Of course the husband was mean. Back then all the husbands were. They moved out of the city on a whim, mostly his, to live on a seedy triangle of acreage in the country. Some important considerations regarding their marriage:
1. He’d built their little house in the city himself, supposedly for her, back in the earliest days when even those central-most municipalities were still developing. It was a metropolis on the verge: sporadic clutches of tall, redbrick factories and rows of shotgun houses. Theirs was one of the city’s first modest bungalows. The husband and wife were from a time before the crime and fast-food chains. The bungalow was beautifully serviceable, with three small bedrooms and rich pine cabinetry all the way to the ceiling, complete with peculiar hinges and special compartments. She would go back into the city with a lady friend, twenty years later, on a doctor’s visit, searching out a diagnosis for a rare blood disorder that would nearly end her life at forty-one. She’d never seen the ocean, but returning to that city again after living so long among gaping fields and farms, she felt lost at sea. An electric sea. She felt mangled by the chaos of the freeways and its inexplicable, spiraling constructions. The place was made flashy and metallic and of questionable, compound materials so oddly arranged she could not make sense of it. She found her little house with an emaciated, brown-skinned lady in a denim miniskirt leaning against the porch post, sucking on an orange popsicle. The deep sucking of the popsicle riveted her. The porch lady gave them the finger as she and the friend waved from the passenger seat of their air-conditioned sedan. What had become of those smooth, naturally stained cabinets, she wondered? Her hand-crafted lazy Susan? Her lady friend, a retired prison guard, responded by saying, “You think every house without clean shutters is a crack house.” Which was true.
2. The husband was great with the children, at first. Very attentive, slapstick in his comedy, always patiently instructing, right up until the children reached puberty, after which he ignored them like mangy strays. Was it their transformed genitals? the wife often wondered.
3. The husband’s first wife was a lesbian, who he was still in love with and likely always would be.
He’d responded to an ad in the newspaper. Rural home with finished attic on eight acres. 5000 sq feet animal processing facility on premises. Prior to becoming a carpenter, he’d been a meat man. He’d loved being a meat man. Hacking into things soothed him. He could slice a steak thin as paper in seconds. Unless you ran the place, though, and slaughtered the animals yourself, there was no real money in it. He belonged to a middle-class generation of men who felt duped by capitalism, tossing at night on their too-soft mattresses, dumbfounded by the constant expansion between their labor and the fey furnishings slowly filling their homes. No amount of wrinkle-proof slacks or electric razors or frozen dinners could wipe the deep memory of bailing hay from his muscles. Once he saw the ad, that was it, he was a goner. She was fine with it, really. She was born to be a business owner, she decided, having thought it over for a day. Being a mother wasn’t so easy. She could cook (bacon grease, Worcestershire), organize coupons, keep immaculate record books, darn, polish silver. Domesticity was a contest she was always winning. Except for the part about the children. She expected them to behave like miniature adults and was too desperate for their affection. It was difficult, having a husband who was in love with a dead lesbian. She’d kiss the children for too long, and requested many topless back rubs. She encouraged long, intertwined naps on the sofa from which the children awoke to find their mother’s housedress hiked around her plump waist. Also she beat them too often. Mostly for being loud or complaining or playing in the drainage ditch. Of course he beat them too, but that was expected. A woman beating her children implied a hysterical lack of control. With a man it implied the opposite.
He put their city house on the market, emptied the savings account, and took out a sizable business loan from a locally owned bank in the new county. He went on ahead of them to ready the estate. During that time they spoke only once, when he called for instructions on how to poach an egg. His absence delighted and terrified her. Two weeks later he sent for them and the furnishings. Oh, weren’t they an excited bunch, crossing the bridge out of the city, waving goodbye to the neon telephone company sign beside the river, finding themselves quickly in farm country, a few hours and there it was, the little town with a dusty candy store and one restaurant and an old abandoned movie theater with a dead marquee that read for sale, and their new house, of course, out on the edge of everything, with a water well and a dozen birch trees and an actual broken-down combine rusting away in their very own pasture.
The slaughterhouse was a lengthy cinder-block building with tangled, flowering weeds growing around it. While the movers and the children unloaded all the furniture, she began pulling the plants with a sweaty, ravenous intensity. In her good shoes. And her black slacks and silk blouse and red fedora. “This building will have to be painted! Most likely multiple coats!” she informed her husband from across the new yard, as he lumbered grumpily up the porch steps with his fireproof lockbox. Turned out the weeds were poisonous nettles—tall and leafy with a tuft of white petals on top and invisible hairs down the stalk, like microscopic hypodermic needles. Her husband got a good laugh out of this, while she lay about wrapped in wet rags, squawking in agony on the sofa.
