3: 3
On the fifth day, my mother made her move.
She didn't come cry at the hospital again.
She switched battlefields.
That afternoon, Brad called me. His voice was colder than I'd ever heard it.
"Maud, your mother brought your uncle's whole family to my company to make a scene."
My head buzzed.
"She knelt outside our door, crying in front of dozens of people, saying you pocketed the dowry, that you're an ungrateful daughter, that you're jealous of your cousin, saying it was her fault for raising you wrong..."
"You know how my coworkers are looking at me now? Eight years of reputation in this industry."
I wanted to explain.
But what was there to say?
Brad was quiet for a long time. In the end he said just one thing.
"Let's call off the engagement."
I froze where I stood. All that was left in the phone was the dial tone.
The next day he mailed the annulment agreement to my rental. The terms were spelled out clearly: the entire three hundred thousand dowry to be returned in full.
My hand didn't shake when I signed.
I found I wasn't as heartbroken as I'd imagined.
In a world where even the woman who gave birth to me and raised me could use me up and throw me away, what was one man less?
But the thing that truly broke me happened three days after the engagement ended.
That day I was burning with fever. A hundred and three point five.
Half-conscious, I heard the door. My mother had let herself in with a spare key.
There was a pair of scissors in her hand.
"Maud, let me tell you something."
She sat on the edge of the bed and propped me up against the pillow.
"A woman who's had her engagement called off carries bad luck. That's just the rule. Let Mom cut your hair, shed the bad luck, so you can start over."
I flinched on instinct.
"Hold still."
She pinned my shoulders down, with a strength that didn't belong to a fifty-four-year-old woman.
Ten years of long hair, falling to the sheets one lock at a time.
I couldn't fight her off.
The fever had drained every bit of strength out of me.
At some point my cousin had come too, standing beside her, handing over a towel.
"Don't blame Aunt Marjorie, sis. She's just afraid your bad luck will rub off on me now that I've just gotten married."
She said it in a light little voice, but the satisfaction in her eyes was impossible to hide.
It was done.
My mother set the scissors down, cupped the loose scraps of my hair in her hands, and sighed.
"From now on stay home and help out your sister. Men can't be relied on. Mom will provide for you your whole life."
But I looked down at the hair all over the floor, and suddenly I had nothing to say.
I slid off the bed, knelt on the ground, and picked up the hair scattered across the floor, strand by strand.
Partway through, I stopped.
Not because it hurt.
Because something had just occurred to me.
She'd let herself in with a spare key.
I'd never given her one.
It was Brad's.
They... had been in on it together all along.
The engagement wasn't called off because he lost face.
It was because my mother had used my dowry to cut a deal with him.
