The Jars I Canned for the Food Shelf
My husband, Curt, was in the machine shed when I got home, greasing the combine for soybeans. He saw my face through the big door and turned the radio off before I was halfway across the yard.
I handed him my phone with the text on it. He read it standing there with a grease rag in one hand. Curt is not a talker.
He read it, and he folded the rag very carefully, and he set it on the workbench like it was something that could break.
“Where are they?” he asked.
“In the dumpster behind church. Most of them broke. Jeff found them.”
Curt looked out the door toward the road for a long time. Then he said, “Do you want me to drive over to Nick’s?”
“No,” I said.
“I wouldn’t yell.”
“I know you wouldn’t. I still don’t want you to go.”
People who have heard this story always ask me the same question. Why didn’t I go over there?
Why didn’t I call Ashley and tell her what I thought of a woman who throws away two weekends of somebody’s work without so much as a phone call?
The answer is a hospital hallway in Iowa City, two years ago in March.
Ashley’s cousin Kayla had a baby boy that winter. When he was four months old, he stopped eating and went floppy, and his eyes would not open all the way.
They took him to the hospital in Waterloo, and Waterloo sent him to Iowa City in an ambulance.
It was infant botulism. The doctors thought it came from a little honey somebody had put on his pacifier to settle him. Babies under a year old cannot have honey.
Nick was working, so I drove Ashley down there that first night.
She was twenty-eight years old with a baby of her own at home, and she sat in a plastic chair in that hallway and held my hand so hard my wedding ring cut into the next finger.
She kept saying, “It was just honey. It was just honey, Marlene. Everybody gives babies honey.” She said it maybe thirty times. I did not correct her. I just let her hold my hand.
Something happened to Ashley in that hallway. I watched it happen. She came out of that hospital afraid of everything, and she has been afraid of everything ever since.
She reads things at night on her phone. Car seats, sunscreen, what is in the water, what is in the chicken nuggets.
She reads them after the kids are asleep, and she cannot stop, and Nick says sometimes he wakes up at two in the morning and the light from her phone is still on her face.
So when I read that text, I knew exactly where it came from. It did not come from a mean place. It came from that plastic chair.
You do not win an argument with a fear like that. You can be right about every fact in the world, and you will still lose, and you will lose the person, too.
That is why I didn’t fight. Because I had sat in that hallway, and I knew there was nothing I could say on the phone that she would hear.