His Wife Wore My Mother’s Ashes to Dinner

The dinner was for Lydia's obstetrician and his wife. Azrael wanted it perfect, so I was told to serve.

I wore the black dress from the service closet. It didn't fit right, tight across the chest, loose at the waist. I didn't complain. I carried the soup tureen out on a silver tray, careful, both hands under it, the way the housekeeper had shown me that morning.

Lydia stood up when I got close. "Let me help you, sweetie. That looks heavy."

I didn't have time to step back. Her hand closed around the ladle and tipped it, and the soup came down in a hot rope across my knuckles, my palms, the backs of both hands at once. I heard myself make a sound, short and sharp, before I could stop it.

"Oh my god!" Lydia's hand flew to her mouth. "Oh my god, I'm so sorry, I don't know what happened, the tray must have tilted—"

The doctor's wife gasped. Someone pushed a napkin at me. I took it and pressed it to my hands and said, "I'm fine. Excuse me," in a voice that came out steadier than I felt.

I walked to the bathroom off the hall and locked the door and ran my hands under cold water until they went numb. Blisters were already rising, white and shiny, across both palms. I found gauze in the cabinet — I'd learned where everything was kept, in case — and wrapped my hands myself, slow, careful, biting down on nothing because there was nothing to bite down on. Just me and the mirror and the sound of dinner going on without me.

Azrael came to the service room that night, after the guests left. He stood in the doorway and looked at the white gauze on my hands for a long three seconds.

Then he looked back at his phone.

He didn't say anything. Not *are you okay*. Not *what happened*. He just turned and walked away, and I heard his footsteps go down the hall, unhurried, like he'd checked a box and moved on.

I sat on the edge of the cot and looked at my bandaged hands and thought about how loud silence could be.

---

Two days later, Azrael called me into the study. Lydia was already there, one hand resting on her belly, sitting in the good chair by the window.

"There's a chapel upstate," he said, not looking at me, looking at a folder on his desk instead. "Lydia wants to make an offering. For the baby."

"Okay," I said. I didn't know why he was telling me this.

"You'll go with her." He finally looked up. "You'll walk the trail. Barefoot. It's tradition — a sacrifice, for the child's health."

I stared at him. "Barefoot."

"It's a mile," Lydia said, soft, sympathetic, like she was doing me a favor by explaining. "It's not far. And it means so much to us." Her hand smoothed over the curve of her stomach. "You'd do that for the baby, wouldn't you, Maren? You're not that cruel."

I looked at Azrael. He was already back to his folder.

I didn't argue. I'd learned that arguing just gave them a longer show.

---

The trail was gravel and shale, cutting up through pine trees toward a white chapel at the top of the ridge. Lydia rode in a hired sedan chair, carried by two men in matching jackets, a wool blanket over her lap even though it wasn't cold. She held a paper cup of tea and sipped it as the chair swayed along beside me.

"You're doing so well," she called down, watching my feet. "Oh — you're bleeding. Should we stop? Do you need to stop?"

She didn't stop the men carrying her. I kept walking.

The first quarter mile was just sharp stones, bearable if I picked my steps. After that the gravel turned to shale, thin flat pieces that bit into the arches of my feet, and I stopped picking my steps because there was nowhere clean to put them. By the halfway point I stopped looking down at all. I looked at the chapel spire instead, small and white against the grey sky, and made myself count the trees between me and it instead of the pain.

A root caught my heel near the top and I went down on one knee. Lydia's sedan chair paused just long enough for her to lean out and say, "Careful, honey. We don't want you making a scene here too," before waving the men forward again.

I got up. I finished the mile.

At the chapel, Lydia lit a candle and bowed her head and let someone take a photo of her doing it, her hand on her belly, her face soft with performed grace. I stood behind her, blood drying between my toes, and said nothing.

Back at the penthouse, I locked the bathroom door and ran the tub with the coldest water I could stand. I picked gravel out of my own soles with tweezers from the medicine cabinet, one piece at a time, my hands still stiff under their bandages from the soup. Nobody knocked. Nobody asked.

I wrapped my feet myself, in gauze I'd started keeping under the sink, a small private stockpile, because I already knew I'd need more before this was over.