The next night they had sex on the attic floor while the children slept on a pile of linens downstairs. He’d not wanted to do it, but she insisted it was customary, so he lowered his pants to his ankles and pulled his briefs to the side. She lay there panting hungrily beneath him with a broad, closed-lipped smile on her face that reminded him of a pink balloon stretched tight, ready for inflation.
Some things they found that were curious about the country:
1. Strangers asked a lot of questions, questions that strangers in the city would never ask and couldn’t care less to know the answer to. Rural folks would ask something and then start talking even before you’d finished responding. This was something she did herself. Though how in the hell had no one returned that simple disrespect before now? “Oh, that’s just like me and my . . .”
“What a self-centered world we’ve found ourselves in,” she said to her husband after those first few days around town.
He almost choked on his soup. “You’ve met your match,” he said.
And she had.
2. The wife made so many friends she had a list of customers to fill an address book before they’d even opened for business. Just hearing about her friendly industriousness gave him a nosebleed and excruciating gas. He’d assumed he would smoke his own bacon and everyone would smell it and come driving over, that he’d open the building doors and people would file in to sample his cracklins. Maybe the men would want to chat about wildlife or war and he’d quickly demonstrate his breadth of knowledge on the subjects. Maybe a lady would smile at him, as he suggestively carved away at the luminous red flesh of a healthy beef.
3. The previous owners seemed gravely invested in the continued success of the business. They were an older couple who dressed with a painful and thrifty formality, in gray and brown synthetics. It wasn’t that the couple didn’t smile, it was that a serene pride rested beneath their stuffy manners, and also that the moment their antique pen was lifted from the document they’d procured from their ratty briefcase, the lady said, “You’ll come to our service, then, on Thursday?”
“We will?” the wife said, too loudly, she realized.
“Sure!” the lady said. “Were you considering another church?”
“I guess we hadn’t thought about that, had we?” the husband said.
“There’s nowhere else you’ll want to go,” the lady assured them, her face wrung up like a rag. The lady sat at the kitchen table, compulsively sliding her palms down the dress, flattening the polyester over her expansive thighs.
“We’ll think about it,” the wife said to her husband. “Won’t we?” And then, turning to the couple: “We’ll let you know.”
“Now, I want to warn you, because you seem like good people,” the man said. “You’ve got some perverse elements living across the way, sexual deviants, men who lie with men, women who make congress with women! A bad lot.”
“Is that the case?” the husband said, pulling a Lucky Strike from the pack on the table. He slid it between his yellowed fingers and put it up to his mouth where his upper lip had begun to twitch. When chewing tobacco wasn’t nearby, he smoked, and as he lit the cigarette he sent an accusing glare at his wife, reprimanding her for any thoughts she might be having regarding the kinky neighbors. “We appreciate the heads-up,” he said, nodding at the three of them before disappearing into the bathroom. “Pardon me,” he said.
“It’s a lovely church house,” the man said. “Nicest one around here, ain’t it, Louise?”
“Yes, sir,” the lady said. Her hair was gray and dry as dirt, the ample mass piled on her head like a bristly cloud stabbed through with a dozen copper pins.
“Do you all want coffee or tea?” the wife asked.
“No thank you,” the couple said, in a chilly, throbbing tandem. Their voices fit neatly inside each other’s, making a single, fluttering sound that stunned the wife.
“We better be going, hadn’t we?” the man said, standing up.
The lady agreed, following him out of the kitchen and onto the side porch, where they disappeared from sight, closing the door softly behind them.
“This was a mistake! The whole thing. You mark my words!” she yelled to the husband, who, in response, released into the toilet bowl a rattling, moist roar of flatulence that he’d been holding in since he’d first gone in and sat down.
He’d saved her. Her mother was certifiably deranged and her father was a known rapist. She remembers thinking on their first date, At least I’ll get my own house now. It was years before she’d admit that to anyone, but there it was—she wanted her own place, with her own dishes and hand towels and family photos on the walls. He needed a new wife, and she was clean enough, polite enough, back then. He’d just gone up to her father in the yard one day and pointed, saying, “Could I take her on a date?” and her father said, “Sure you can. If you buy me a soda.” So he came back the next evening in his truck with a six-pack of Pepsi. He took her out for milkshakes and a biscuit. The place they went to had giant biscuits. It was known for them.
