When we bought our house, a little three-bedroom with blue shutters and a crooked mailbox, his mother offered us money.
We were sitting in her living room. Her enormous living room, with the white couches nobody was allowed to sit on and the grand piano nobody played. Linda Whitford had been widowed for eight years. Her late husband had owned a chain of car washes across the state, and he’d left her very comfortable.
“For the down payment,” Linda said, sliding a check across the glass coffee table. “Consider it a wedding gift.”
I looked at the number on the check and nearly choked on my tea.
Marcus pushed it back.
“We don’t need it, Mom.”
“Are you sure?”
“We both have good jobs,” I said.
Marcus reached over and squeezed my hand.
“We’ll build everything ourselves,” he said. “Together. Fifty-fifty.”
I remember how he looked at me when he said it. I remember thinking, This is it. This is the kind of marriage I want.
But somewhere along the way, he forgot that promise.
According to his mother, the house was entirely my responsibility.
She came over several times a week. Never with a warning. She had a key. Marcus had given it to her “for emergencies,” and apparently Linda considered my dusty bookshelves an emergency.
She’d come in, put her designer purse on the counter, and start inspecting.
“Dust on the shelf again, Sarah?” She’d run one finger along the top of the bookcase and hold it up to the light like a crime scene investigator.
“Linda, I cleaned it yesterday.”
“Then it isn’t clean, is it?”
Once, she opened Marcus’s dresser drawer. Without asking. Just walked into our bedroom and pulled it open.
She stared at the contents. Then she turned to me with her mouth open.
“You don’t iron his socks and underwear?”
I stared at her.
“What?”
“You’re supposed to iron them,” she said, like she was explaining that water is wet. “Fold them neatly. In thirds. And put them away properly. By color.”
“Linda, nobody irons socks.”
“I did. For thirty years.”
Then she went into the kitchen and opened my refrigerator.
“A wife should cook real homemade food,” she said, looking at the frozen pizza in the freezer. “Frozen pizza isn’t dinner. And neither is restaurant delivery.” She held up a takeout menu from the Thai place down the street like it was a dead mouse.
“I work forty hours a week too, Linda.”
She waved her hand at me. Like she was shooing a fly.
“My son works all day. He has a very demanding job. Cleaning and cooking are women’s work. He’s tired enough when he gets home.”
“I’m tired when I get home too.”
She just smiled. That small, tight smile. And turned my cumin around again.
