At the wedding, my mother-in-law, the one with dementia, handed me a shaming placard and a filthy shoe.
"A girl who's pregnant before the wedding has to wear this and crawl a few laps on her knees. Otherwise the head of the collective won't let the two of you marry."
"If you want to blame someone, blame yourself for keeping your belt so loose. For the sake of the work credits and the baby, you'd better hang this on and get going."
I knew she was having an episode, so my first instinct was to explain that this wasn't the 1970s anymore.
But beside me, my husband clung to my arm, his face all pleading.
"My mom has dementia. If you tell her what year it is now, her mind can't handle it. She'll break down."
"Just go along with her. Everyone here understands you're only putting up with this out of respect for her. No one's going to laugh at you."
I couldn't get the refusal out.
Half pushed, half yielding, I hung the placard and the shoe on and took a few steps.
What I didn't expect was how fast that video would blow up all over the internet.
Netizens said I must have done something shameful, or I'd never have agreed to be humiliated like that.
And my husband didn't step in to clear my name. He watched, doing nothing, while the online harassment drove me to lose the baby.
As I lay dying, my mother-in-law smiled and made a call to my husband.
"Millicent Hughes's about to die. After that, all her money will be ours."
"Once she's dead, you can even build yourself a devoted-widower image and make even more. This dementia act of mine really wasn't for nothing!"
Given it all to do over again,
I looked at the mother-in-law putting on her show in front of me, and I smiled.
You love pretending you're trapped back in the 1970s. Fine. Then I'll send you back to the seventies for real.
One:
"Mom doesn't want you to be embarrassed on such a happy day, and Mom doesn't hold it against you that you're already carrying a child before the marriage. But this isn't a rule I made."
"If we don't do this, there'll be no work credits, our rations get cut, and the whole family and the baby will really starve to death."
My mother-in-law, Faith Walker, staggered toward me, holding up the placard and the ugly, broken shoe.
That placard she'd written in chicken blood, and the shoe had been picked up from who knew where. It reeked of rotten eggs and rotten cheese.
Before she even got close, the stench nearly made me gag.
Seeing that I not only didn't take it but stepped back twice,
Faith's cloudy eyes flickered with a streak of viciousness.
"Just take it as me begging you. If that's not enough, Mom will kneel down for you."
The moment she said it, her knees buckled as if to drop, and beside me my husband, Phil Harding, reacted fast, catching Faith and easing her into a nearby chair before anyone else could react.
That coordination was the kind of seamless timing you only get from rehearsing it countless times.
And it wasn't just their teamwork. That placard and that shoe were things I had never once seen at home, and both were obviously prepared well in advance.
So this wasn't Faith suddenly having an episode. It was long premeditated.
The pity of it was that I only understood all of this after I had already died once.
Phil didn't notice anything off about me. He pulled me aside and lowered his voice.
"You've seen my mom's test results yourself. Her mind's clouded, she keeps getting the time and place mixed up. We can't expose it, we can only go along with her."
"Just agree to her this once, play along with her. You know how it is, her episodes only last a day. When she's better tomorrow, she'll apologize to you and treat you even better."
"And have you forgotten what happens when we don't go along with my mom during one of her episodes?"
