Chapter 5 - The Woman in the Apron
By the second year Maeve and I were together, my life had pulled away from the Miller family orbit like a satellite breaking loose.
We got married at the courthouse in Forest City on a Tuesday morning in April. Norb Cool was my witness, wearing his only brown suit that smelled faintly of mothballs, and the clerk of court brought us a plate of store-bought sugar cookies. Dad sent a card with fifty dollars cash tucked inside. Mom didn't send anything; she told her sister in Mason City that Dane had married ""some girl from a roadside hash-house without even asking the family to meet her.""
She wasn't wrong about us not asking. We bought a small, two-bedroom ranch house on two acres of wild brome grass just outside Ventura. The mortgage was $680 a month. Maeve kept working three days a week at the Rusty Anchor because she liked the regulars, and between her tips and my commercial driver's license, we paid our bills five days early every single month.
We had peace. Real peace. The kind where you sit on the back porch with a pair of binoculars watching the red-tailed hawks hunt the grass along the ditch, and nobody mentions regional farm store sales figures.
Then came the second Thanksgiving after we bought the place.
Dad called my landline himself. His voice sounded older, thinner, like dry leaves scraping along asphalt.
""Dane,"" he said, speaking loud the way people do when their hearing aids are losing battery. ""Your mother wants you here. Jared’s coming down. He’s got Alyssa with him. They’re driving that new Lincoln he bought.""
""Dad, you know how that goes,"" I said, leaning against the kitchen counter while Maeve was peeling baking apples into a stoneware bowl. ""Jared talks, Mom agrees, and I sit there getting chewed on.""
""He’s thirty-four, you’re thirty-one,"" Dad rasped. ""I got a bypass coming up in January down at Mercy. I ain't having my boys sitting in two different counties while they cut my chest open. You bring your girl. You bring a pie. You sit down.""
The line went dead. Dad never said goodbye; he just hung up when the information was delivered.
Maeve looked up from her cutting board, her hands sticky with apple juice. ""Was that Rodney?""
""He wants us there,"" I said, rubbing the back of my neck. ""Says he's got surgery in January. Wants the whole circus under one roof.""
Maeve set her paring knife down with a soft click. She walked over, wiped her knuckles on a tea towel, and looked right into my eyes. She had this way of looking at me that made me feel like I was six feet tall and made of solid steel.
""We go,"" she said.
""You don't know them, Maeve. Jared will find a way to make you feel like you crawled out of a storm drain, and Mom will help him do it.""
""Dane,"" she said softly, reaching out to straighten the collar of my flannel shirt. ""I worked third shift in a Cedar Rapids truck stop for four years. I’ve had drunk dispatchers throw hot soup at my chest and I’ve had teamsters try to take my tips off the counter. Your brother is an agricultural supply salesman with nice teeth. He doesn't scare me. Go get the truck washed.""
On Thanksgiving afternoon, the sky over Sheffield was the color of zinc. The ditch grass was frozen stiff under a crust of grey frost. We pulled into the driveway behind Jared’s shiny black Lincoln Navigator—the kind with chrome rims that had never seen a gravel road until today.
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Maeve was carrying a glass pie dish wrapped in a clean red-and-white checkered dish towel. It was pumpkin, made from squash we’d grown in our own garden, heavy and fragrant with nutmeg.
I took a deep breath, took her free hand, and opened the door.
