Elsa, Mary’s mother, started getting weaker and weaker. Mary began driving down once a month to check on her and help out around the farm. There was always some canning to do or an outbuilding to repair or doctor appointments to keep. I tried making jokes about my farmer wife, but Mary laughed less and less. Then she was making trips every weekend and since some of my classes were at night, I wouldn’t see her for days at a time. By the time I graduated and got my teaching license, Mary was spending three days a week in Pine Valley and working ten-hour days in the city to make up for it.
She was exhausted all the time. I tried to convince her that Elsa needed to sell the property, but she would grind her teeth every time I mentioned it, roll her eyes, and say, “Don’t you think I’ve tried that?”
We couldn’t find anyone to come help Elsa; the only qualified nurse who was willing to drive out to the farm wanted a thousand a week to check in on her and administer her meds.
I looked for a teaching job so Mary could quit the bank or at least scale back to part-time. I was trying to be a good husband. Isn’t that what good husbands do? Except I couldn’t find anything. The only openings were in elementary special ed and I had no experience with behavioral disorders. They wanted me to promise to go back to school for the specialty, but I wanted to teach literature, not social skills.
Then last March, Mary came home with a newspaper clipping. She showed me the ad—Pine Valley High School English teacher, the exact job I was qualified for—and told me that Elsa knew the principal personally and had put in a recommendation for me. The principal was waiting for my call.
God, I did not want to move to Pine Valley. But she looked so hopeful and tired, and I don’t know how it happened but two months later we moved in with her mother and I lost my entire life. Although she said it was only temporary, we both knew that meant we were staying until Elsa died, whether that took months or years. Lately, I hated to admit it, I’d been hoping for months.
The entire summer everything was Elsa, Elsa, Elsa. How was Elsa feeling today? Did she need a new oxygen tank? Could she take a shower by herself? It felt like we did have a baby, except our baby was an old, set-in-her-ways woman with a failing body.
Elsa was grateful, but all her gratitude seemed reserved for Mary. Me, she treated like a mildly irritating foreign exchange student.
It started with the vegetarian thing. She questioned everything I ate, from kale to black bean burgers to tempeh. When I went running, Elsa shook her head like she’d never seen a human move faster than a brisk walk behind a plow. And if I cracked a beer at night, she sniffed and pointedly looked away.
I honestly didn’t care what my mother-in-law thought of me, but she was coming between me and Mary. Every time Elsa cold-shouldered me, she stretched Mary’s peacemaker position a fraction thinner, pulled her daughter a little further away. One day I fixed the fence around her chicken barn while she toddled out after me to supervise, and we even had some good conversation about Mary’s childhood, except by the next week she’d forgotten all about it. The deprivation of oxygen to her brain was robbing her memories, especially the most recent ones, so all my attempts to improve our relationship were pointless.
And then there was the squawking. Even though the chickens were housed on the far side of the main barn, the clucking and rustling and scraping of those birds were omnipresent, no matter what time of day. It was enough to drive anyone insane. There were only about fifty of them, the last of Mary’s father’s flock, but they seemed to provide eggs for half the county. People stopped by all the time to pick up a carton, and Mary personally delivered them to our neighbor, Winifred Erickson, who usually followed Mary right back to our house and chatted with Elsa for hours. Mary collected eggs twice a day, starting at 6:00 a.m., cleaned the nests out, cleaned the floor, and hauled the feed—without making more than a few bucks a day as far as I could tell—and she wanted to talk about not having money?
“Why don’t you get rid of the chickens?” I kept asking her.
“I don’t mind it. I grew up doing this. I just don’t know how Mom managed it by herself.”
“Why do you have to manage it? We can buy eggs at the store.”
“Mom won’t hear of selling them,” she said, which had become her standard line of the summer. Our seventy-three-year-old baby wants this. Our seventy-three-year-old baby won’t tolerate that.
It was creeping into everything. Mary wouldn’t discuss books with me anymore. She said she had no time to read, yet she watched those awful shows with Elsa every night. She didn’t want to drive into the city to see any plays or even spend a night with our friends.
She’d shake her head. “It’s too far, I’m tired just thinking about it.”