June 2023 Flash Lit 4 - One by One

 

But when they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the eldest, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus looked up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”  She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again.”  John 8:9-11

 

 

 

“No,” Maggie said.

 

“What do you mean, no?” Bill said.

 

“I mean NO.  I don’t want to do this anymore.  It’s not right,” she said.  “It’s not right.”

 

Bill smoothed his wavy hair back from his forehead.  “You know that means I will have to call in the loan.”

 

Maggie crossed her arms over her chest.  The cracking feeling in her heart was just the beginning, she thought.  Once Bill called in the loan, Jason, her husband, would ask why.  Bill would tell him.  He would tell Jason that not only was he going to take away the house, but he’d already destroyed the home.  Or Maggie had.

 

But looking at Bill’s smug face and his soft, banker’s hands, Maggie just couldn’t do it anymore.  She couldn’t look at the ceiling and think of Jason.

 

The trial took months.  Every day, Maggie forced her spine upright, put on a fresh dress.  She wrapped herself in an old raincoat for the dash from the car to the courthouse and once inside shoved the rotten-vegetable spattered coat in a plastic bag until the next trip through the angry crowd.

 

The first day had been the worst.  Jason’s large extended family had been among the tomato-throwers.  She had seen her neighbors’ faces distorted with disgust at her.  Even the woman who had poured her cup of coffee at the local café for years flung a mushy apple at her.

 

Bill’s lawyers were just as slick as he was and at least as expensive.  Maggie’s lawyer, Jenny, was neither slick nor expensive, but she was driven.  “We can win this,” she said.  “The truth is on our side.”

 

Maggie didn’t care much about the truth.  She just wanted peace.  The mob wasn’t going to give it to her.

 

But, as the weeks went by and the testimony trickled out, the crowd also trickled away, one by one.  Bill’s illegal and unorthodox practices around Maggie’s and Jason’s loan did not draw the kind of attention Bill liked.  Some other husbands in the community, also struggling to pay their bills, began to look at their wives differently.  Some other wives, thinking about their children, wondered what they might do in a similar situation.

 

Jenny said, characteristically deadpan, “People in glass houses, you know.”

 

Maggie thanked her when the verdict came in and went to gather up the shards of her own life.