The Roses on Ilene’s Casket

And I kept driving it after the divorce, every Christmas, because Ilene asked me to.

That was the thing nobody understood about Ilene and me. Lowell and I split up, and she simply refused to recognize it.

She never said one word against the divorce to my face. She just went on as if it had not happened.

Every year on my birthday she mailed me a card from the drugstore. She wrote the same thing inside every single time, in that slanted school cook handwriting: “Happy Birthday, Janet. Your mother-in-law, Ilene.”

Not former mother-in-law. Not Ilene Kruse. Your mother-in-law. Ten years of it, ten cards in my kitchen drawer, and I never knew whether to laugh or cry when I opened one.

She called me in March of the year after the divorce and asked if I was bringing the kids up for Easter. I said, “Ilene, Lowell and I are divorced.” She said, “I know that. I asked if you were bringing the kids.” And I brought them.

Ilene was not a soft woman. She cooked in the school cafeteria in Rhinelander for 31 years, and she ran that kitchen the way a sergeant runs a barracks.

She said what she thought, and most of what she thought was about how other people ought to behave.

She told me the week I married Lowell that my pie crust was too thick. She told me the day Erin was born that I had the baby bundled wrong.

She told me, more than once, that a wife who works outside the home ends up with a husband who forgets where home is.

I resented that one for years. And I will admit, driving north in the snow that day, that some small part of me wondered if she had been right about it.

Lowell was not a bad man. I want to say that plainly, because this is not that kind of story.

He drove truck for a logging outfit when we married, and later for the paper mill. He worked hard. He hunted every November and fished every May.

But Lowell had a way of letting things go until somebody else picked them up.

The furnace, the car registration, the parent-teacher conference, the leaky roof over Mark’s room. He wasn’t lazy. He just always knew somebody would cover it.

And for 59 years, the somebody who covered it was mostly his mother.

Ilene paid for his first truck, a used Ford he wrecked on a curve outside Tomahawk the second winter. She put up half the down payment on our house in Medford.

When the furnace died the January Erin was born, Ilene drove down with a check before Lowell had even called the repairman.

And all through our marriage, a lot of the covering fell to me too. I paid the bills because I was the one who remembered them.

I signed the permission slips. I called the insurance man. And at some point, without either of us deciding it, Lowell stopped seeing any of it.

We did not have one big fight that ended things. We had about four thousand small ones that never got finished.

When the kids were mostly grown, Lowell moved back up to Rhinelander, closer to his mother and the mill, and we signed the papers a year later. It was quiet. It was sad. Nobody threw anything.

So when Stan told me Ilene had written my name on that line, the first thing I felt was the old insult.