The Wrong Side of the Cupboard
Episode 1 of 3 of My Husband’s First Wife by Helen Abbott
“You put the mugs on the wrong side.”
He said it kindly. That’s what I want you to understand about all of it. Every single thing he said, he said kindly.
Here is who we are. I’m the second wife. My husband is a widower, and everyone in town knows it before they know my name. His mother lives four streets over and decides things. And there is the first wife, who died two years before I moved into her kitchen, and who I am going to talk about more than I should.
I moved the mugs to the left.
“There you go,” Evan said, and kissed my temple, and that was the first day.
It took about a month for me to notice the pattern, and I only noticed it because I stopped being able to find anything.
The coffee filters were in the drawer by the stove, not the cabinet above it. I had put them in the cabinet. Someone moved them. The towels went in the hall closet, not the bathroom. My side of the bed became the side by the window because he slept better on the door side, he said, and it was true, he did.
None of it was wrong. That’s the thing. Every single change made the house work better. He never said, that’s how she did it. He never had to.
The first time I heard her name was at the hardware store.
I was standing at the counter with a box of picture hooks and the man behind it, who was old and had a name tag that said Walt, looked at me a beat too long and said, “You must be Julie’s,” and then stopped, like a car that had gone over a curb.
“I’m Evan’s wife,” I said.
“Sure. Sure you are.” He rang up the hooks. “You’ve got the same coat.”
I looked down at my coat. Gray wool, hip length, one button missing. Evan had given it to me in October. He’d said it was a good coat for the wind up here.
I didn’t ask Walt anything. I paid for the hooks.
That night I said, “Did Julie have a coat like mine?”
He was drying a plate. He didn’t stop drying it.
“Everybody has a coat like yours, Tess. It’s a gray coat.”
“Walt at the hardware store said”
“Walt is eighty one years old.” He put the plate on the left side. “He called me by my father’s name for six years.”
That was reasonable. I let it be reasonable.
I want to tell you what it feels like, living in a house that keeps correcting you. It doesn’t feel like being watched. It feels like being helped. You put something down and it ends up somewhere better, and after a while you start putting it in the better place yourself, and you feel efficient, and you feel like you’re settling in.
By December I had cut my hair. He didn’t ask me to. He said, once, that it might be easier short, with the wind. And it was.
His mother came for dinner the week before the holiday and stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at me for a long moment with the dish towel over my shoulder and the mugs on the left.
“Well,” she said. “You’ve settled in.”
“I have.”
“She’d be pleased.”
I thought she meant it as a compliment. I have thought about the sentence a great deal since, and I no longer know what it was.
The Saturday after that I was in the grocery store parking lot, loading bags into the back of the car, and somebody across the lot called out a name.
“Julie!”
And I turned around.
Not slowly. Not after a second of confusion. I turned the way you turn when someone says your name, all at once, with my whole body, with a bag of oranges still in my hand.
There was a woman by the cart return waving at somebody behind me.
I stood there in the wind in my gray coat with my short hair, and I could not remember, for a full three seconds, which one of us I was supposed to be.