I chose that. Nobody made me go. There were Sundays over twenty-one years when I would rather have been anywhere else and I went, because not going would have required a conversation with my husband about his mother, and that conversation was the one thing in our marriage that had a price on it.
But that Sunday something about him was wrong.
He barely spoke in the car. His hands stayed tight on the wheel and he checked the clock on the dashboard four times in twenty minutes.When I asked what was bothering him he said: nothing, I’m just tired.
I know that tone. It means do not ask me another question, and in twenty-six years I have never once asked the next question after it.
My name is Merritt and I am fifty-four and that sentence is the reason this happened to me.
Not the packet. Not the soup.
Twenty-six years of a house where there was a specific voice that ended enquiries, and I recognised it every single time, and every single time I let it work.
At the house I went to wash my hands, and on the way back I passed the kitchen.
Then I stopped.
Renwick was standing at the counter. In front of him was a bowl of chicken soup.My bowl. It has a chip on the rim and it has been mine at that table since about 2009, which is the kind of thing families do without deciding to.
I was about to walk in when he reached into his pocket.
He took out a small white packet.
He tore it open and emptied it into the soup, and then he stirred it thoroughly, for longer than anybody stirs anything.
That is the image I have. Not the packet. The stirring.
A man of fifty-seven standing at his mother’s counter with his shoulders forward, doing something carefully.
But the thing that finished me was what he did afterwards.
He glanced over his shoulder. Checking whether anybody had seen.
I stepped away from that doorway without a sound, and I want to be honest that I do not remember making the decision to do that.
Something in me made it and it was faster than I am.
I got to the bathroom and I ran the tap, because that is what you do when you need thirty seconds, and I stood there with my hands under the water and looked at myself in somebody else’s mirror.
