The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress

Chapter Thirty-Five





SHELBY, IOWA, TUESDAY, MARCH 3, 1931



RITZI kept to the side, where the country road softened to dirt, and walked along in a pair of new patent leather shoes that pinched her toes and rubbed a blister on her heel. As a girl, she ran down these gravel roads with bare feet toughened to leather and wind in her face. There wasn’t a swimming hole or a rope swing within ten miles that she hadn’t befriended. It seemed like another lifetime. Another woman, really.

The fields were wrapped in snow, and the sky was a clear cornflower blue. Beneath the frozen soil lay a crop of winter wheat, planted after the corn was harvested. Ritzi could see the gentle rise of each row, dormant, waiting for the warmth of spring before it would send tender green shoots skyward. She scanned the fields, peering into the horizon, and then tilted her head up and drank in the sight. No skyscrapers to block the view. No exhaust or smog. A cathedral of sky above her.

She’d been walking for almost an hour, and stiffness rose up through her calves and into her lower back. Her entire body felt strained and heavy, cracked at the seams. At the train station, a kind farmer had offered her a ride, and she’d allowed him to bring her as far as the turn onto Rural Route 79. She took the rest on foot, and with each step her courage waned. For the last twenty minutes, she’d been walking slower and slower, looking for opportunities to stop and ponder this or that.

When Ritzi came to the last rise in the road before the Martin farm, she stopped. There was no way to count the number of times she had traveled this road, both as a child and as an adult. She knew its curves and dips. That pothole a quarter mile back that no one ever bothered to fill and everyone swerved to avoid. She knew where the split-rail fence buckled over the culvert and how that ditch always overflowed in spring when the rains came. The fields, whether newly planted, bursting with wheat, or stripped bare, were intimate friends. She had lived within two miles of this farm for all but three of her twenty-two years. Yet Ritzi was not prepared for the terror that filled her as she stood atop that knoll and looked down at her old home.

Ritzi stared at the thin gold band on her left hand. She rubbed it with her thumb, took a deep breath, and made her way toward the gate at the bottom of the hill. Ritzi had all the courage of a newborn calf. She would have turned and run, but her belly weighed heavy and her lower back groaned with the strain. This was the end for her. She had nothing left. And so she limped across the yard and up the front steps. They sagged in the middle, same as always, and the porch rail still needed painting. Everything looked the same as it had the morning she left, only sadder, emptier.

There was a hush in the air, as if the farm held its breath, as she reached out, hand curled into a fist, and rapped on the screen door with her knuckles. It was the first time she had ever knocked. Ritzi locked her knees and waited. Seconds later, she heard boots thumping down the hall. The rattle of a hand on the knob, and then the door opened. Ritzi looked at her husband.

“Hi, Charlie.”

He pushed the screen open and filled the doorframe, shoulders broader than she remembered. Chestnut-brown hair flipped out in curls above his collar. His eyes were still kind and blue, but he’d gotten the sort of lines around them that only sorrow could bring. He hadn’t shaved in days. Charlie stood there, clenching and unclenching his fists. She watched as his face contorted from shock to rage to sadness to relief. He looked her up and down, over and over, wincing every time he glanced at her swollen abdomen.

Finally, Charlie took a deep breath and looked straight in her eyes. His voice cracked. “That ain’t my baby.”

Ritzi stepped backward and dropped her chin. “It is if you’ll have it.”

He flinched as though she’d slapped him, and she saw that look on his face, the one he got when trying not to curse. Charlie couldn’t look in her eyes any longer, so he stared at her feet instead. His arm twitched like he wanted to slam the door shut in her face.

“You been gone a long time, Sarah.”

The name was a blow. Her name. Coming from Charlie’s lips, it sent a shudder through her body, and she reached out to steady herself against the side of the house. But there was no stopping the tears. They were a flash flood, coursing down her face. “Nobody’s called me Sarah in years.”

“That so?” There was a long pause as he stood there, one arm propping the door open.

She wiped her cheeks. “Mostly, they call me Ritzi these days.” She’d tried to say it with nonchalance, but all she could muster was embarrassment. It was the stage name she’d picked for herself as a child, when she dreamed of being something more than a farmer’s daughter.

Charlie barked out a mirthless laugh. He shook his head there in the doorway like he’d never heard anything so ridiculous in his life. Her breath clouded between them in the cold, and she rubbed her arms, shivering.

“That’s a right stupid name.” He turned and walked back into the house.

The tears came even though Ritzi fought against them. She stood on the front porch of the home she had once shared with Charlie and stared at the door. He’d left it open.





Five months later …