My Husband Abandoned Me to Save His Mistress’s Son

The meeting was held in the church basement. They didn't call it a trial. They called it a community conversation.

I sat in a folding chair at the front. Clara Jensen stood at the lectern. I'd bought her daughter's insulin two winters ago when the pharmacy wouldn't front her the cost. She wouldn't look at me now.

"We have standards here," Clara said. Her voice echoed off the cinder-block walls. "We take care of our own. But we can't harbor someone who brings shame to Crestwood."

Behind me, the chairs creaked. Sixty people. Maybe more. I'd fed half of them. Lent money to a quarter. Sat with old Mrs. Kowalski through her husband's last night because no one else would.

Not one of them spoke.

Whitley sat in the back row, Devon on her lap. She was crying. Perfect little tears that caught the fluorescent light. Garrett stood beside her, his hand on her shoulder. Protective. Bereaved.

"Three days," someone said. I think it was the pastor. "Public labor. Fencing on the north road. Then she can go."

A murmur of agreement rolled through the room like wind through wheat.

Clara finally looked at me. "Do you have anything to say, Edith?"

I thought about the clinic. The fake certificate. Garrett's shoulder in my sheets. The knife at my throat and the way he'd run.

I shook my head.

There was nothing to say to people who'd already decided.

*

The first day, my hands blistered by noon. The work gloves they gave me were too big, and the post-hole digger kept slipping. My shoulders burned. The sun sat on the back of my neck like a hand pressing me down.

Cars slowed as they passed. Faces in windows. Some I recognized. No one waved.

By the second day, the blisters had popped. I wrapped my palms in the bandanas I used to tie back my hair and kept digging. The fence posts went in crooked, but no one corrected me. They just watched.

Garrett came by on the third afternoon. He parked his truck on the shoulder and got out slow, like he was approaching something wild.

"Edith."

I didn't look up. I hammered the next post in with the flat side of the digger. My forearms were scraped raw from the wire. My face was blank. I'd practiced blank.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'll fix this. I'll tell them the truth. Just come home tonight and we'll—"

"Go away, Garrett."

He stood there another minute. Then he got back in the truck.

I finished the fence at dusk. My legs shook on the walk back to the farmhouse. The sky was going purple over the wheat. It would've been pretty if I'd had the space to notice.

I came in through the kitchen. The house was quiet. Whitley's car was gone. Garrett's truck wasn't in the drive.

I went upstairs. I ran the shower as hot as it would go and stood under it until the water went cold. I washed the dirt out of my hair. I wrapped my hands in clean gauze. I put on the one pair of jeans that didn't smell like smoke and sweat.

I was in bed when I heard the lock click.

Not the bedroom lock. The front door.

I sat up. Listened.

Footsteps on the porch. Whitley's voice, low and satisfied. Then the scratch of a match.

I smelled it before I saw it. Gasoline. Sharp and wrong.

I ran to the window. Flames were already climbing the porch rail, orange and hungry. They licked at the doorframe. Black smoke poured under the bedroom door.

I grabbed the quilt off the bed and shoved it against the crack. It bought me ten seconds. Maybe twenty.

The hallway was a wall of heat. I couldn't see the stairs. Couldn't breathe.

I turned back to the window. It was old. Painted shut. I slammed my shoulder into the frame once, twice. It didn't budge.

The smoke was in my lungs now. My eyes streamed. My chest locked.

I picked up the bedside lamp and swung it like a bat. The glass exploded outward. I didn't think. I just shoved my arm through and pulled.

The broken edge caught my forearm and opened it like a zipper. Blood came fast and hot, black in the firelight. I didn't feel it. I pulled myself through the frame, my hips scraping the sill, my knees hitting the porch roof. I rolled and fell into the dirt six feet below.

I lay there. The sky spun. Smoke poured from the upstairs window like something alive.

I got to my knees. Then my feet. My left arm hung useless, blood dripping off my fingertips into the dust.

I walked. I didn't look back.

The highway was a mile. I made it in twenty minutes. A semi blew past, then a sedan. Then the Greyhound, westbound, its headlights cutting through the dark.

I stood in the road and raised my good arm.

It stopped.

The driver, a woman with gray hair and kind eyes, took one look at me and pulled the first-aid kit from under her seat. She wrapped my arm in gauze that soaked through immediately.

"Hospital's in Billings," she said.

"No." My voice cracked. "New York. I need to go to New York."

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she nodded.

"Okay, honey," she said. "Okay."

I climbed the steps. Took a seat in the back. Pressed my forehead against the cold window.

The bus pulled away, and Crestwood disappeared into the dark behind me.

I didn't cry. There was nothing left to come out.