The Salary My Mother In Law Wanted

The Long Table

I did not go home that night feeling victorious. I went home to the little rented house on Mill Street, and Lyle sat on the back steps with Biscuit’s head on his knee for an hour, and I let him.

When I finally sat beside him, he said, “I’ve been a coward my whole life.”

“No.”

“I have. I let her do it because it was easier than telling her no.”

“You were nineteen.”

“I was nineteen for fourteen years.” He laughed, wetly. “Joanne, I’m not going to ask you to forgive me. I just want to tell you I know what I did. I let you pay rent on a house you thought we split, because I couldn’t bear to look at my own bank account. I let you walk into my mother’s kitchen with a deposit form in front of you, and I sat there.”

“You did,” I said.

“I’m so sorry.”

We sat there a long time. In the dark across the yard, a screen door slapped somewhere, and a dog barked twice and stopped.

“Here is what I need,” I said at last. “I need you to open an account in your name. Monday morning, the first thing. I need to know that when I come home, there’s a man in this house who has his own money and his own opinions and says them to me, even when they’re inconvenient.”

“Okay.”

“And I need us to see someone. A counselor. Someone in Kansas City, so nobody in Carver brings us a casserole.”

He laughed, a real laugh, the first in a week. “Okay.”

“And I need you to know that I’m not leaving. But I’m also not going to carry a husband. I want a partner.”

“I can be that,” he said. “I think I can be that.”

He was.

The following Monday, Lyle sat in a bank office in a neighboring town and opened a checking account with his name and nobody else’s. Dwight drove down with him, which neither of us had asked for. Dwight took a seat in the corner of the office, and when the banker asked about funds to deposit, my father-in-law handed over a cashier’s check for sixty-one thousand and some dollars, drawn on an account he had finally gotten his own name onto, and said, “It’s his. I’m sorry it took so long.”

It was Dwight who made Bonnie hand it over. Not me. I never said one word about the money to her. I want that on the record. What Dwight said to his wife that night in the farmhouse kitchen, with the lights off and the pot roast pan still soaking, I will never know, and I am glad. But the next morning she signed the papers. And the week after, she wrote another check, to Sherry, and she did not tell Raymond, and Sherry did not tell me until spring.

Sherry opened her own account the same week. She told me over coffee, at the diner on Main Street, with the careful wonder of someone describing a trip abroad. “I bought myself a coat,” she said. “A red one. I stood in the store and cried.”

“It looks good on you,” I said, because it did.

Bonnie did not call for three weeks. She did not come to church on two Sundays, which in Carver was the equivalent of a public funeral. When she finally did call, it was a Thursday, and her voice on the line was thin and formal.

“I would like to come see you, Joanne. If that is not an imposition.”

She came to the house on Mill Street on a gray November afternoon. She did not bring a casserole. She stood on the front porch with her purse in both hands, and I stood in the doorway, and neither of us moved to let her inside for a while.