Divorced, my husband threw an old pillow at me with a sneer. When I unzipped it to wash it, I was stunned by what was inside…
Héctor and I had been in marriage for five years. From the very first day I became his wife, I got used to his cold words and his indifferent glances. Héctor wasn’t violent or loud, but his apathy made my heart wither a little more each day.
After our wedding, we lived in his parents’ house in a neighborhood in Mexico City.
Every morning I woke up early to cook, do laundry, and clean
Every evening I sat and waited for him to come home, only to hear him say,
“Yeah, I already ate.”
I often wondered if this marriage was any different from being a tenant. I tried to build, I tried to love, but all I got in return was an invisible void that I couldn’t fill.
Then one day, Héctor came home with a cold, blank face.
He sat down opposite me, handed me a divorce paper, and said in a dry voice: – Sign it. I don’t want to waste either of our time anymore.
I froze, but I wasn’t surprised. With tears welling up, I took the pen with a trembling hand. All the memories of waiting for him at the dinner table, of the times I had stomachaches in the middle of the night that I endured alone, suddenly came flooding back like deep cuts.
After signing, I packed my things.
As I was pulling my suitcase out the door, Héctor threw the pillow at me, his voice full of sarcasm: – Take it and wash it. It’s probably about to fall apart. I took the pillow, my heart constricting. It really was old; the pillowcase was faded, with yellowed stains and torn spots.
It was the pillow I had brought from my mother’s home in a small town in Oaxaca when I went to university in the city, and I kept it when I became his wife because I had trouble sleeping without it.Childbirth classes
He used to grumble about it, but I still kept it. I left that house in silence.
Back in my rented room, I sat dazed, looking at the pillow. Thinking about his sarcastic words, I decided to take off the pillowcase to wash it, at least so it would be clean and I could sleep well tonight, without dreaming of painful memories.
When I unzipped the pillowcase, I felt something strange. There was something lumpy inside the soft cotton fluff. I reached my hand in and stopped dead. A small paper bundle, wrapped very carefully in a nylon bag.
I opened it with trembling hands. Inside was a stack of money, all 500-peso bills, and a piece of paper folded into four.
I opened the paper. My mother’s familiar handwriting appeared, shaky and wobbly: “My daughter, this is the money I saved for you in case of hardship. I hid it in the pillow because I was afraid you’d be too proud to take it. No matter what, don’t suffer for a man, my dear. I love you.”