You always figure you have the measure of a house the second you set your boxes down and start untaping the corners. I thought I knew Robert, and I certainly thought I knew how a fourteen-year-old girl ought to behave once a proper adult took the reins of her upbringing. Chloe had spent eighteen months running wild in that drafty brick house ever since her mother passed away from the cancer that took her down to a whisper, leaving behind a mess of loose papers, dusty corners, and a scruffy, half-blind terrier mix named Barnaby who shed white hair over every piece of upholstered furniture in the parlor.
Robert was working sixty hours a week down at the grain elevator, coming home smelling of diesel and dry chaff, too bone-tired to argue with a grieving teenager who refused to eat her vegetables or keep her bedroom door unlatched. When we finally decided to make it official and I moved my oak dresser and my grandmother’s china hutch into the master bedroom, I told myself I was walking into a rescue mission. I didn’t know I was walking into a trap that had been laid out weeks before I even picked out my wedding shoes.
The dog was the first real hurdle, or at least that was what I told myself when I called the ad in the local shopper on a Tuesday morning while Robert was already down at the yard. Barnaby was old, he smelled like damp carpet no matter how many times I washed him with flea soap, and he had a habit of scratching at the screen door until the wire pulled away from the frame.
I didn’t want the animal anywhere near my good rugs, and more than that, I knew Chloe was using that wretched dog as a living anchor to a woman who was gone and buried in the churchyard three miles out of town. A man came by in a faded blue pickup truck around ten o’clock, handed me two crisp twenty-dollar bills, and hoisted the old terrier into the cab without so much as a backward glance. When Chloe came home off the yellow school bus at three-fifteen, her backpack slung over one shoulder and her face all flushed from the November wind, she dropped her books right by the hall tree and asked where the scratching sound had gone. I was sitting at the kitchen table shelling pecans for a pie, and I didn’t even look up from the bowl when I told her the truth because I figured honesty was the best policy for a girl who needed to learn how the real world operated.
She didn’t scream, which honestly would have been easier to manage, but instead she just stood there in the middle of the linoleum with her mouth slightly open, staring at me like I’d spoken to her in a dead language. Then she turned around, walked out the back door, and sat down on the bottom step of the porch where the wind came whistling off the corn stubble, and she stayed out there crying until her shoulders were shaking under her wool coat. When Robert’s Ford truck crunched down the gravel drive at six, I was standing at the stove browning pork chops in the iron skillet, the grease popping against the sides while the radio played some old country station out of Grand Island. He walked through the back mudroom, hung his canvas jacket on the peg, and washed his hands at the utility sink without saying a word, the way he always did after a long shift of loading boxcars.
I told him right then while he was drying his hands on the roller towel, using my best matter-of-fact tone, that I’d taken care of the dog problem so we could finally have a clean house where a person didn’t have to vacuum twice a day just to keep up appearances.
Robert didn’t say a single word, and that was the moment I should have known the floor was made of rotted timber. He just looked at me with those pale blue eyes that didn’t seem to blink, walked past the stove into the dining room, and sat down at the head of the table where Chloe was already sitting with her plate half-full of cold peas and dry potatoes. He didn’t yell at me, he didn’t scold his daughter, and he didn’t tell me I’d overstepped my bounds as a brand-new wife who hadn’t even lived under his roof for twenty-one days. He just passed the butter dish to the girl, patted her shoulder once with his heavy, calloused hand, and ate his supper in a silence so thick you could hear the refrigerator compressor clicking off in the pantry. I felt a little prickle of annoyance right between my shoulder blades, but I pushed it down, telling myself that men who worked the elevators just didn’t have the stomach for domestic discipline and preferred to let the women handle the heavy lifting when it came to character building.
Later that night, long after the house had gone dead quiet except for the grandfather clock in the hall wheezing out the hours, I got up to get a glass of cold water from the bathroom down the hall. When I slid back into the master bedroom, the floorboard near the edge of the cedar-lined bed gave a funny sort of hollow creak that didn’t sound right under my slippers, like something was wedged underneath the dust ruffle where nothing had any business being. I bent down, hauled back the heavy floral spread that hung to the baseboards, and reached my hand into the dark space where Robert kept his spare boots and old tax folders from the nineties. My fingers brushed against something stiff and cardboard-textured, and when I dragged it out into the sliver of moonlight coming through the white sheer curtains, I saw it was an old black shoebox held shut with a thick rubber band that had dried out and cracked right down the middle.
