Inside, the house smelled of someone else’s laundry detergent.
My couch pillows had been arranged in a pattern I didn’t recognize, and my cookbooks were gone from the counter.
Eleanor stood in the kitchen in a cream cardigan, going through what looked like our mail.
My cookbooks were gone from the counter.
“Cindy,” she said without a smile. “You look tired.”
“Car accidents will do that.”
“David, help her to the bedroom. She needs rest.”
My husband walked me down the hall without meeting my eyes.
“You look tired.”
Behind us, my MIL’s heels clicked confidently across my kitchen floor as she opened drawers she had no business opening.
Something in my torso that wasn’t a broken rib began to tighten.
I sank back against the pillows, every rib throbbing dully.
Abbie had curled up next to me with her stuffed rabbit, and I could hear Eleanor somewhere down the hall, moving with purpose.
My MIL’s heels clicked confidently across my kitchen floor.
Then I heard it.
Drawers. Not kitchen drawers. Bedroom drawers, sliding open and shut in a rhythm I couldn’t place.
“Eleanor? David?” I called out, shifting my leg carefully. “Everything okay in there?”
No answer. Only more drawers.
I stroked my daughter’s hair and tried to sound casual.
“Sweetie, why don’t you go pick out a coloring book, okay? Mama needs a minute.”
“Everything okay in there?”
Abbie hopped off the bed obediently.
Two seconds later, Eleanor swept into the room carrying two designer suitcases, and my stomach plunged straight through the mattress.
They were new. Matching. Already tagged.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
My MIL didn’t glance at me.
My stomach plunged.
She went to David’s closet and began yanking shirts off hangers with the smooth efficiency of someone who’d rehearsed this in her head a hundred times.
“Eleanor. Stop. What are you doing?!”
“Packing for my son.”
“Why?”
“He’s coming home.”
I laughed, because it seemed the only fitting reaction to a sentence that absurd.
“David is home.”
“He’s coming home.”
My MIL folded a sweater and said nothing.
Then my husband appeared in the doorway, staring at the floor as though it owed him money. He wouldn’t look at me or at his mother. He just stood there with his hands in his pockets, a grown man pretending to be furniture.
“David.” My voice cracked. “David, look at me!”
He didn’t.
He wouldn’t look at me.
“Can somebody please tell me what is happening in my bedroom right now? How can you abandon your injured wife and child?”
Eleanor zipped the first suitcase with a firm tug and sneered.
“My son didn’t sign up to be a nursemaid. He has an important career. He’ll come back when you’re functional.”
I stared at her. “Functional?”
“You heard me.”
“I’m his wife!”
“You’re a broken leg and a set of fractured ribs, dear. He’s not equipped.”
“You heard me.”
I turned to my husband, and something small and desperate climbed into my throat.
“Say something! Anything. Your wife just got hit by a car. Your daughter is four. Are you seriously letting your mother pack a suitcase?”
David finally raised his eyes. They were the eyes of a boy caught doing something he’d been told wasn’t his fault.
“Babe,” he said quietly. “It’s just really stressful right now.”
“Stressful for whom, David?”
“For me.”
“Say something!”
I had no reply to that. There was no reply to that.For illustration purposes only
Eleanor clicked the second suitcase shut and lifted them both as if she’d trained for this very moment.
My MIL smiled the way she always did at Thanksgiving. “Rest, dear. You look tired.”
Eleanor had always despised me.
I badly needed help caring for myself and our little girl, and I finally understood that she hadn’t come to nurse me.
I had no reply to that.
David crossed the room and bent down. He kissed my forehead. His lips were dry.
He smelled of the cologne I’d given him for his birthday.
“Sorry, babe,” he whispered. “It’s just too stressful right now.”
Then he straightened up just as Abbie came running down the hallway, clutching a crayon.
He kissed my forehead.
“Daddy?” Our daughter trailed after him. “Daddy, where you going?”
Her father didn’t turn around.
“Daddy?” I heard her say again, and my heart broke.
The front door opened, then shut. A car engine started in the driveway.
I felt my whole chest collapse in behind the fractured ribs.
“Daddy, where you going?”
Abbie wandered back into my bedroom, holding her crayon in a small, uncertain fist.
“Mama?”
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