Chapter 2 - The Text Message and the Black Gloves
The following morning, my mother-in-law sent me a text.
Joyce Murray was a woman who viewed the world through the narrow lens of country club memberships, proper table manners, and the unshakeable belief that the Murray family name was a brand that required constant, defensive protection. She had never particularly liked me. She had spent eleven years dropping subtle hints about my lack of social pedigree, my decision to major in accounting instead of art history, and my refusal to join the Overland Park Women’s League, which she considered a vital duty for any woman married to an ambitious executive.
She believed Kevin deserved a wife who supported his career without ever questioning his financial ethics or his late nights at the office.
Her message arrived at 8:14 AM, right while Michelle was pouring me a second cup of black coffee at her kitchen table:
Kevin tells me you’ve agreed to leave. Good. Donald would have wanted us to move forward as a family without unnecessary friction. Sign the papers, Amanda, and let everyone get on with their lives.
I stared at those words on the glowing screen of my phone, watching the little typing dots blink and disappear as if Joyce were sitting across from me, tapping her manicured fingernail against the glass.
Donald would have wanted us to move forward as a family.
The sheer hypocrisy of it made my stomach turn. Donald had spent the last year of his life visibly wincing every time Kevin talked about his corporate stock options or his plans to buy a BMW M3. Donald loved his son, but he saw through him with the terrifying clarity of a dying man who had nothing left to lose by being honest.
I took a screenshot of the message, saved it to a secure folder labeled Legal, and put my phone face-down on the wooden table.
"Everything okay?" Michelle asked, sliding a plate of buttered toast across to me.
"Joyce is already rewriting history," I said quietly.
"Joyce wouldn't know history if it bit her on her expensive beige loafers," Michelle snorted, wiping down the counter with a damp sponge. "Don't let that woman get into your head, Amanda. You’ve got a roof over your head, you’ve got me and Mom, and if Kevin thinks he can sweep you under the rug with a twenty-thousand-dollar check, he’s about to find out what happens when you mess with a woman who reconciles corporate bank statements for a living."
I managed a tight smile, though the knot in my stomach refused to loosen.
Saturday morning arrived cold and gray, the kind of late-autumn Kansas morning where the wind cuts straight through your wool coat and the sky looks like wet slate.
We attended Donald’s funeral at a small, austere Lutheran church on 75th Street. It was the same church where Donald and Joyce had been members for forty years, a place of dark oak pews, stained glass depicting solemn-faced apostles, and an organ that always sounded slightly out of tune on the lower notes.
Kevin wore a charcoal bespoke suit and stood near the heavy wooden entrance doors, shaking hands with senior executives from Peterson Supply and various country club acquaintances. He looked composed, solemn in all the right places, and almost disturbingly pleased with himself. Every time someone patted his shoulder and offered condolences about his father, Kevin gave a solemn, knowing nod that suggested he was already stepping smoothly into the patriarch's shoes.
Alexis wasn't there. Even Kevin had enough tactical sense to realize that bringing his mistress to his father’s funeral two days after evicting his wife might push even his mother’s tolerance for social expedience.
Joyce sat in the front pew, flanked by two elderly cousins from Topeka. She wore a heavy black wool coat, a matching veiled hat, and a pair of vintage black leather gloves that looked like they belonged in a 1950s spy movie.
I sat three rows back on the left side, with Ruby sitting quietly beside me, coloring in a small notebook with a box of Crayola crayons Michelle had packed. Ruby wore a navy blue dress with a white collar and black Mary Janes. She didn't understand why we were in church instead of at home, but she understood that she had to be quiet, and she sat there with her little knees pressed together, focused entirely on coloring a blue horse.
After the service concluded and the casket was wheeled out toward the hearse, the congregation moved slowly toward the front doors to offer final condolences.
Joyce broke away from her group and approached me near the baptistry font. Her face was set in lines of severe disapproval.
"You should have sat with the family," she said, her voice dropping into a harsh, controlled whisper so the surrounding mourners wouldn't overhear.
I looked down at her black leather gloves, the heavy pearl earrings she’d worn to every Thanksgiving dinner for a decade, and the familiar, tightening expression around her mouth that I had endured for eleven years.
"Would you have moved over, Joyce?" I asked softly.
Her mouth tightened into a hard, white line. "That is a deeply inappropriate thing to say, Amanda. Especially in the House of the Lord."
"Then we agree on something," I replied, taking Ruby’s small hand in mine. "Excuse us. Ruby needs to use the restroom before we drive back to Michelle's."
May you like
I didn't wait for her response. I turned and walked down the side aisle, leaving Joyce standing by the baptismal water with her mouth half-open, looking like a queen whose courtiers had suddenly forgotten how to bow.
We didn't attend the graveside burial at Elmwood Cemetery. Kevin hadn't invited us, and frankly, I didn't want to stand in the freezing wind watching him shovel dirt onto a man who would have been deeply ashamed of how his son was behaving.
