How Far She Went

The eighth story of the collection opens on the south side of the US border with Mexico. An unnamed female protagonist looks back over the events leading to her ending up here—a displacement necessary to end the torture and alienation of a failed marriage. She recalls meeting her husband and the initial passion—then the pregnancy, the wedding, the death of the child, and the increasing frequency of his nights out with rowdy friends.

She thinks back to the multiple times her hometown church leaders and family encouraged her to understand that “this too [...] was her fault. She had driven him away with her coldness” and needed to “try harder [...] to ‘win him back’” (94). She remembers confessing what she believed to be her sins: that she had caused him to abuse her by provoking him with the very attempts to win him back that she had been instructed to make.

She recalls the moment her husband released her from her self-made prison of everyone else’s opinion—the moment he “boasted that he had married to avoid the draft” (95), invoking the others to help him to “be rid of her” (96)—and her family takes a collection to pay a lawyer to handle annulment proceedings.