My mother-in-law knocked the wine out of my hand at Christmas and said I’d had enough. I’d had half a glass. I’d been sober eleven years at that point, everyone in that house knew it, and she said it loudly enough for the entire kitchen to hear. The glass hit the carpet, and she looked at the stain and then at me. “We all know how this goes,” she said. Nobody answered her.
My husband’s brother’s wife—a woman I’d spoken maybe forty words to in six years—got up and went to the kitchen. She came back with a towel and a fresh glass. She poured it herself, in front of everybody, set it down in front of me, and said she was tired of watching people pretend they didn’t know what was happening. My mother-in-law told her to stay out of it. She said she had stayed out of it for six years and that was exactly the problem.
Then she pulled a folded piece of paper from her pocket. She said she’d found it in an old box while cleaning her husband’s garage, and she’d kept it because she wasn’t sure what it meant. It was dated eleven years earlier, the week I stopped drinking. My name was on it, along with the names of two people in the room. I recognized one immediately, but the other was someone I had never heard mentioned in our family. My mother-in-law saw the paper and suddenly stopped arguing.
My husband’s brother’s wife looked at me and said she had one question before she handed it over. She asked whether I’d ever been told why my mother-in-law had insisted on being the one to drive me home the night everything supposedly happened. I said no. Then she unfolded the paper and showed me the last line, written in my husband’s handwriting. It said, “If she ever starts asking questions, tell her she was drunk and doesn’t remember.”
