The Locks My Mother In Law Changed

The cold came in off the Missouri River that Monday the way it always does in late January, sliding up through the bluffs and settling over Rocheport like it owned the place. I remember thinking, as I pulled onto Third Street with two nights of hospital air still clinging to my sweater, that the town looked exactly the same as it had on Friday. The same string of Christmas lights nobody had taken down from the hardware store awning. The same gravel lot at the Katy Trail trailhead, empty except for one brave cyclist in a yellow jacket. The same brick storefronts leaning into each other like old men at a fence line. Everything was the same except the man I had built a life with wasn’t breathing anymore, and I was driving home to tell our house.

I did not expect the house to have other plans.

I have driven that stretch of river road so many times I could do it with my eyes closed, past the winery on the bluff, past the little white church where half of Rocheport gets married, past the spot where the highway dips and you can see the whole valley open up gray and gold in the winter light. Usually I love that drive. That Monday it felt like the town was watching me come home a different woman than the one who’d left it Friday morning, and it was right.

My name is Ozzie Jessup. I was born Ozzie Prewitt, and I spent twenty-two years answering to Jessup because I loved a man named Ransome Jessup enough to take his name, his mother, his mortgage, and eventually his grief. I want to say that plainly, because what happened to me on that porch, in that cold, still doesn’t feel real when I say it out loud, and I have had to learn to say it plainly or not say it at all.