My Husband Buried Me in Gossip, So I Came Back With His Brother novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Toast
At Todd's fortieth birthday party Jo knows every word of the toast he is about to make, takes the microphone out of his hand, and finds a man at the back of the tent who died after she did.
Todd tapped the microphone, and I knew the joke before he made it.
I was standing at the dessert table in his mother's backyard with a serving spoon in my hand.
The last time I stood here, I laughed along with everyone else.
Within the year, I died in a locked room at the county hospital.
"To my wife," Todd said, "who has never once remembered my pills or her own."
Eighty people in a rented white tent laughed, because they had laughed last time too.
The May sun came through the canvas and lay warm on my arm.
The sheet cake in front of me was shaped like a pickup, with the name of his car lot piped on the door in blue.
I knew how it tasted.
I knew that my eleven-year-old daughter would lick the frosting windows off the cab before anyone cut it.
She was already reaching.
I knew the rest, too, and I will say it once.
At Thanksgiving, Todd would hand me divorce papers in front of twenty-two relatives, with his girlfriend's name already on a place card.
His mother would read the label on my anxiety pills out loud, one at a time, to the whole table.
Our family doctor of twenty years would say I had not been myself.
I lost my son and my daughter in a week.
By December I was in a hospital hold with the word unstable on my chart, and nobody believed a word I said.
One visitor kept coming anyway.
On my last night he stood at the nurses' desk and pounded his fist on it and shouted down the hall, "Somebody check her head!"
That was the last thing I heard.
Now Todd grinned out at his guests, pleased with himself, and waited for the second laugh.
Our son, fifteen, stood by the cooler and laughed with the rest of them.
It hurt more than I expected.
Then I noticed the man at the end of my table.
He wore a gray work shirt with chalk on the sleeves, and he was the only one under that tent who was not laughing.
He was Todd's older brother, Dale, and he was looking straight at me.
His voice was low, under all the noise, so that only I could hear it.
"Somebody check her head," he said.
My hand closed on the serving spoon.
Nobody alive could know that sentence but me and one other person.
I set the spoon down on the table.
Then I walked across the grass to my husband, in front of everyone, and took the microphone out of his hand.
Todd's smile stayed on his face, but his eyes asked what I thought I was doing.
"Thank you, Todd," I said into the mic.
My voice came out steadier than I felt.
"That was sweet. I remembered one thing for you, so I thought I'd say it while everybody's here."
Somebody near the front gave an uncertain laugh.
"Your landlord's letter is in the glove box of the blue truck, under the tire gauge."
The tent got quiet from the front to the back.
"It's about March," I said. "The lease on the Tiffin Avenue lot isn't being renewed."
"You've had it since April," I added, "and I read it so you wouldn't have to."
Todd's hand came up, reaching for the mic, and I stepped back out of range.
"Congratulations on forty, honey," I said. "Who wants cake?"
I did not wait for an answer.
I carried the microphone back to the stand, laid it down, and picked up the cake knife.
Behind me, eighty people started talking at once.
I cut the tailgate off the truck and slid it onto a paper plate.
My hands were shaking, so I braced the plate on the table until they stopped.
A shadow fell across the frosting.
Dale had come up beside me.
He did not say hello, and he did not say happy birthday.
"How long have you been back?" he asked.
I looked up at his face, tired and bearded and alive, and for the first time since the hospital I was not alone.
"Since the toast," I said.
I put the plate in his hand.
"Hold this," I said. "My daughter's coming for the windows, and I need the cab."
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