My husband Alden has been gone for two years now, and I want to tell you about the morning our homeowners association president stood at the edge of my driveway in Lorne Valley, Kansas, looked at the little garden I had planted for him along our side fence, and told me, calm as reading a grocery list, that grief does not buy a variance. His name was Reginald Larkspur. He had a clipboard in one hand and a printed notice in the other, and he handed me that notice the way a man hands you a parking ticket, like it was nothing personal, like it did not cost him a single thing to do it. Fifty dollars, the first one said. Unauthorized landscaping structure, section fourteen, subsection two. I want you to understand that section fourteen, subsection two did not exist. Not the way he used it. It took me the better part of a year, and a woman named Estelle Merrivale, and a binder that had been sitting in the back of a hall closet for eleven years, to prove that, but I am getting ahead of myself, and this is not a story I want to rush, because it took me a long time to live it and I think it deserves to be told the way it happened.
I should tell you first who I was before any of this, because I think it matters. My name is Maribel Ingram. I am fifty-nine years old, and I have lived in Lorne Valley my whole life except for four years in Manhattan, Kansas, at the state university, where I met Alden in a night class on small-engine repair that I had signed up for on a dare from my roommate and he had signed up for because he actually wanted to learn something. We married the summer after I graduated. Alden went to work for the county roads department, running a grader in the winter and a mower in the summer, the kind of job where a man comes home every night smelling like diesel and cut grass and you learn to love both smells because they mean he is home. We raised two kids in Lorne Valley, a son who is out in Colorado Springs now with the Air Force, and a daughter, Adaline, who stayed close, over in Ellsworth with her own family, twenty-five minutes down the highway.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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