used on salesmen. Raymond shook his head into his iced tea. Sherry’s knife stopped, and she looked at me with an expression I did not understand until much later: not disbelief, but a kind of careful hope, as though I had said something in a language she had once spoken.

Bonnie did not laugh. She tilted her head and said, “That is a very unkind thing to say about my son.”

And Lyle, beside me, turned the color of the milk pitcher.

I have thought about what I wanted him to say. I think what I wanted was, “Mama, that’s enough.” Or “Joanne, are you okay?” Or just my name. What he said, in a voice barely above a whisper, was:

“Do you make more than me?”

Not more than the table. More than him.

I could have softened it. Eleven weeks of marriage and I could still have laughed and said I was exaggerating. I looked at my husband and thought about all the small silences of the summer, and I said, “Yes.”

He nodded once, slowly, like a man receiving a diagnosis.

I stood up. I folded the deposit form in half, and in half again, and put it in my purse, because I wanted her to watch it leave the table. I took my plate to the sink and rinsed it, because I was raised right. And then I turned and looked at all five of them, and I did not raise my voice.

“There’s a dinner at the Grange hall on Saturday,” I said. “Gordon Brandt sent every employee a table for their family. Lyle, you have table nine. I’ll see you all there.” I smiled at Bonnie. “Wear something nice. You’ll want to be photographed.”

“Photographed?” said Dwight.

“There is a man coming from the Kansas City paper.”

I walked out to the truck. Lyle followed me after a long minute, got into the passenger seat, and sat there. Neither of us spoke until we were halfway down the county road, past the grain elevator with the faded red letters, past the Methodist church with the blue tarp over the corner of its roof.

“You make more than me,” he said finally. “How much more?”

“Lyle.”

“I’m just asking.”

“You never asked before.”

He took that like a slap. I did not say it to hurt him, but it was true, and he knew it was true.

“Do you want to know what it was like in there?” he said. His voice cracked on the last word. “Mama has done the household books since I was nineteen. When I started at Brandt’s, she told me it would be easier if my check went into her account, so she could pay the truck and the insurance and put some by. I said okay. I was nineteen. I never changed it.”

I looked at the road.

“You mean your paycheck goes to your mother.”

“It goes to the family account. I get seventy-five dollars a week. That’s what I live on. That’s what I took you to dinner on, the first time.” He laughed, a short ugly sound. “I thought you knew. I thought everybody’s mama did it.”

“Lyle, we pay rent on Mill Street. Who pays the rent?”

“You do.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “I thought you were being generous. I thought, she must be a little better off than me, that’s all. I never wanted to think about it.”

Fourteen years of paychecks. I did the arithmetic on the dashboard of that truck without meaning to. My husband had earned something near six hundred and fifty thousand dollars across those fourteen years, and he had been handed seventy-five dollars a week out of it. And his mother had sat in a kitchen and told me that my pay belonged to the household.

I pulled into the driveway on Mill Street, turned off the engine, and said the only thing I could think of that was both true and kind.

“I’m not angry at you.”

“You should be.”

“I’m angry at a lot of things,” I said. “I’ll get to you when I’m done with them.”