The thing was, the blow dealt to him by the lesbian ex-wife was more than his stunted brain could endure, she decided, a year into the marriage. He was reasonably handsome and hardworking, but despite his noble posture and militant haircut, he turned out to be a broken-down stable horse with a burning-hot ego that would eventually incinerate him. It could only ever have been snuffed by the love of the lesbian who’d died a decade ago. How was the wife supposed to know this? It’s not something you understand until it’s too late. He’d caught the lesbian in bed with his own sister, more than once, engaged in a raunchy, possibly criminal position he’d not even known was possible. From what she could piece together of his cranky explanation, he’d beat his sister until her ears bled and begged the wife to denounce her same-sex attraction or else end up in a state hospital. Later he’d finally given up and said the ex-wife could do whatever she wanted so long as he occasionally watched from the broom closet, and if she promised never to divorce him. This contract was the tipping point, though, because the ex-wife left him shortly after and months later died in a car wreck. He insisted the crash was caused by one of her mentally unstable lovers. How could the ex-wife stand to be around him though, really, after he’d engaged in such groveling? It was doomed from the start, like so many things. The first wife was a beauty. The husband still kept a tooled leather album of their wedding photos in the lockbox. She never wore makeup and had the creamiest complexion, boyish, like potter’s clay. She wore her black hair slicked back in a flip. Her breasts were magnificent, even under the high-necked oxfords she wore. He was a huge fan of magnificent breasts. The new wife kept hers on prominent display as well. Like she had a choice. It was a more liberal time and partially unbuttoned blouses were the thing the year they moved out of the city. He hated this constant presentation of her tits, unless they were alone. He was nothing if not possessive.
What was it that made denial turn into desire? the husband wondered to himself in private moments, smoking his cheap cigars on the wheel of the rusted-out combine, watching a gentle doe sneak behind the encircling birches.
When the children discovered they enjoyed the offal truck, the husband called them to be placed on the hydraulic lift at the rear, allowing them to ride up among the rancid waste barrels to watch the driver dump gallons of blood and sloppy innards into a maggot-infested trough. They held their noses and stared deeply into the thick pool of organs. The wife took great delight in explaining how the offal would be transformed into ladies’ cosmetics at a nearby factory.
Once things took off, which didn’t take long on account of the wife’s ingratiating social skills, the previous owners appeared again, creeping slowly up the long drive in their flesh-colored Town Car. It was newly washed, the trim and wheels flashing in the sun. They lingered inexplicably within the vehicle, as if organizing something, before emerging from the hot car to stand with their hands in their pockets. Were they shy, or just old? The wife was incensed over not being allowed to make their acquaintance prior to the purchase. One look at those two, and she’d have advised him not to buy. She knew he knew this. She was a quick study in deceit. But what did they want? Nothing was certain about the two—every mannerly gesture seemed to conceal a filthier, feral motive. They meandered up to the office, waving as they walked through the door, as if the wife was expecting them and a graciousness ought to be extended for their having arrived on time for the appointment they never made.
They offered endless advice, in their eerie, matching voices. They delivered too-detailed histories of the facilities and the adjacent properties. “And of course this area was home to slaves. The help was necessary, and always humane. Now the neighboring estate is owned by a group of dykes and sodomites. So be cautious! Protect your children!”
“You mentioned that already,” the wife said. But she could feel her husband burning behind her. She wouldn’t turn around to see his face, but she could feel the heat melting the flesh off his hard bones.
“It was a booming business for us, and we paid all of our employees a fair wage,” the lady said.
“When is this church service?” the husband asked, his demeanor suddenly turning bright enough to blind them. “We have no taste for lewd behavior,” he said. “None!”
“Absolutely not,” she said to him later. “It’s a damn cult. And why wouldn’t they pay their employees fairly? Like they deserve a prize for being good to people.” The whole conversation seemed beyond reason to her.
“We need to keep the peace!” he yelled, scolding her in the way he did when he’d reached his mysterious brink. His eruptions came without warning. Rarely did she see one coming.
“You should hire me,” she said sweetly, trying to change the subject. “As a paid employee. I keep saying this. I want to pay taxes, honey! Pay into Social Security.”
