The Store My Husband Thought Was His

The Folding Chair

I was standing at the far end of the exhibition hall at the Tri-County Farm Show, holding a paper cup of weak coffee, when the marriage I had trusted for nineteen years came apart in front of a booth selling hog panels.

I want to be honest about the coffee, because that is the kind of detail your mind clings to when everything else is falling. It was the free coffee from the co-op table, the kind that tastes like it was poured through a work glove, and I had a cup of it in my hand because a delivery had gone wrong that morning and I had driven two hours to the fairgrounds in Calloway County to fix it in person. That was the only reason I was there. If the truck from the mill had shown up on time, I would have been home in Ellery behind the counter of my own store, and I would have gone right on believing the man I married was exactly who he said he was.

Instead I was there, at the Tri-County Farm Show, watching my husband Wade help a young woman named Kayla settle into a folding chair like she was made of glass.

Not the way a man helps a coworker. Not the way a boss steadies an employee who tripped on a cable. He had his hand flat against the small of her back. He tucked her jacket, a cream-colored jacket I had seen before in a photograph from the fall dealer banquet, over the back of her chair so it would not fall. He leaned down and said something in her ear that made her laugh with her whole face, and she reached up and touched his jaw the way you touch someone you have touched a thousand times.

I was forty-six years old. I had run Tilden Feed and Seed since my father died, kept the books, met the payroll, made the hard calls in the dry years. People in three counties knew me as a woman who did not rattle. And I stood there at the back of that metal building and I could not feel my own hands.

I did not scream. I did not drop the coffee. I did not walk over.

I watched.