Chapter 1: The Gravy Was Cold
“Claire. The gravy.”
My mother-in-law didn’t look up when she said it. She just snapped her fingers twice, the way you’d call a waiter in a restaurant you never plan to tip, and went on cutting her pot roast into very small, very disappointed pieces.
“It’s cold,” Gloria said. “Again.”
Across the table, my sister-in-law Tammy laughed into her wine. Her son Mason, who is ten and the only person in that house who still said thank you, stared at his plate.
I picked up the gravy boat. It was my mother’s, white china with a thin gold rim, and the gravy in it was not cold. I’d made it eleven minutes earlier, standing at the stove in my own kitchen after a twelve-hour shift running the pharmacy at St. Joseph’s.
I carried it back to the stove anyway.
That’s the thing I want you to understand before you judge me for what I did later. I carried it back. I’d been carrying things back for fourteen months.
Gloria moved in after her hip surgery “for a few weeks.” Tammy came a month later, after her divorce, with Mason and a U-Haul and a coughing hatchback that has been parked on my lawn ever since. My husband, Derek, said family takes care of family. Then he went back on the road.
He builds patios and outdoor kitchens. Vance Outdoor Living. For the last two years, he’s had “a big job in Nashville” that keeps him gone four nights a week.
The house they were all eating in was mine. Not ours. Mine.
My parents bought it in 1979, a red-brick Colonial on Tates Creek Road with a magnolia in the front yard and a piano room my mother called the only quiet place in Kentucky. When she died six years ago, she left it to me, along with everything she and Dad had saved. Dad had been gone longer, but his rule was still taped up inside my head: Never give a man money without paper.
I reheated gravy that didn’t need reheating and brought it back.
“There,” Gloria said, as if I’d finally learned something. “Now. Derek called.”
“He called me too,” I said. “Twice. I was in the middle of a code.”
“Well, he called me.” She folded her napkin into a neat triangle. “He needs sixty thousand by Friday. Payroll. You have it. So wire it.”
Tammy pointed her fork at me. “It’s not like it’s even your money. It’s your parents’.”
“Which makes it mine,” I said.
Gloria sighed the sigh she’s been perfecting since 2006. “A good wife invests in her husband, Claire. My son has given you twenty years. You couldn’t give him a child. The least you can give him is a little faith.”
Mason put down his fork.
I could feel my face doing what it always did, going smooth and pleasant. The pharmacist face. The one I use when a doctor yells at me for a mistake that was his. Three miscarriages. Two rounds of IVF. One night on the bathroom floor with Derek holding my hair back, saying, We’re enough, you and me. We’re enough.
“I already put two hundred and fifty thousand into the company,” I said.
“And now it needs sixty more.” Gloria smiled. “That’s how businesses work, honey.”
I didn’t answer. I cleared the plates instead. I scraped my mother’s china into the trash while Tammy asked if there was pie, and Gloria stacked her casserole dishes on top of Mom’s piano like it was a kitchen counter, the way she had every Sunday since she arrived.
It was almost ten when I finally sat on the edge of my bed with my phone. I meant to text Derek something short and civil. We’ll talk Friday.
Instead, there was an email at the top of my inbox from the airline credit card we’ve had for years. Derek has a card on my account. It earns me miles. It was the only thing about his travel that had ever given me anything.
Congratulations, Claire! You’ve earned 2,480 bonus miles.
Thank you for your recent purchase at: BLUEGRASS BIRTH & MATERNITY CENTER, Georgetown, KY
I read it three times.
Georgetown is fifteen minutes north of us.
Nashville is three hours south.
And I’m forty-seven years old, and I have never once been pregnant long enough to need a maternity center.