“There’s no need for that! We’re the fucking owners!” he said, still inflamed.
This would turn out to be a miserable, violent point of contention later in their lives, after they’d gone broke and were old and separated and her primary source of income came from his meager disability benefits. She’d continue to mention it long after he’d entered the nursing home, and even then he couldn’t bring himself to admit she’d been right. Of course, his memory was eaten up and licked clean. Retribution rarely produced the rewards one hoped for.
“Do they think they’re supposed to train us?” she’d whisper to her husband when the couple was around but out of earshot. He swatted her away with a wide, sharp cleaver flecked with fat.
“And these machines never gave us a bit of trouble,” the couple said, gesturing toward the meat grinders. “They must be rinsed properly of an evening, or else there’s a greater risk of malfunction. And the smokehouse must be sanitized.”
The wife thought she was going to tear her own eyes out. The couple’s pulsating voices enraged her. It was as if the two spoke on some rare frequency that triggered an area in her brain that longed for fantastic acts of torture.
“Now we’ve told you when the services are, right?” the lady said at the end of these visits. “So all that’s left is for you to come! Oh, our pastor is truly touched. A true man of God! There’s no excuse for you and your husband to say no.”
Except the wife could think of nothing but. Even after so many months.
“We’re buried these days! Business has really taken off,” she reminded them, and it had. People from five counties were bringing their cows and hogs to be slaughtered and processed, and everyone poured out the compliments, especially regarding the sausage, and the transparency of prices. Every animal that came through the door was made as tranquil as a forest before the kill, they reminded the customers, assuring the most tender product. They’d even begun administering electroshock treatments to the beef, further tenderizing the carcass, a process that captivated the wife—watching the dead animal’s muscles contract and relax each time the machine was switched on.
“Well, we had it going pretty good ourselves, but in the end we decided being full-time Christians was more important. A lot goes on in a true house of God that people don’t know about!”
“I bet,” the wife said, reeling.
The problem was that too many of the less conservative customers had already confessed an unnamable distrust of the couple. Was it their matching voices and coordinated clothes? One thing was, people questioned if the animal they’d brought in was the butchered animal they collected on the other end. Also, people claimed, the weights seemed incorrect. Most of all, it was the communal suspicion surrounding the church’s decision to pull all of their children out of the local school to be enrolled in a private program owned by the church.
“Thanks must be given. Come show your appreciation!” the lady said to the wife.
“We should thank you for how well our business is doing?” the wife responded.
“Oh, mercy no! Not us, in particular. Your heavenly father! Praise God for the blessings he’s allowed you. Come give thanks to God almighty!”
Hers had been a hard life. She’d always had trouble understanding other people’s faith. Praise or penance never seemed to yield the same results as backbreaking labor, in her experience. So she just said it, and that was the glimmering pinnacle: “As far as I can tell, we’re the ones in here twelve hours a day, working our hands to the bone. So I’ll just thank myself, if you don’t mind.”
The lady backed up a few steps, opening her mouth wider than the wife thought possible. The uvula was dark red and swollen. “We have no intention of permitting an atheist to run our business!” she finally managed to say, putting her hands up in front of her, as if warding off an attack.
“Well, it’s too late for that. It’s already been sold to us. And I think you should leave.”
That evening while the husband lay in bed sweating, boiling over her intolerance and the thought of the lesbians next door, his wife stood out in the yard beside the old water pump, breathing heavily under a sky busted apart with stars, smelling the rancid hay in the fields, gazing across the acres at a blurry spot along the fence where she was certain she saw someone standing, staring back at her in the dark. Perhaps there were two silhouettes, even, holding hands by the gravel road? Her housedress whipped around her legs in the breeze and her mind leaped forward many decades to a vision of her adult children sitting before her on an elegantly decorated sunporch, both of them making a depressed, pathetic case for why they wanted nothing to do with their father. “He never loved us unconditionally!” they exclaimed. “He didn’t provide a nurturing environment!” They had unhealthy adult bodies, and malformed child-faces. This whole exchange would come to pass, subtracting the part about the sunporch and adding the latent disgust they eventually extended to her too, ducking her embrace whenever she reached for them, which was often. She’d remember this night in the yard and her vague premonition of the children delivering back to their father the selfish negligence he’d sowed into their child-hearts. This accordion of memories would leave her feeling fated and alive and connected to every detail—the sharpening rod on the stoop, the red chiggers swarming on the well, the bark peeling off the birches, the crowded nettles. Of the moment in the country when everything fell apart. The endless growl from the electric engine of an oil horse in the field behind the sodomites’ ranch style brought her back. She went inside and slipped under the sheets next to her husband, who was playing over in his pre-sleep the inevitable argument he’d have with his wife when he finally told her he was, in fact, only leasing the slaughterhouse, and the option to buy was contingent on a list of indecipherable stipulations that he’d hardly even read, having been so eager to escape the city and begin the messy, glorious business of killing animals on a farm.
