Part Four: The Boxes
The next morning, Monday, I came downstairs at six-thirty to make coffee before work.
I stopped in the kitchen doorway.
Marilyn was standing at my kitchen counter.
She was wearing her emerald-green tracksuit. Her blonde hair was pulled back with a headband. She had a stack of flattened moving boxes leaning against the refrigerator and a roll of packing tape on the counter.
She was wrapping my dishes in newspaper.
Hal was sitting at my kitchen table. He had a box in front of him and a stack of my coffee mugs. He was wrapping them slowly, with shaking hands.
When he saw me, he stopped. He looked down at the mug in his hand.
He didn’t say anything.
“What on earth are you doing?” I said.
Marilyn didn’t stop wrapping.
She looked up at me and smiled.
“Getting ready to move in, obviously,” she said.
I stared at her.
“You’re packing my kitchen?” I said.
Marilyn laughed.
She picked up one of my plates. White, with a thin blue band around the edge. She wrapped it in a sheet of the Tulsa World and set it in a box.
“Not your kitchen anymore,” she said.
Those plates were my grandmother’s.
Grandma Opal. She’d bought them in 1962 at a department store in downtown Tulsa that doesn’t exist anymore. She’d used them every Sunday for forty years. She gave them to me when I got married.
Marilyn was wrapping them in newspaper and stacking them in a box like they were garage sale junk.
I turned around.
Trey was standing in the kitchen doorway. Fully dressed for work, in his khakis and his polo shirt with the logo of the insurance agency where he works. Holding his keys.
“You’re actually letting them do this?” I said.
Trey sighed.
“Don’t start,” he said. “I already told you how it’s going to be.”
“But Trey,” I said. “We never agreed to any of this!”
Marilyn set down the plate she was holding.
She turned around and looked at me. She crossed her arms. She smirked.
“And what exactly are you going to do?” she said. “We’re moving in whether you like it or not.”
I looked at the boxes on my counter.
At my grandmother’s plates wrapped in newspaper.
At Hal, sitting at my table with a coffee mug in his trembling hands, not looking at me.
At my husband in the doorway, who seemed perfectly pleased with himself. Like he’d handled it. Like he’d handled me.
I wanted to scream.
I wanted to grab the box out of Marilyn’s hands and throw her out of my kitchen. I wanted to shake Trey until he understood what he’d done.
But I didn’t.
Instead, I took a breath.
I picked up my coffee mug from the drying rack. The one Marilyn hadn’t packed yet.
I poured myself a cup of coffee.
And I forced a smile.
“Okay,” I said.
Marilyn blinked.
Trey blinked.
Even Hal looked up.
“Okay?” Marilyn said.
“Okay,” I said. “If that’s how it’s going to be.”
I took a sip of my coffee.
“I’m going to be late for work,” I said. “Make yourselves at home.”
Then I picked up my purse and walked out the front door.
Because I had something much smarter in mind.
