Chapter 1 - The Kitchen on Cedar Lane
The kitchen on Cedar Lane always smelled like whatever Lorraine was cooking, and that night it smelled like pot roast.
That was the last normal thing about the evening.
My father-in-law, Gerald, sat at the head of the table with his checkbook open, and he didn't look up when I walked in.
"Dana," he said.
"The family account needs your savings.
All of it.
Eleven thousand four hundred."
I had been married to his son for six years, and in those six years I had learned to read that table like a weather map.
Gerald at the head meant a decision had already been made.
Lorraine at the stove meant she would pretend it hadn't.
And Ray, my husband, in the chair closest to the hall, meant he had gone along with it.
That money was not spare cash.
It was my mother's house money.
My mother, Ruth, sold the little place on Merton Street two years ago and split the proceeds three ways, one part for her, one part for my brother in Ohio, and one part for me.
Eleven thousand four hundred dollars, sitting in an account in my name, for the day I needed a way out of something.
I put my purse on the counter and said one word.
"No."
The pot roast kept ticking in the oven.
Ray stood up so fast his chair scraped the linoleum, and then he took his drinking glass and threw it hard at the floor beside my feet.
It burst into pieces, and something small stung my ankle through my sock.
"You need to learn your place," he said.
I saw his right hand come up.
I don't remember deciding to move.
I remember the porch light, and the screen door, and my own feet taking me across the kitchen and out through the mudroom while Lorraine screamed behind me.
"How dare you go against this family!"
I got to the porch and dug my phone out of my pocket with two fingers because my hands were shaking.
The porch was dark and the boards were cold and the gravel driveway stretched out to the road, and I knew that if I got in my car they would follow me in Ray's truck.
So I didn't run for the car.
I called 911 and told the dispatcher my husband had just thrown a glass at me and raised his fist, and that I wanted a deputy, and I gave her the address on Cedar Lane in a voice that sounded steadier than I felt.
"I'm calling the sheriff," I said, loud enough for the doorway behind me.
Ray stopped in the mudroom, half in, half out, one hand still up, the other against the frame.
He froze.
Lorraine came around him onto the porch and stood there with her hands on her hips, telling me I was embarrassing the family, telling me I was going to make a scene the neighbors would hear about for years.
I didn't answer her.
I kept the phone against my ear and watched the road.
It took about twelve minutes.
Two cruisers came down Cedar Lane, and a deputy I didn't know got out of the first one and walked up the path, and by then three porch lights had come on next door.
The deputy talked to me first, then to Ray, then to Lorraine, and then he walked Ray down the steps and put him in the back of the cruiser.
Ray didn't say a word to me as they passed.
He looked at the porch light instead.
Lorraine stood on the lawn and screamed at me in front of the deputies, in front of the neighbors, in front of the whole street.
And then a third car slowed at the end of the driveway, and I knew it before I saw the plate.
It was my mother.
Ruth got out of her old sedan holding a thick manila folder against her chest with both arms crossed over it, like she was carrying something that might try to get away.
She walked up the gravel and stopped in front of me and looked at my face, and then at my ankle, where a thin line of blood had soaked into my sock.
"I was on my way before you called," she said.
"How did you know?"
I asked back.
She didn't answer that.
She walked past me to the hood of her car and set the folder down on it and opened the flap.
"Read the top page," she said.
"Then tell me if you still want to stay married to that man."
