The Woman He Called No Fun

By the time I was seventeen I was the girl who got asked to sing. I sang at the Grange hall suppers. I sang the national anthem before the Friday games at the high school, standing at the fifty with the lights coming up and the whole town quiet for me, for a skinny farm girl in borrowed boots. I was not the prettiest girl in Cardwell and I was not the smartest. But when I opened my mouth something happened in a room, and I knew it, and it was the one place I felt like more than ordinary.

I met Greg Tolliver the summer I was eighteen, at the county fair, at the grandstand where my friend Tammy Reece and I were doing two numbers between the truck pull and the demolition derby. I had on a red dress my mother made me, the first thing I ever owned that was not a hand-me-down, and I sang “Help Me Make It Through the Night” into a microphone that fed back the whole time, and when I came down off the platform there was a boy with a sunburned neck and a gap in his teeth waiting by the rail.

“You’ve got the prettiest voice I ever heard,” Greg said. “I about forgot to breathe.”

That was the Greg I married. The one who about forgot to breathe. I held onto that sentence for twenty years, longer than I should have, because a woman will build a whole life on the foundation of one sentence a man said to her when she was young.

We got married at nineteen in the Methodist church with the windows open, and I sang at my own reception, which people still talk about, and we moved into a rented farmhouse on the Vernon Road with a wood stove and a well that ran rusty, and we were happy. I want to be fair to the whole of it. We were happy a long time.

Maddie came when I was twenty. Then Caleb. Then Hannah. Then Ben. Then Lucy. And then, eighteen years after Maddie, when I thought we were done, when Maddie was finishing high school and getting ready to leave, there was Eli.

I will not pretend the sixth was planned. I cried when the test came back positive, sitting on the edge of the tub, and not all of the crying was happy. I was thirty-seven. My body had already given everything it had to give and I knew it. But a child is a child, and by the time he came I loved him the way you love the last of everything, fierce and sad at the same time.

What I did not understand, standing in Carol Furnish’s kitchen that August night, was that somewhere in those eighteen years I had stopped singing, and nobody had noticed, least of all me.