My chest gave a funny little flutter, not out of fear back then, but out of plain old irritation that Robert had been hiding some sort of junk under our bed instead of throwing it out in the burn barrel like any sensible man would have done. I popped the lid off right there on the braided rug, and the smell of old paper and cedar chips came up into my face, sharp and dry like an old attic in July. Inside, sitting right on top like someone had laid them out for an exhibit, were three eight-by-ten glossy photographs of Robert’s late wife, Mary, sitting on the back porch steps with that mangy terrier in her lap, laughing at something just out of frame the summer before she went into the hospital. Underneath those were four veterinary receipts from the clinic down in Hastings, dated all the way back to when the dog was a six-week-old puppy with floppy ears, and then a stack of yellow legal pads covered from margin to margin in Robert’s neat, block-lettered handwriting. My name was written right at the top of the first page in black ink, alongside the date we had signed our marriage license at the county courthouse three weeks prior.
I picked up the papers with fingers that suddenly felt clumsy and cold, and I started reading lines that made the blood ring in my ears like a distant train whistle. October fourteenth: Sarah complained about Chloe’s breathing treatments, suggested the girl was faking for attention. November second: Sarah threw away the hand-carved wooden horse Mary left on the window sill, claiming it was dust-catchers. November nineteenth: Sarah made disparaging remarks about Mary’s cooking habits in front of the minister’s wife during the potluck. It went on like that, page after page, week after week, cataloging every sharp word, every cold shoulder, and every little power play I’d executed since I first started spending weekends at the house back in the spring. At the very bottom of the box, resting under a folded linen handkerchief that still smelled faintly of lilac water, was the dog’s old leather collar with the brass tag glinting dully in the moonlight. I lifted it out by the buckle, and when I turned it over to look at the engraving on the back where Robert had always taken his tackle to be stamped down at the hardware store, the letters spelled out a sentence that made my stomach drop clean down to my knees.
The engraving didn’t say the dog’s name or our address like most folks had on their pets; it was just four short words cut deep into the brass by someone who wasn’t in any sort of hurry at all. I see you’ve finally finished it. That was what the tag said, and as I sat there on the edge of that mattress with the cardboard box resting between my knees, the front door downstairs gave a slow, deliberate click as the deadbolt turned from the inside. I hadn’t even heard Robert come back into the house, but when I looked up toward the bedroom door, he was standing right there in the frame with his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows and his jaw set like he was waiting for a heavy load to drop off the crane. He didn’t look angry, and he certainly didn’t look like a man who had been caught red-handed doing something behind my back; he looked like a man who had finished a five-day job ahead of schedule and was standing there waiting to hand over the keys to the new foreman.
He didn’t raise his voice even an inch when he walked over to the dresser, set a thick manila envelope down right beside my silver hairbrush, and told me the only thing he had to say the entire evening. I didn’t need to yell, Sarah, because you were doing all the heavy lifting for me right out in the open where the court clerk can read it plain as day. Those papers are already filed down at the county seat, and the sheriff’s deputy is an old friend of mine who knows damn well who owns this mortgage. Chloe’s got her dog back, she’s got her mother’s things packed in the back of my brother’s truck, and you’ve got about twenty minutes to decide whether you want to load your dresser into your own car or leave it for the Goodwill truck on Thursday morning. I tried to open my mouth to tell him he was out of his mind, to remind him that I was his wife and that a wife had rights in a home she’d spent three solid weeks cleaning and organizing from top to bottom, but the words wouldn’t come up past the tight knot in my throat.
He just turned his back on me without another word, walked down the narrow hallway toward his daughter’s room where the light was still burning under the door, and left me sitting there on the rug with the black shoebox open at my feet and the cold wind rattling the window screen against the brickwork.
