The Salary My Mother In Law Wanted

The Longest Week of My Life

Monday morning I moved my direct deposit to a new account in my own name, which is what I should have done in July and did not because it had never occurred to me to be afraid of a woman who baked me a birthday cake.

Then I called Gordon Brandt.

“Joanne,” he said, “I’ve been writing my remarks for three weeks, and I have changed the ending of them four times. Kathy says I’m going to cry on stage.”

“You are going to cry on stage, Gordon.”

“I know it.” He cleared his throat. His wife, Kathy Brandt, had been my quiet ally through the whole acquisition, a small gray-haired woman who ran the dealership’s books and had said to me the first day we met, “Be kind to the boy at the parts counter, he’s the heart of the place.” I had not known then that the boy at the parts counter would be my husband. I only learned it at the rehearsal dinner, when Gordon looked across the room at Lyle in his rented tuxedo, and then at me, and went the color of paper.

“I told you when we started,” Gordon said now, “that my one condition was that you not fire anybody over the age of sixty-two. I did not know I was also selling my company to my best employee’s wife.”

“Gordon, I recused myself from every decision about Lyle on the day I found out. His raise last spring was yours. His review is yours. Nothing about him has gone through my desk. I need you to say that on Saturday, clearly, to the room.”

“I will say it,” he said. “Joanne, does he know?”

“Not yet.”

“Are you going to tell him before Saturday?”

I thought about it for a long time.

“No,” I said. “I want him to hear it the way everyone hears it. If I tell him now, it’s a gift from his wife. On Saturday it’s just the truth, and he can decide what to do with it.”

That was the whole of my plan, by the way. I know people like to imagine a trap, a detonator, a long cold revenge. There wasn’t one. Saturday was happening whether I wished it or not. I simply declined to move my seat.

The part I could not control was Bonnie.

By Tuesday afternoon she had called me four times and left three voicemails, each one sweeter than the last. By Wednesday she had called Lyle, and he had put the phone down on the counter and let it ring itself out. By Thursday, Sherry texted me from a number I did not recognize, a prepaid phone she kept in her purse.

I need to tell you something and I don’t have long. Bonnie told the pastor at Wednesday night service that your salary is going to pay for the church roof. Eighteen thousand dollars. She said it in front of the whole building committee. She said Lyle’s wife would be glad to.

I read that standing in my kitchen with Biscuit’s leash in my hand.

I didn’t know, Sherry wrote. I wanted you to hear it from somebody.

Thank you, I wrote back.

I get sixty dollars a week, she wrote. A long pause, the three dots appearing and disappearing. I have for eight years. I thought maybe it was normal.

It is not, I wrote.

I know that now, she wrote, and the dots went away.

I did not text Bonnie. I did not call the pastor. I did one thing on Thursday evening, and I want to be honest about it. I looked up what the blue tarp on the Methodist church roof was costing in water damage, and I wrote a check from my own account for exactly the amount of the repair estimate, and I put it in an envelope with a plain card that said, For the roof. No name. I mailed it to the church office.

Not to punish Bonnie. To make sure that whatever happened Saturday, the roof would not be the casualty.