Wife-In-Law Read Online Free

did when anyone asked about Mama, but didn’t let my expression show it. “Down in town.”
    Kat eyed my clothes. “Buckhead, I bet.”
    I just smiled, a master at avoiding awkward questions. “Y’all use the tray and the dishes as long as you need, but the dishtowel is a housewarming present.” I started edging toward the door. “Don’t get up,” I said with more than a hint of sarcasm as Zach shoveled in the food I’d made. “I know you must be tired. I’ll just let myself out.”
    Kat followed me, suddenly shy. “Thanks so much for the food and all. Maybe we’ll see each other around on the weekends.”
    “I’m sure we will,” I said with a warm smile and a wave good-bye, silently dismissing the couple as potential friends.
    The other four houses on the cul-de-sac were almost finished. Surely somebody with whom Greg and I had more in common would move in soon. Kat and Zach just weren’t our kind of people.
    But God, as He so often does, had other plans.

Two
     
    T hanks to Atlanta’s ever-present road construction and traffic, I was almost an hour late getting to Mama’s that afternoon. If I didn’t do a fast turnaround, I’d end up stuck in rush hour. I parked on the crumbling pavement in front of Mama’s tiny house and unloaded the food. When I got to the chain-link gate to her tiny yard, her next-door neighbor appeared on the other side to let me in, hoe in hand.
    “Afternoon.” He went back to weeding the tomatoes Mama let him plant all the way around the inside of her fence.
    The guy hardly ever spoke. Mama said that gardening was his only escape from taking care of his wife, who was dying long and hard of Alzheimer’s. But Mama’s motives weren’t completely altruistic: she loved home-grown tomatoes, and his were prizewinners. His own little yard was crammed with gorgeous vegetables, which he also shared with her.
    I noted that some of the tomatoes were almost ripe. “How do you get them to ripen so early?” I asked him.
    He beamed. “Plant ’em early, in March,” he said. “I cut the bottoms out of gallon jugs and cover them. On warm days, I take off the jug tops. Only way to get tomatoes in June this far north.”
    It was the most he’d ever said to me in fifteen years. “You’re a real wonder-worker in the garden.”
    He hesitated, frowning, as if he owed me a compliment in response. “Your mama’s lucky to have you lookin’ out after her.” His face flushed with embarrassment.
    “Thanks.”
    He went back to his hoeing, so I headed inside with the food.
    I didn’t bring up our brief conversation because Mama would analyze it to death, and I didn’t want to talk about the man behind his back.
    “Hey, Mama!” I called over the blare of The Match Game, carrying the food down the narrow path to her TV tray.
    “Hey, yourself.” She didn’t turn down the TV. She never did. “What’d you bring?”
    “Fried chicken, pole beans, stewed corn, and devil’s food cake.” I set the containers on her tray. “What did you pick out for me to take?”
    “For heaven’s sake, Betsy, you just got here,” she deflected. “Can’t that wait? I haven’t even eaten.”
    I stood in the small space in front of her recliner, my nose twitching at ancient dust and decaying paper. “Mama, pick something. Now,” I said over the TV, “or I’m taking this food home with me and not coming back for a week.” We both knew it wasn’t an empty threat.
    Mama went canny. “How did I raise such a cruel child?” she repeated in cultured Southern tones. Despite her arthritis, she rose gracefully from her recliner and pulled a middle-sized box from atop the heap of stuff beside the TV. It was a miracle she could move at all, since her only exercise was going from the bathroom to the refrigerator and the sink and the microwave, then back to her chair. How she kept her figure was beyond me.
    Still, Mama was a striking older woman—beautiful even, if she’d just take some care with her