Chapter 2

2: 2

But no one cared what I thought.

So I just lay there in the yard on the ground floor, until the cold morning dew soaked through and froze me awake. I got up unsteadily, and before I could even wash my face, my husband came storming in from outside.

"I told you to wash the clothes, not roll them through the pigpen! Look at you, clumsy and useless, you've gotten everyone's clothes dirty!"

He was about to say more, but the sight of me in such a sorry state softened him.

"Ah, forget it, forget it. There's no work at the site today anyway, I'll handle these chores. Go lie down and get some rest."

And with that, ignoring the mud all over me, he coaxed me gently back into the house.

That kind of patience, that kind of tenderness, left me a little dazed.

Zane and I met during that earthquake in the Ozarks. The aftershocks kept coming, and the rescue grew harder by the hour.

Not to mention that my whole body was pinned under a slab of mud and debris. Most people had given up on me, because the time it would take to save one person like me was enough to save ten others.

But there was one young man. He was crying, shouting, digging alone with a single shovel.

One hour, two hours, three... until his arms trembled so badly he couldn't even hold a pair of chopsticks to eat, and still he gritted his teeth and kept on.

In the end, he did it.

So I owe him my life. All these years, carrying this household on my own, I never once complained.

It's just that, in the quiet dead of night, I still find myself missing the Zane who cherished me like the apple of his eye.

Back then, he wouldn't dream of letting me wash clothes in the cold of autumn. Even in summer, if I stayed outside too long, it pained him.

I looked at Zane, who had just finished wiping my face and was now massaging my shoulders, and asked, a note of pleading in my voice,

"Zane, next month's donation money, could we set a little aside for the family? One more good deed or one less, nobody's keeping count anyway. It's mainly Mom's condition—" it had worsened, and she needed surgery.

The moment I brought up keeping something for the family, Zane's face changed.

"Irma Vance! You, you, you, what am I supposed to do with you!"

"People out there call me the neighborhood Good Samaritan, so I have to live up to it! Cutting corners is out of the question."

"And another thing, can you stop using Mom's condition as an excuse? Mom said it herself, she's fine, and she told me to go ahead and do what I want with a clear conscience."

"She's her age and she still understands sacrificing herself for the greater good, so why can't you grasp such a simple thing!"

I let go of the hand I'd been holding. The warmth that had just risen in me was already gone.

I remembered how, to support his good deed of paving the roads in the neighborhood, I'd handed over every cent of my dowry, and how he'd cupped my hands with tears in his eyes.

"Having you is a blessing I earned over eight lifetimes!"

And how, in the dead of winter, when he didn't have enough money to give warm clothes and heating money to the old, the weak, the women, and the children, I pawned the gold bracelet my mother left me.

In those first few years of marriage, Zane praised me more than once. He said I was the best wife in the world.

But in recent years, after we bought the house, after my mother-in-law fell ill, after his older brother died of a serious illness, and with the pressure of my long years unable to conceive all piling up, I simply couldn't go along with him and support him in everything anymore.

And then I felt his attitude toward me turn far colder than before.

You could see it in how one extra dish on my birthday was enough for him to tear me apart.

Yet before all this, he'd worked at the site through an entire summer, got heatstroke more than once from the sun, just to give me a gold necklace on my birthday.

The image surfaced in my mind of him drenched in sweat, grinning like a fool as he held out that gold necklace and asked me, "Do you like it?" And then his mouth opening and closing now.

"Learn a thing or two from your late brother's widow. She's a lot more conscientious than you."

Every third sentence about the people, every fifth about the widow.

And beyond that, nothing but his disdain for me.

Zane, I'm so tired.