The Wife Who Turned Off The Stove

The Rule Troy Made Up In My Own Kitchen

My husband made the announcement while I was still carrying grocery bags in from the truck, so the first I heard of my new financial obligations was over the top of a sack of okra.

“From here on out,” Troy said, “if you want to eat in this house, you pay for your own food. I’m tired of providing for you like you’re some kind of queen.”

He said it to me, but he said it for his brother. Melvin was at our kitchen table with a glass of sweet tea halfway to his mouth, and Troy had that little smile on he gets when he thinks he’s about to be quoted somewhere.

I want to be fair to him here, because I am going to tell you a lot of unflattering things about my husband and I would like the record to show I tried. Troy is not a cruel man in the way you mean when you say cruel. He does not raise his hand. He does not call me names when he’s sober, and he is always sober. What Troy is, is a man who has told a story about himself for so long that he has started believing his own material, and the story is that he is the one who provides.

I set the okra down. My hands were still cold from the produce cooler at the farmers market out on the Ashford highway, where I go every Saturday because the tomatoes are better and it is fifteen minutes and eleven dollars cheaper than the grocery store in town. I had just handed over eighty six dollars of my own money for the bags currently sweating rings onto my kitchen counter.

“I paid for all of this,” I said. I even had the receipt. I don’t know why I thought a receipt would matter to a man who had already decided what kind of woman I was going to be that afternoon.

Troy didn’t look at it. “Sheila, don’t start with your excuses. You always help out. I’m the one who provides for this house.”

Melvin’s tea glass came down slow, like he was trying not to make a sound that would get him noticed. Smart man. I have always liked Melvin.

Here is what I did not say, because I was raising two teenagers at the time and I have learned that the smartest thing you can do in front of witnesses is let a foolish statement sit in the room by itself so everyone can look at it. I did not say that I work the front counter at Cochran Feed and Seed five mornings a week and have for eleven years. I did not say that every afternoon after that I am in this kitchen baking for the Baptist church’s Wednesday supper, or the football boosters’ concession stand, or somebody’s funeral, because in a town the size of ours a woman who can turn out a good pound cake on short notice is never short of work. I did not say that I am the one who pays the water bill and the electric bill and half the truck payment, and that I have been the one buying groceries, ours and half his family’s, for longer than I could tell you off the top of my head.

I said, “Alright.”

Troy laughed. It was the laugh of a man who has never once in twenty one years of marriage lost an argument by the microphone check, only by the actual vote, and does not yet know the difference. “Let’s see how long you last,” he said.