«My Mother-in-Law Dumped a Watering Can Over My Head and Trampled the Tulips on My Husband’s Grave, Nine Days After the Burial, Right in Front of His Father…»
Yellow Tulips
I am thirty-three years old, and nine days ago I buried my husband.
He was thirty-six.
He drove a delivery van at night and worked a warehouse floor by day, and for four years I saw him mostly asleep on the sofa with his boots still on.
I used to be angry about it. I would give anything to be angry about it again.
He died on a Tuesday, on the ring road, at ten past five in the morning, on the way home from his third night shift in a row.
We have a four-year-old son. He still sets out two bowls at breakfast.
My husband’s mother never cried at the funeral.
I noticed that. I did not say anything.
At the church hall afterwards, she told his aunts, his cousins and half the congregation that I had worked him to death.
She said I was greedy. She said I wanted a bigger house and he had killed himself to buy it.
We rent two rooms above a launderette.
I let it go. People say terrible things when they are grieving, and I told myself she was grieving.
On the ninth morning I woke at six and could not breathe.
I did what I always do. I walked to the market and bought him yellow tulips, because they were the only flowers he ever bought me, one bunch every payday, from a bucket outside the petrol station.
I left my son with the neighbour.
It was raining a little. The cemetery was empty. The mound was still bare, only a plain wooden marker with his name burned into it.
I knelt down and said, «I’m sorry I was so tired.» I don’t know why I said it.
I did not hear the gravel.
«What are you doing here?»
His mother was standing behind me in her navy wool coat and her pearl earrings, holding the steel watering can that sits by the tap at the gate.
His father was a step behind her. He had his flat cap crushed in both hands and his eyes on the ground.
I stood up. I held out the tulips, as if they could explain.
She tipped the whole can over my head.
Cold water ran down my face and into my collar. It filled my mouth.
«You killed my son, you don’t get to cry here!» she screamed.
I could not answer. I was gasping.
She ripped the tulips out of my hands and threw them into the mud. Then she stamped on them, one after another, with the heel of her good shoe, until the petals were just yellow streaks.
She shoved me. I went down onto his grave, onto the wet, loose earth, with my hands in it.
«Please, I only brought his tulips,» I said. I was sobbing so hard that it hardly sounded like words.
His father looked away.
He did not say a word. He stared at the grass beside the marker as if he had never seen it before.
She took hold of my braid and pulled my head back until I was looking up at the sky.
She went on stamping on the tulips, right beside my face.
I was lying on my husband’s grave, nine days after I had buried him, soaked to the skin, with his mother standing over me.
And then someone at that grave did something nobody expected.
Four Words
I lay in the mud with my hair still wound round her fist, and I heard him say it.
«That is enough.»
He did not shout. In all their years of marriage, I learned later, he had never once raised his voice to her. He said it like a man putting down something very heavy.
She did not let go. She said, «Stay out of it. She took our boy.»
«No,» he said. «Listen to our boy.»
He let the flat cap fall into the wet grass. From the pocket of his jacket he took a phone, an old one with a cracked corner. I understood then why he had been staring at the ground. He had been trying to find the courage to press a button.
He pressed it.
The Voicemail
It was my husband’s voice.
I want to describe what that is like, and I cannot. It was ten to five in the morning, and he was in the warehouse car park, with a lorry reversing somewhere behind him and the engine of his van running. He sounded exhausted and happy.
«Dad, it’s me. I know it’s early. Listen, I’m on my way home, so I’ll be quick. The last payment cleared yesterday. Forty-one thousand, all of it. The riverboat people, the lender, everybody. It’s finished. Don’t tell Mum I told you. She’d never get over the shame. Just let her think the extra work was for the house, I don’t mind. But Dad, please. She needs somebody to blame when things go wrong, she always has, and she’ll pick my wife. Don’t let her. Be kind to them both for me. I’ll see you Sunday. I love you.»
There was a click. Then the little electronic voice said, Message received on Tuesday, at four fifty-one a.m.
It was the last thing he ever said to anyone.
Nobody moved. The rain went on falling on the tulips.
What She Had Hidden
She let go of my hair then. I felt it go slack.
His father said, very quietly, «He called me from the car park. He died twenty minutes later. I saw his name on the screen at breakfast on Tuesday, and I couldn’t. Not at the funeral, not for nine days. This morning I sat in the car at the gate and I thought, if I don’t listen to him now, I never will.»
He turned to his wife. «Four years. He worked three jobs for four years. You told me you’d sold your mother’s silver to pay the roof.»
She said it was a lie. She said the message was something the boy had cooked up for a joke, and then she remembered the date on it, and the word joke died in her mouth.
The truth came out in pieces, on a wet hill, with the groundsman watching from the gate. She had started going to the riverboat casino with her sister when his father retired. She had won a little, then lost a lot, and she had borrowed to win it back. In the end it was forty-one thousand dollars. She took out a loan against the house in her husband’s name without telling him, and when the lender began to call, she went to the one person in the family she thought would not tell his father.
My husband never said a word to me about it either. He had promised her.
I had spent four years thinking he was working for us. He was. He was working for me, and for our boy, and for his mother, and he had decided I did not need to carry that last part.
What Happened to Her
She did not argue any more. She sat down in the wet grass, heavily, next to the tulips she had ground into the soil, and put her hands over her face.
Her husband took the car keys out of her coat pocket. She let him.
He helped me up. He took off his own jacket, which was dry on the inside, and put it round my shoulders. He did not say sorry. He said, «I’m going to drive you home, and then I’m going to sit at your table, and then I’m going to tell every person you lied to the truth, one at a time. I’ll start with the church.»
He did. He went on the Sunday and stood up at the back and told them what the voicemail said. Not one person asked him to repeat it.
His wife went to the cemetery alone on the following Saturday. I know because the groundsman told me. She brought a bag of tulip bulbs herself. She planted them with a trowel, on her knees, and she left without a word.
She has asked to see my son. I have said yes, but only when his grandfather is there, and only at my table, and only for as long as I decide.
Months Later
My husband’s father pays for the headstone. He asked if he could, and I said yes, because it is what my husband would have wanted me to say. It is plain grey stone, and it says what he was: a son, a husband, a father. It does not say what he was worth to us. There isn’t a stone big enough.
My little boy still sets two bowls out at breakfast. Sometimes I let him. Sometimes the second bowl is for his grandfather, who comes on Sundays and eats the whole thing.
The tulips came up in the spring, yellow, every one of them. I did not plant a single bulb, and I have not told her that I go there to look at them.
Would you let her see your child again? Tell us in the comments.