Perhaps he was an idiot after all.
“Are we supposed to be polite to them now?” she asked him. He hadn’t said a word to her all day. This wasn’t uncommon. They were leaning over the stainless industrial sink, scrubbing dried blood from under their fingernails. “They don’t even strike me as the type to get their hands dirty!” she said. “How did they ever manage a slaughterhouse?”
“How do you think? They had mutual respect! They honored each other,” he said, looking at his bloody apron.
As it turned out, they were indeed the type to get their hands dirty. Or at least the type to pay someone else to get their hands dirty for them. Filthy, actually, because the husband and wife returned from a cattle auction a week later to find the entire killing floor flooded with sewage. The septic tank had backed up and seeped beneath the locker room door, filling the place with the smell of shit, ruining all the uncured meat. They had to pay back the price of all the hogs and cattle that were contaminated.
“We’re in deep now!” the husband said, throwing his rubber gloves at her, going for the phone. “You’re going to call and fix this. You’re going to that church.”
“You want me to pray over a backed-up septic tank? When did you turn so pious?” She could see the bile spilling over his face in response to her having used a word he didn’t know. “Religious!” she said. “For God sakes.”
“The moment those two walked into our house and invited us to church. Now you’re going to call them, ask for the name of their plumber, tell them you’re a stupid person and we’ll see them at the next service.”
“What have you done?” she said coldly. “What do we owe? What kind of dirty deal did you strike?”
“We’ll lose this place!” he screamed, spit flying from his mouth, his eyes going bloodshot.
“Good riddance,” she said, wading out of the putrid waste, using the mop to clear a slimy path before her.
He tried to make amends with the couple. She could hear them both on the other end of the phone when he called, speaking sedately in their twin voices, saying how sorry they were to hear of the sad trouble that had befallen the business. “Satan is a cunning thief,” they said. “Have you considered that the disturbed neighbors are possibly to blame? Those deviants?” they asked.
He had considered that. “It’s a little closer to home though,” the husband said after hanging up, eyeing his wife with teeth-grinding contempt.
“It’s them you should be angry at, you old fool! Or yourself. Not me!”
“It’s Satan, all right,” he said to her. “Lucifer herself!” He pitched a jar of meat jelly at her from the kitchen doorway. It went sailing past, crashing against the wall, where it dripped sluggishly down the floral paper.
The next week the water heater exploded, damaging the entire south end of the house. A few days after that, the propane tank acquired a leak, leaving them without gas to cook a meal. For the final, exhausting toll, a health inspector showed up to do a full review of the facilities, announcing a list that included over ten thousand dollars’ worth of necessary renovations in order for them to remain in operation. They had five days to comply, or else close the doors. “God bless,” the inspector said, as he bowed his head beside the lard vat.
Later that day, as he wrapped up the last hog’s leg, the husband whispered to her, tenderly almost, “You’ve cursed us.”
The first moment she had to herself, she snuck up into the attic alone to embroider in a broken easy chair. The hypnotic rhythm of precise work allowed her to slide below her own imagination, the whole history of the world, even, to a place where a woman didn’t need a husband. The peaceful, slippery dream didn’t last long. It was nearly visible though. Was it his disgust she feared? Sure, his blood curdled at the thought of taking advice from her. He couldn’t help that. It was purely physical. But when she finally tried to explain, on the ride home from their lawyer’s office, he turned and spit on her. “Oops,” he said as they stared at the gooey clots of chewing tobacco on her legs and shoes.
“I put flour under all of the doormats at night and every time we left the house,” she said. “And every time when we came back I lifted the mats to find footprints in the flour. They’ve been coming in our house and the business since we moved here.”
He hated her for being clever, more than anything.
