The Lock My Mother In Law Kept
My Mother In Law Locked Me Out Of My Own Bedroom So My Husband Took The Door Off Its Hinges
We were gone nine days, and when we came home there was a brand-new brass deadbolt drilled into our bedroom door, and the only key to it was hanging on a ribbon around my mother-in-law’s neck.
I want to be careful telling this, because it would be easy to make Carol into a monster, and she is not a monster. She brings a cooler of deviled eggs to every funeral in Bracken. She sat with old Mrs. Dewey for three nights in the hospital when nobody else would. People in this town think the world of her. That is part of what made the whole thing so hard. The cruelty never came in a shout. It came in a smile and a soft voice and a brass key she wore like jewelry.
Let me start where it is easy. My name is Renee. I am thirty-four. I grew up out on the Carver place north of town, and I married Wade Hollis four years ago in the little Methodist church on Oak Street where I was baptized. Wade works the scale house at the Bracken grain elevator, which means in harvest I do not see him from before sunup to after dark, and the rest of the year he is home for supper at five-thirty on the dot. I do the front desk and the books at Dr. Pruitt’s dental office on the square. We are ordinary people. We are not the kind of people anything exciting is supposed to happen to.
Two years ago we bought our first house. It is a small white house on Sycamore Street, two bedrooms, one bath, a front porch that needs painting and a back yard just big enough for the dog to feel like he owns something. Biscuit is a beagle, and he does in fact believe the entire parcel is his. The house was built in 1952 and it has the original doors, heavy and solid, the kind nobody makes anymore. I loved it the first time I walked through it. I remember standing in the empty front room with Wade and crying a little, because I never thought a Carver would own anything in Bracken but a used truck and a church pew.
Our names are both on the paper. I want that said plainly, because it matters to the story. Wade and Renee Hollis. We saved for that down payment for six years. I counted it out in coffee cans and Christmas bonuses and the tips I used to make waiting tables at the Dutch Mill before Dr. Pruitt hired me on. It was ours. I thought that was the kind of thing that could not be argued with.
Carol thought differently, and she had thought differently from the day we signed.