The Mortgage Receipts Beside the Gravy Boat
So then there were two of us keeping it. He never brought it up again unless I did. But a promise to keep a secret is not a promise to let your wife be talked down to, and Brian treated them as the same thing. He never offered a dollar toward it, which I could have borne, because his pay was already spoken for. What I could not bear was the Sundays.
Because the Sundays did not change.
For two years after that night, my husband sat at his mother’s table knowing whose paycheck was keeping the lights on over it, and he watched her hand me the dish towel and tell his aunt I could not be trusted with the gravy. And he squeezed my knee, and he said, “That’s just Mom.”
He is not a stupid man and he is not a cruel one. He is a man who learned at five years old that the way to get through his mother’s weather was to look at his plate until it passed.
Now the rolls.
I had worked the Saturday. And I had been sick since Thursday, the kind of sick that comes on at the smell of coffee and is gone by noon and back by supper.
I knew what it was. I had known for eleven days. I had a test in my bathroom drawer and an appointment in Chillicothe on the fourteenth, and I had not told a living soul, not even Brian, because I wanted to hear a doctor say it first. We had been disappointed once before.
So on Saturday at five o’clock I was not standing in my kitchen proving yeast. I was sitting on the edge of the bathtub with a cold washcloth on my neck.
Lorraine had told me the week before, “You can bring the bread, Katie. If you think you can manage bread.”
I stopped at Hy-Vee on the way out of town Sunday morning. I bought a dozen bakery rolls. In the farmhouse kitchen, while Lorraine was out on the porch calling Gene in, I warmed them in her oven and put them in the basket with the towel over them, and I pushed the bag down into the trash under the potato peelings.
I did not do it to fool her. I did it so the table would look right.
And I had one other thing with me that Sunday.
On Friday, after my last patient, I had stayed late at the office and printed every statement. Thirty-one of them. I had added it up twice on the office calculator.
Thirty-one times $1,640. It comes to $50,840.
I had not printed them to shame anybody. I had printed them because I was going to walk out to the machine shed with Gene after dinner and tell him, kindly and plainly, that I could carry it through Christmas and not one month past. There was a baby coming. My year had turned into nearly three. I wanted him to see the whole number on paper the way I had finally made myself see it.
The stack was in my purse. My purse was hanging on the back of my chair.
Then Lorraine got up in the middle of dinner to scrape the potato pan into the trash, and found the bag.
So. There I sat.
“She’s just teaching you, Katie.”
Lorraine was still on her feet. She had gone white around the mouth, and I think now that she had frightened herself. But she was not a woman who could back up once she had started.