The digital clock on the microwave read 11:47 when I decided to go check on the extra quilt in the cedar chest upstairs. The house was supposed to be asleep. The kids were down in the basement rec room watching the ball drop on the old floor model TV, and Arthur had gone up ten minutes earlier to find his wool socks because the draft near the back windows was getting to him again.
It had been a decent sort of day for a Tuesday, considering the cold front that blew in from Oklahoma and dropped the temperature down into the teens.
We had spent the afternoon putting up leftovers from Sunday roast and arguing good-naturedly about whether the youngest boy needed braces this spring or if we could stretch it another year. Twenty-two years of marriage usually wears the shine off things, but I reckon we had kept up a decent pace. We still went out to the Perkins on Thursday nights after choir practice, and Arthur always brought home a slice of coconut cream pie for me to share with the girls while he watched the game.
The upstairs hallway was dark except for the faint amber glow of the nightlight near the bathroom door. I walked past the spare room where my mother was staying for the holidays. She had come down from Emporia right before Christmas, her old Dodge sedan packed with jars of canned peaches and three crocheted afghans she swore we needed. Mama had always been close with Arthur.
Sometimes too close, my sister Ruth used to say back before she moved out to Denver, but I never thought much of it. A man who lets your mother help him pick out his work shirts just seemed like a good family man to me.
The door to our bedroom was cracked open about three inches. A narrow wedge of yellow light spilled out across the dark oak floorboards.
I pushed the door open without knocking because after twenty-two years you don’t bother with manners in your own house. Mama was standing right beside the dresser with her blouse half unbuttoned, and Arthur was sitting on the edge of the mattress trying to pull his belt through his loops with shaking hands.
Nobody screamed. That is the part that always gets me when I replay it in my head while sitting at the kitchen table with the lights off. There was no great theatrical shouting match, just the heavy grandfather clock in the downstairs hall chiming three quarters past the hour and the sound of the furnace kicking on with a dull metallic thud.
Mama didn’t even drop her hands. She just looked rightover at me with those pale, watery eyes she had inherited from her own people and spoke in that flat, everyday voice she used for telling me when the beans were overcooked.
“Go on back downstairs to your company, Brenda,” she told me.
Arthur didn’t look up from his boots at all. He just cleared his throat and muttered something about the radiator making a funny racket, like I was some neighbor woman dropping by to borrow a cup of sugar instead of his wife of two decades who was carrying his fifth child.
I didn’t yell. I didn’t cry. My hands just went entirely numb, and I walked right back down those stairs without saying a single word because my brain had kind of stopped working altogether.
By morning, I had called Daddy. He drove out from Wichita before the sun was even up over the tree line, his old Ford pickup kicking up gravel in the lane.
He didn’t ask many questions when I told him what I saw through that crack in the bedroom door. He just listened while I stood on the back porch wrapped in a quilt, and then he looked at me with those tired old eyes and said we needed to settle something right then and there.
Daddy paid for the private lab in town by noon on New Year’s Day. He went right back into that house while Arthur was out pretending to look for winter oil at the hardware store, and he collected the toothbrushes and the hairbrushes from the three youngest kids’ bathroom without Mama even realizing what he was doing.
The man at the lab called Daddy’s cell phone four days later while we were sitting in the quiet kitchen waiting on a pot of coffee to finish. Daddy didn’t put it on speaker, but I could hear the tinny, distant sound of the technician’s voice through the receiver as plain as day.
Daddy just sat there at the Formica table for a long time after he hung up, staring down at his coffee mug like he was trying to read tea leaves in the bottom.
“Well, Brenda,” Daddy finally whispered, and his voice sounded older than I had ever heard it. “The first three aren’t Arthur’s. Not a single one of them.”
I didn’t say anything back. I just looked down at my own swollen stomach where the fifth one was kicking against my ribs, and then I looked over at the calendar hanging by the pantry where Arthur had written his bowling league schedule in red ink all the way back in September. Twenty-two years of keeping house and washing shirts and saving every spare dollar for a family I thought we built together, and I realized right then that Mama hadn’t just stolen my husband at the end. She had been there for the very beginning of every single life I thought I made.
