Lester Rowe stared at me, his eyes wide with shock, unable to believe what he was hearing. "You want a divorce over something this small?"
I shook my head. "I'm not the one who brought it up. You did. I'm just respecting your wishes."
Laurel's eyes reddened, her whole face a picture of wounded innocence. "Lester, don't fall out with your wife over me. She doesn't want me staying here, so I should just go back."
She made a show of turning to leave, and Lester caught her by the arm. He looked at her with aching tenderness. "Laurel, where would you even go? Your own family doesn't want you back after the divorce. All you'd have there is a mat on the kitchen floor. It's too cruel."
Then he rounded on me, furious. "Ruby, you'd drive Laurel to her death over one room? I already told you what she's been through."
"Her brother and his wife can't stand her. They make her do the laundry and cooking every single day. Her parents always favored the sons. She couldn't survive in that house."
"Sending her back now, that's the same as pushing her to her death."
I went rigid, looking at this man I'd spent three years with in the countryside and ten years married to after we came back to the city, and something in my chest sat heavy and stuck.
I'd never known he could be so attentive, so understanding of how hard a woman's life could be.
He knew Laurel had it bad at her family's home after the divorce, that her brother and sister-in-law made her do this and that, that her parents treated her poorly.
He'd just forgotten that I had lived exactly the same way in his house for ten years.
Every day I was up at five or six to cook for the whole family, then wash a household's worth of laundry.
Every month my wages had to be handed over. At meals I ate the least.
Because his mother said a man was the pillar of the house, the man had to eat his fill first, and a woman could get by on a few bites of whatever was left.
Most of the time he stayed at the school dormitory and only came home on weekends, and only when he was home was I allowed to sleep in the bedroom. Any time he wasn't there, the bedroom went to his brother and sister-in-law's kids, and I slept on a mat in the cold kitchen that reeked of damp.
I'd complained to him about it, and he'd only turned cold and scolded me. "Doesn't every married woman live this way? Mom's doing it for our own good. Can you not be so petty about it?"
Ten years in that kitchen and he never once felt for me, but Laurel spent one month on a kitchen floor after her divorce and he ached for her so much he threatened me with divorce to make me give up the bedroom.
So it turned out he did understand. He just cared about someone who wasn't me.
I looked down at the thick calluses on my palms, worn there by ten years of work. In those ten years I never once let myself rest. I ran myself like a spinning top. The night shifts nobody wanted, I took. The jobs everyone called too exhausting, I did.
I did all of it so I could earn my housing eligibility sooner and get out of that house that ate people alive.
Now I had my apartment, and the house was about to take in an outsider all over again.
"This apartment is what I earned after ten hard years. I slept in the kitchen at your family's place for ten years, and now you want me to sleep in the living room. Lester, do you really think that's fair?"
Guilt flickered across his face. He'd just opened his mouth when Laurel clapped a hand over hers, her voice all hollow despair. "I knew I was just in the way. Then I'd be better off dead."
With that she shoved past Lester and ran out.
Lester scrambled after her, not even caring that he knocked me down on his way.
I braced myself against the table and got up, then started packing the room myself, folding all the clothes that were mine into the closet. Lester's things I left untouched.
Then I went to the factory office. "Write me a referral letter. I want a divorce."
Freya Lambert, the office supervisor, and I got along well. When she heard I wanted a divorce, her face went blank with surprise. "Ruby, why so suddenly? Is it because of that Laurel woman?"
I nodded. "It is. Since the two of them are so devoted to each other, I'll let them have it."
