He Hits You? Suck It Up So I Locked Them in With My Abusive Husband novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Vault
At his mother's birthday dinner Jean shows the table her bruise, is told to suck it up, and locks eight of them in the watch room with Conway. The first paramedic through the gate is Nate.
At his mother's birthday dinner, I pulled up my blouse in front of twenty people and showed them what my husband had done.
The bruise ran from my hip to my armpit.
It was black in the middle and green at the edges.
Conway had pushed me into the kitchen counter four nights ago.
It was the fifteenth time in four years.
I had counted every one.
Nobody at the table said a word.
Then his mother set down her fork.
"Oh, Jean, sweetheart," she said gently. "Pull that down before you catch cold. We'll talk after the cake."
My mother leaned across the cranberry sauce.
"Honey, we've talked about this," she said. "He doesn't mean it. It's the drink."
Conway's uncle nodded and kept chewing.
"A man can't help himself when he's had a few," he said. "And he's so good to you the rest of the time."
His aunt patted my wrist as if I had spilled something.
"Nobody throws away a marriage over a few bad nights," she said.
The pastor who had married us folded his napkin.
"Suck it up and pray, Jean," he said. "That's all a wife can do."
Conway sat at the head of the table in a pressed blue shirt.
He swirled his whiskey and smiled at me kindly.
"She bruises easily," he told the table. "I keep telling her to see someone."
Diane, his mother, reached into her handbag and took out a flat steel bottle.
She topped up his glass without looking at him.
She did that at every family dinner.
I looked at my husband's hands.
In four years he had never put a fist through a wall.
He had never knocked over a lamp or thrown a plate.
Thirty-one Rolexes sat in glass cases in his watch room, and not one had a scratch.
The Murano vases on the shelf beside them had never lost a chip.
Only I got hurt.
I pulled my blouse down, and I made up my mind.
"Conway," I said. "Show your mother her present."
His face lit up.
He had bought Diane a vintage Rolex Daytona, and he had been waiting all night to hand it over.
"Everyone come see," he said, and stood up.
Eight of them followed him.
The other twelve guests had already gone out for their coats.
Diane and my mother, Carol, went first, then the uncle and the aunt.
Two cousins came behind them, and the pastor, and a family friend who had told me last Christmas that all marriages have weather.
I walked at the back.
The watch room was off Conway's study, behind one steel door with a keypad.
He punched in the code and swung it open.
Inside, spotlights lit the glass cases and the shelf of vases.
They filed in and bent over the Daytona.
Conway laid his hand flat on the case lid and smiled down at the watch.
I stayed in the doorway.
"I'll get the cake," I said.
Nobody looked up.
I stepped back, and the heavy door swung shut on its own.
The bolt went home with a thud.
Conway had added me to the vault's alarm app years ago, so I would be the one blamed if a watch went missing.
He never told me what the red button did.
I had read the manual on the bathroom floor last winter, one page at a time.
I opened the app and pressed LOCKDOWN.
The door ignored every code for the next forty minutes, even his.
The intercom crackled above the keypad.
"Jean?" Conway said, slurring. "Baby. Open the door."
I held my thumb over the speaker button.
"You all told me he can't help it when he's drunk," I said. "So stay in there with him, and see what he can't help."
Fists hit the steel.
The aunt screamed my name.
Diane's voice came through, cold and clear. "Jean Slocumb, you open this door this minute."
"No," I said.
I walked into the hall and called 911.
I told the dispatcher my husband beat me when he drank.
I told her he was locked in a room with eight members of his family and that I was the one who locked it.
I gave her my name and the address, and I did not hide anything.
I said I would open the door for anyone with a badge.
Then I stood in the hall and watched the vault camera on my phone.
Nine people stood under the spotlights.
Conway did not move toward any of them.
He walked down the aisle between the cases with his hands in his pockets, and he did not bump one case.
He did not raise a hand to his mother.
He did not raise one to the pastor, who was shouting in his face.
He was drunk enough to put me on the kitchen floor, and he stepped carefully around every shelf.
I put my phone against my chest and breathed.
Sirens came up the hill.
I opened the front gate with the app and stood on the porch with my blouse still wrinkled where I had gripped it.
The ambulance came first, then two patrol cars.
A paramedic jumped down with a bag on his shoulder.
He was broader than I remembered, with a scar through his left eyebrow.
I had not seen him in nine years.
Nate Trumbull looked at my face, and then at my hand pressed against my ribs.
"Jean?" he said.
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