Chapter 5
Alma
Diego's lawyer was a man named Royce Whitmer, and he had the kind of voice that suggested he had inherited his practice from his father and had not, in any meaningful sense, ever lost a courtroom argument.
I learned his name from Knox.
Knox was Iron Vow's counsel. He had been Tomás's friend, too — apparently Tomás had befriended a great many lawyers, which makes more sense to me in hindsight than it did at the time — and he had agreed to represent me in the matter of Diego's legal challenge for what he called family rates, which I learned later meant free, which I tried to refuse and which he refused to allow me to refuse.
Knox was sixty-one. He wore three-piece suits in a town where most men wore flannel.
He was married to a woman named Margaux who had been his client and then his fiancée and then his wife, in that order, in a sequence of events that the town apparently still discussed at length when the gossip cupboards were bare.
Knox came over to the shop on a Friday morning in early November with a manila folder in his hand and a coffee from the diner in the other.
He said, "Alma. Your cousin filed."
I said, "What did he file."
He said, "A challenge to the will's execution.
Specifically, he is alleging that your marriage to Beckett was entered into in bad faith for the purpose of fraudulently satisfying the marriage clause.
He is requesting a court-supervised investigation.
The investigation will be conducted by a licensed private investigator of his retention, whose findings will be submitted to Judge Pruitt for review. "
I said, "How serious is it."
He said, "Procedurally, it's a nuisance.
Substantively, it's nothing. He has no evidence beyond his own resentment, and resentment is not a legally cognizable claim.
But the investigation is going to happen.
There will be an investigator. The investigator will interview people.
He will photograph things. He will, almost certainly, knock on your door at an inconvenient hour and ask whether your husband is home. "
I said, "How long."
He said, "Six to ten weeks, probably. He'll file his findings, your cousin's counsel will move on the findings, the judge will rule, we will, in all likelihood, prevail. But for those six to ten weeks, Alma, you and Beckett are going to be observed. You need to behave like married people."
I said, "We are married people."
He said, "I know. I'm saying you need to look like it from the outside, too."
I said, "Understood."
He set the folder on the counter. He sipped his coffee. He looked at me for a long moment over the rim of the cup.
He said, "Alma."
I said, "Yes."
He said, "How is it going. Honestly."
I said, "It's going well."
He said, "Are you sleeping."
I said, "I am sleeping."
He said, "I am asking the second question. Are you sleeping."
I said, "Knox."
He said, "I am sixty-one years old and I have, in my professional life, walked an unfortunate number of people through marriages of convenience.
I am asking you the question I always ask, which is whether you are taking care of yourself, because every single time, the person tells me they are, and every single time, I find out later that they were not, and I had to be the one to ask. So I am asking. Are you sleeping?"
I said, "I am sleeping fine."
He said, "Are you sleeping in your own bed."
I said, "Yes."
He said, "Is he sleeping in his own bed."
I said, "Yes."
He said, "Have you discussed not sleeping in your own beds."
I said, "Knox."
He held up his hands. He said, "I am not prying.
I am ascertaining. The investigator is going to be looking for inconsistencies.
If you have a roommate situation that the photographs are going to reveal — separate toothbrushes in separate bathrooms, no shared closet, men's clothing in the second bedroom — he is going to file that.
He is going to file it as evidence of a sham marriage. "
I had not thought about that.
I had, somehow, in all my organizing and contracting and listing, not thought about the fact that an investigator's photographs would show what the apartment actually looked like inside, and that the apartment, inside, looked like the home of two careful roommates rather than a married couple.
I said, "What do we need to do."
Knox said, "Move some things around. Have his razor on the same shelf as yours.
Hang a shirt of his in your closet. Put his books on the nightstand of your bed.
He doesn't have to sleep there. He just has to appear to.
Investigators look at the photograph, not the testimony, because they think the photograph is more honest. It's not, but he won't know that. "
I said, "Okay."
Knox said, "And the two of you need to be seen. Out. Together. Holding hands. Touching. The town has accepted your marriage because the town wanted to, but the investigator does not have that bias. He is paid to find cracks. The way you don't get cracks found is to not have cracks."
I said, "We don't have cracks."
Knox said, "Then show that."
He left.
I sat at the counter with the folder. I read the filing.
It was forty-three pages of what amounted to my cousin is unfair to me and I would like the court to fix it, dressed up in legalese, with footnotes.
Diego had not bothered to disguise his motives.
The filing was so plainly resentful that Knox would have a field day in court.
But Knox had not been lying — the investigation would still happen.
There would still be a man with a camera and a notebook.
There would still be the small ongoing performance of marriage, intensified now, brought up to the level of convincing rather than getting by.
I went home that night and I told Beckett.
He listened. He did not interrupt. When I was done, he said, "Okay. We adjust."
I said, "Knox said you need to have a razor in my bathroom."
He said, "Done."
I said, "You need to hang a shirt in my closet."
He said, "Done."
I said, "Your books need to be on my nightstand."
He said, "Done."
I said, "We need to be seen together. A lot. Holding hands."
He said, "Done."
I said, "Beckett."
He said, "What."
I said, "I'm sorry."
He said, "For what."
I said, "For the inconvenience."
He looked at me for a long second. He said, "Alma. I signed the contract. There's no apology required for the contract doing what contracts do."
I said, "I'm still sorry."
He said, "Noted."
The next four weeks were the strangest of my life.
We performed marriage.
We performed it at the diner, where Sienna sat us in the corner booth and brought us a single milkshake with two straws like a Norman Rockwell painting that someone had updated with leather jackets, and we drank from the milkshake and our knees touched under the table and I felt the touch in the soles of my feet.
We performed it at the hardware store, where I rested my hand in the center of his back while he asked the clerk about a specialty bolt, and his shirt was warm under my palm, and the clerk smiled at us the way clerks smile at couples, and I felt the smile land in my chest like a coin dropped in a slot.
We performed it at the club's Halloween gathering, where Beckett wore a flannel and I wore jeans and a Navarro Custom Cycles t-shirt because we had not had the energy to come up with costumes, and Sienna had pretended to be scandalized and then declared us too in love to bother, and we had stood by the bonfire and Beckett had put his arm around my shoulders, casually, the way a man puts his arm around his wife when he is not thinking about it, and I had leaned into him before I'd realized I was doing it.
That was when I started to be afraid.
Not of the investigator. Not of Diego. Of myself.
I had been raised by a mother who loved fully and unwisely and a father who loved carefully and never said so, and I had taken from each of them the lessons they had not meant to teach.
From my mother: that love, fully given, was sometimes received and sometimes not, and that the reception was the part you could not control.
From my father: that the controllable parts of love were the ones worth giving, and that everything else was sentiment, and that sentiment, in his estimation, was a luxury he had not been able to afford.
I had grown up, accordingly, into a woman who was excellent at the controllable parts.
Bills on time. Cards on birthdays. The reliable, durable, infrastructural love that holds a family together when the dramatic loves are off doing other things.
I had not, before Beckett, ever loved a man in the dramatic way.
I had loved my college boyfriend, but it had been my mother's love — fully given, partially received — and I had loved the boyfriend after him for two careful years that had ended without anyone being surprised.
I had thought I was a careful-love person.
I had organized myself around the assumption.
I was discovering, the way you discover a leak in a roof, that I was not.