Seven years of folding Simon’s undershirts into neat little squares in the top drawer didn’t buy me a single birthday card. I spent seven years waking up at 5:15 in the morning to fry his eggs, pack his lunchbox with black coffee and turkey sandwiches, and listen to the back door slam behind him without a single goodbye. I was thirty-eight years old, my knees clicked every time I stood up from scrubbing grout, and my own wedding anniversary had passed three weeks prior with me eating leftover meatloaf over the kitchen sink while he worked late at the warehouse district.
The house always smelled of bleach and floor wax because I kept it that way. Simon liked things pristine. He liked his dinner on the table at 6:30 sharp, his boots lined up by the mudroom heater, and his laundry done twice a week without him ever having to hand me a single crumpled five-dollar bill for groceries. I used my own savings from cleaning houses on the south side of town to buy our groceries and pay for my own Christmas presents. I would walk into the drugstore on Main Street, pick out a box of lavender soap or a cheap silver bracelet, bring it home, wrap it in shiny paper, and put it under the tree with my own name on the tag just so the neighbor ladies wouldn’t ask why Santa skipped our chimney. It was humiliating in a quiet, rotting kind of way. You get used to swallowing your own tongue after a while.
Last December 24th started like every other frozen Tuesday in Iowa. The ground was hard as iron, and the wind was howling straight off the frozen fields behind our property, rattling the single-pane glass in the pantry. I had spent eight solid hours baking pumpkin pies and roasting a twelve-pound turkey that Simon said he wanted for his office crew, even though none of them ever came over to eat it. By 9:00 PM, the kitchen was spotless, the counters were wiped down with lemon oil, and the turkey was sitting wrapped in foil on the middle shelf of the fridge, untouched.
Simon wasn’t home. He hadn’t called since noon, which was standard for him. Whenever I asked where he was, he’d just look at me like I was speaking a foreign language and mutter something about inventory audits at the supply yard. I sat down at the wooden kitchen table with a cold cup of tea that tasted like stale dust.
My fingers were raw from the dishwater, and my lower back was throbbing from bending over the oven all afternoon.
At 10:14 PM, I picked up the landline because my cell phone battery had died three hours ago and I couldn’t find the charger where Simon had moved it. It rang four times before the line clicked. I could hear loud music in the background, thumping bass that didn’t belong to any warehouse I had ever seen.
“Simon?” I said, my voice sounding smaller than I meant it to. “Are you coming home tonight? The turkey is getting cold.”
He didn’t say hello. He didn’t ask how I was. His voice came through the receiver hard and sharp, like glass breaking on a basement floor.
“I’m busy! Can’t you just leave me alone already?!”
Before I could get another word out, the line went dead with a harsh clicking sound.
I didn’t scream or throw the phone. I just slid down the side of the wooden kitchen chair until my knees hit the cold linoleum floor, and I started crying so hard my chest hitched and my throat burned like I had swallowed hot coals. I sat there in the dark kitchen for I don’t know how long, watching the little red light on the stove clock tick past 11:00 PM.
My head pounded with every beat of my heart. I kept thinking about the seven years of eggs and laundry and empty envelopes under the tree. Finally, my legs felt stiff enough to hold me up, and I stood on shaking legs to walk into the living room to turn off the tree lights before I went to bed alone. The house was dead quiet except for the furnace kicking on with a loud clank in the basement.
As I walked over to the front window to pull the heavy velvet drapes closed against the frost, I noticed something strange sitting near the base of the pine tree. I had spent two hours wrapping my own pathetic little drugstore boxes earlier that morning, arranging them neatly in a row on the faded blue rug. But right behind the tinsel, tucked half out of sight against the white tree skirt, was a large rectangular box wrapped in heavy matte paper with a wide silver velvet bow. It wasn’t there when I vacuumed at 2:00 PM. I would have seen it because the paper was a deep, rich plum color, not the cheap red foil I always bought at the dollar store down on 4th Street.
My breath caught in my throat. I walked over slowly, my bare feet sinking into the cheap carpet, and knelt down in front of the branches. The pine needles scratched my arm, but I didn’t care. I reached out a trembling finger and touched the silver ribbon. It was expensive fabric, heavy and smooth, nothing like the plastic curls Simon bought for his mother’s birthday cards.
There was a white card tucked under the bow, written in Simon’s neat, sharp handwriting. The kind of writing he used for business contracts.
I flipped the card over. My name wasn’t on it.
The name written across the front in black ink was Chloe. And underneath it, in smaller letters that made my stomach drop like an elevator falling three floors: For the best part of my week, every week. Always yours, S.
I didn’t scream. I didn’t cry anymore. The tears just dried right on my cheeks, leaving my skin tight and cold. I reached out, grabbed the heavy plum-wrapped box by its corners, and ripped the top off.
Inside sat a brand-new leather designer handbag, the kind that cost more than my monthly grocery budget, along with a receipt from a boutique in the next county over dated three days prior. And right beneath the bag was a stack of greeting cards, all signed with the same initials, thanking him for dinners at upscale hotel bars and weekend getaways in towns two hours away where nobody knew his name. Seven years of cold toast and silent mornings, while he bought expensive leather for someone else who didn’t even have to wash his work socks.
I stood up so fast my vision went gray at the edges. I didn’t pack a bag because I didn’t want anything in that house that had ever touched his hands. I walked straight out the front door into the freezing December air in my slippers and my old flannel bathrobe, leaving the front door wide open behind me so the winter wind could blow right through his clean, empty living room.
I got into my old Dodge pickup, turned the key, and watched the dashboard lights flicker to life at 11:42 PM. I didn’t look back at the porch light once. Let him come home to an empty house and a cold turkey. This time, he could clean up his own mess.
