My Husband's Dead Fiancée Came Back as My Backyard Hen

After the wedding, my husband moved his dead fiancée's mother into our guest room. The whole town called it the kindest thing they'd ever seen.

Every morning, Dione made me a green smoothie. Her grandmother's recipe, she said. Good for the nerves.

I never drank a single one. I poured them all into the chicken feed.

In my last life, I drank them. One a day, for thirty days.

Then I started losing time. I would blink at breakfast and come back at dinner. I found notes in my own handwriting that I never wrote.

I begged Julian to take me to a doctor. He held my shoulders and smiled. "You're just tired, baby. Drink your smoothie."

On the thirtieth night, I fell asleep in my own bed, in my own body.

I never woke up. Someone else did.

Her name was Celeste. My husband's first fiancée, the girl this whole town still mourns. She died two weeks before their wedding, and Julian never stopped loving her.

He just needed somewhere to put her.

This time, every glass went to Nugget, the smallest of my backyard hens.

And one night, a hen crowed in my backyard.

Hens don't crow. And we don't have a rooster.

Dione moved in on a Tuesday. Julian carried her bags up the porch steps himself.

"Maren, this is Dione," he said. "Celeste's mother. She'll be staying with us for a while."

He didn't need to tell me who she was. Everyone in Cedar Hollow knew Dione. The church took up a collection when her daughter died, and another one five years later, when she finally came home. By the time Julian offered her our guest room, half the town had already hugged her at the farmers market.

She smiled at me. Her eyes moved over my face and stopped, just for a second, on my collarbone.

"You're even prettier than your pictures," she said. "Julian, you didn't tell me she was this pretty."

In my last life, I liked her on sight. She hugged me that first day and cried a little, and I thought, this poor woman, of course we have room. For a month she cooked my meals and rubbed my shoulders and asked every morning how I'd slept. I told her things I never told Julian.

"Thank you," I said. "Come in. I'll show you your room."

By dinner she had taken over my kitchen. There was a glass sitting by my plate, thick and green, and underneath the mint I caught a smell I remembered — something earthy, like turned-over dirt.

"My grandmother's recipe," Dione said. "Good for the nerves. One glass a day, and in a month you'll feel like a whole new you."

"That's so kind," I said. "But I can't. I'm allergic to meal replacements. They make me break out."

Julian set down his fork. "Maren. It's one smoothie."

"She lost her daughter." He said it quietly, as if Dione weren't sitting three feet away. "She has nobody left. The whole town knows what she's been through, and all she wants is somebody to take care of. Can you not give her this one thing?"

In my last life, I stopped drinking them once. Four days, blaming a stomach bug. On the fifth day, that same earthy taste turned up in the soup, then the tea, then the gravy. I never did find out everything she'd put it in.

A glass she handed me was a glass I could follow.

So I sighed, the way a wife sighs when she gives in to a good husband. "Fine. But I'm having it in the mornings, with my journal. Alone. That's my quiet time, and I'm keeping it."

Dione's whole face opened up. "A morning ritual. That's exactly right. Celeste used to—" She caught herself, still smiling. "That's exactly right, sweetheart."

The glass was on the counter at seven the next morning, still sweating from the blender. I told Dione it smelled wonderful, carried it into my study, and went out the back door.

The chicken run sits ten steps from my study door. Six hens, all named after food, because it makes Julian's friends laugh at barbecues — Dumpling, Teriyaki, Gumbo, Brisket, Tempura. And Nugget, the little gray one with the ragged wing, who eats from her own bowl by the fence because the others chase her off the feeder.

Nugget was already waiting at the fence, pacing.

I poured the glass into her bowl. She went at it like she'd been starving all her life, pecked it clean, and looked up at me for more.

"Good girl," I said.

Dione was in the kitchen when I brought the glass back. She took it and turned it over, checking the inside, and her shoulders came down.

"How do you feel?"

"It's got a taste," I said. "Kind of earthy. But it's good for me, right? I can live with that."

She beamed at me. "You'll get used to it, sweetheart. I promise."

That night I lay with my back to Julian's side of the bed and kept my breathing slow and even.

Around midnight, the mattress shifted. The drawer of his nightstand slid open, careful, an inch at a time.

Through my lashes I watched him lift out something small on a chain and close his hand around it.

"Twenty-nine more days, my love."