And as it turned out the old lockbox had a gun in it. Why didn’t she know about that? After the children had gone to sleep, he sat beside her in bed holding the pistol, running the tip of it up her arm, and then her cheek. The air conditioner had just quit working and the heat was so thick they were floating in it. He said, “You stupid, ugly woman. I could kill you right now.” She peed herself, and blinked as a tear rolled down her huge nose. He gave a dumb, satisfied smile, showing bits of tobacco in his brown teeth. She could smell the hay and trees outside the open bedroom window, mixed with his body odor, which, like always, was a fermented, yeasty smell because of all the bread he ate. His doctor had asked more than once how much he drank, because of the smell. He didn’t drink at all, she’d said. He was merely intoxicated with buried fury and yeast.
She looked over at him, pointed a shaky finger at his bare, concave chest. “You do it now then,” she said, “because if you don’t kill me I’ll make you wish you had from now until forever.”
Of course he didn’t do it. He was never going to. He just wanted to see the look on her face when he produced the secret, black gun and held it to her head. Would she pray then?
Not at all.
She did make him regret it though. Always and forever.
All of the gossipy women in town reached out to her when the business closed and her husband went back to the city, leaving her and the children alone in the country while he got things settled, again. The past in reverse, again. How was it that she was the one who remained, stranded in her husband’s rural dream? The women came by smiling, bringing dense foods to console her. One in particular—the widowed prison guard with spiky red hair, standing so tall she had to look down at nearly everyone—ordered the wife to stay with her after the official eviction date.
When the husband finally called for her this time, the wife said no thank you.
She grew to love the prison guard dearly, and the prison guard loved her, though not in any sexual way, unfortunately. The wife let the husband think what she knew he would until his memory was consumed. He’d already decided that any woman not obviously flattered by his attention was a homosexual. The world, it turned out, was full of rude lesbians, insisting they open their own car door and carry their own groceries, insulted by an honest compliment from an assertive man. The wife had discovered the kind of retribution that would keep on giving without her having to do much at all, the kind he could enact all on his own, in the privacy of his boring nights as he roamed aimlessly around his cluttered apartment, listening to the distressing noise of cars and gunshots and neighbors yelling, in that city he used to know so well but no longer understood, being too old and entitled to comprehend the longing or poverty or bound-up rage of anyone more complicated than himself.
When the wife began to bleed occasionally from her nose and eyes, her friend made her nettle tea. The old doctor at the clinic appeared nervous before the lab results, eventually referring her to the doctor in the city. Her friend came in with a paper bag full of nettle leaves she’d picked in an abandoned lot across the street. She dumped them carefully into a pot of boiling water on the stove. It made the house smell like dead plants. She strained the leaves from the golden water through a metal sieve into a mason jar. They drank it together on the sofa while watching Matlock. It was hard to tell if it did any good, but it tasted nice, like rain and rot, and it made the wife feel content.
When she saw the Christian lady again, many years later, they were in the Dollar General store. The wife and her friend were cackling at each other, trying on stupid hats in front of a small, warped mirror affixed to the sunglasses kiosk. The lady appeared like a distortion between their grinning reflections. She was reaching for an item she could hardly grasp on a high shelf. The wife turned around, as if searching out something, to watch the lady feebly lifting a giant can into her cart. She had aged tremendously, her wide back hunched and her hair so thin the scalp was shining beneath the harsh lights of the store. The wife had read in the newspaper last winter how the man had fallen over in the driveway at night and froze to death, and of course she’d read about the church scandal. It wasn’t exactly satisfaction she felt. She had to admit there were things she’d never considered about the couple:
1. That they hadn’t wanted to sell the business in the first place. That the church had forced them. Everyone in the congregation had liquidated their personal assets in preparation for an apocalypse. The pastor had charged himself with the obligation of constructing an underground haven where they could all await the Second Coming. No haven was ever constructed. The money disappeared and the pastor was in prison. It was not long after that the sexual abuse allegations came out, regarding the children attending the private school.
2. The couple didn’t know how to trust anyone. How could they? They’d worked their whole lives for something and lost it. Being lied to had made them liars too.
She couldn’t stop herself from following the lady out into the parking lot, where she labored again with a case of canned food beside her car. The wife approached softly. “Let me help you with that, please,” she said. The lady didn’t look up. She stayed fixed on the difficult task.
“No thank you,” she said blankly, without any sign of recognition.
The wife reached out. “That’s too bad, because I’ve already decided I’m going to help you,” she said, taking the heavy load.