PART 3 — MOVE
Jeff came home after midnight, still laughing from his own party. Under the kitchen light he found three things laid out on the counter. An offer letter. My car keys. And a one-way plane ticket, Columbus to Seattle.
The offer was from the University of Washington. Assistant Director of their library science department. I had applied on a whim at two in the morning after one of his jokes, never expecting to hear back. They offered it to me three weeks later. I had been too afraid to say yes.
That night, in the steakhouse parking lot, I finally stopped being afraid. I earned a masters degree at night for three years and no one in my own house ever noticed. I was not the woman who could not do anything else. I was the woman who had quietly done everything.
For ten years I was the punchline at my husbands table, and it turned out I was the only one in the room with a graduate degree and a job offer across the country.
Jeff read the letter three times. He could not understand how his wife, the one he kept around because she could not do anything else, was moving two thousand miles away to run a university department.
I did not scream at him or list every joke from ten years of dinners. I did not need the last word. The plane ticket was the last word.
Our three children were grown. I told them the truth, that their mother was going to go be good at something in front of people who would clap instead of laugh. Every one of them told me to go.
I flew to Seattle in September. On my first day a young librarian asked what had brought me across the country. I smiled and said, I finally took a joke seriously. My own worth. It stopped being funny, so I left.