12. Willow
— ? —
Willow
It fitted first time, and that was the part that undid me.
I had random things and beer mats and a folded envelope under that leg all week and every one of them squashed flat by the second day. Fifteen pages of laid paper with a photograph in it did the job like it had been made for it.
I got down on the floor of Ruth’s kitchen with my cheek nearly on the boards and slid it in and put my hand flat on the tabletop and pushed, and nothing happened, and I sat back on my heels and laughed at absolutely nothing until it stopped being laughing and became something else entirely.
Then I got up and made Archie his lunch.
“Mama down.”
“Mama was on the floor, baby.”
“Why?”
“Fixing the table.”
Archie considered the table with enormous seriousness, put both hands on it, and shoved with all his weight.
“Table fix.”
“Table’s fixed.”
“BOAT.”
“Different subject entirely,” I said, “but yes.”
I never told Michael I did it. I never had to. He put his hand down on that table the next day, expecting the wobble, and found it steady, and I watched the back of my husband go completely still in my doorway with the rain coming off him.
He did not say anything about it. Neither did I. He said something about a phone number and then stopped saying it, and stood in my doorway dripping on Ruth’s floor, and I cut an apple into pieces with my back to him and let him have the whole minute to work it out.
It was the most honest conversation we had all summer.
Every office in town has a receptionist and it’s a problem when filing for a divorce.
Every one of them has a mother, and every mother has a friend at the club.
If I walked into a solicitor’s on Federal Street at ten, then by lunchtime it is not a decision anymore.
It is a maneuver. It has been discussed.
Kristina has heard, and Kristina hearing it before Michael does turns it into a thing done to the family rather than a thing done by me.
So I did not use anybody on that island.
Pia offered. Pia offered twice.
“There’s a man in Hyannis. Very discreet.”
“Pia.”
“He did the Athertons’ girl and she came out of it with a boat and a house in Chatham.”
“I’m not taking a lawyer off a Folger.”
“He isn’t a Folger, he’s a man in Hyannis.”
“Who does the Athertons,” I said, “who are two doors from your mother, who will know by Thursday, who will tell Michael by Friday, who will then know I went to a lawyer his family has used, which makes it a conversation.”
Pia opened her mouth and then shut it again, which for Pia is an entire white flag.
I sat in Ruth’s kitchen with a phone and thought about who I actually knew, on my own, without him, and the honest answer was almost nobody.
There was one. A woman I sat next to at somebody’s wedding, years ago, who spent the whole dinner telling me about her divorce with absolute relish and no self-pity, and who put her number in my phone at the end of it and said, and I have never forgotten this, “in case.”
She picked up on the second ring.
“Willow Folger.”
“Sutton,” I said, and heard myself say it.
There was a small pause.
“Right,” she said. “Boston. You want Boston. Don’t take anybody local, they’ll be very kind to you and it’ll be all over the island by Friday. I’ll text you a name. Ring her today, not tomorrow, because tomorrow is how people end up staying married for another ten years.”
“Can I ask you something first?”
“You can ask, and I’ll tell you if it’s the wrong question.”
“How long did it take you to be sure?”
“Wrong question,” she said, with no unkindness in it at all.
“Nobody’s sure. You’re not going to wake up one morning and feel sure.
You ring the woman, and then there’s a thing happening, and then you find out what you feel about the thing that’s happening.
That’s the whole method and everybody hates it. ”
“That’s horrible.”
“It’s completely horrible. Ring her anyway.” And she hung up, which I have decided is a kindness.
Alicia Harvey has a voice like a form.
“You’re on the island year-round?”
“For now.”
“For now. Right.” Typing. “And the child is two.”
“He is.”
“Grounds. This is not a fault state, but I ask anyway because it tells me what we’re walking into. Infidelity?”
“No.”
There was a pause with typing in it.
“You’re certain.”
“I’m certain.”
“Violence.”
“God, no.”
“Financial concealment.”
“Michael would put a receipt in a drawer for a coffee.”
“You’d be amazed how often I hear that sentence about a man who owns three companies I can’t find.”
“Not him.”
“Everyone says not him.” Typing. “Is there another woman?”
“No.”
“Is there a woman?”
I sat down on Ruth’s kitchen floor with my back against the cupboard and my eyes on the ceiling.
“There was a woman,” I said.
“Those are different answers and you gave me the second one first, which is fine. I just want us both to notice that you did it.”
“Christ.”
“Then what happened?” Alicia Harvey said.
The question nobody can answer on a form.
Because what happened was a chair. A two-year-old walked around an apartment picking up every object he loves and arranged them on a seat so it would be worth his father coming home, and his father lifted them off onto a side table in order to sit down.
That happened. That is the whole thing. And there is not a form in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts with a box on it that says my husband did not notice a wet plastic whale.
“He stopped noticing me,” I said.
“Right.”
“That’s not a ground, is it?”
“No,” she said. “But it’s usually the truth, so I ask.” More typing. “Four hundred and fifty for the initial consultation, and I’ll be honest with you. Given the surname, you will not enjoy the number after that.”
“I’ve got it.”
“You’ve got four hundred and fifty?”
“I have enough in an account with my own name on it,” I said. “I opened it the week before I married him. Nobody has ever put a penny in it but me. Now, it feeds me and Archie.”
The typing stopped.
“Say that again.”
“Which part?”
“The week before,” Alicia Harvey said. “You opened an account in your own name the week before you married a Folger.”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know.”
I looked at the window over Ruth’s sink, which looks at nothing at all.
“Because my mother cleaned houses for people who had everything,” I said, “and I watched what happened to the women in those houses when it stopped. They had nothing that was theirs. Not a bank account, not a car, not a door they could close. I watched it happen and I swore I wouldn’t be one of them. ”
There was a pause on that line, and it was the first pause Alicia Harvey had taken that wasn’t filled with typing.
“Mrs. Sutton,” she said, “that is the single most encouraging thing anybody has said to me this month, and I have had a very good month.”
He came at four.
He does not knock anymore. He gets out of the car and stands by it with his hands where I can see them, like a man surrendering a weapon, and he waits, and if I do not come out he leaves whatever he has brought on the wall and goes.
So far that has been: a bag of Archie’s clothes that Pia packed.
A tin of the tea Ruth used to keep in the left cupboard, which nobody sells on that island and which he must have got somebody in Boston to find.
A tide chart, laminated, because I had one on the wall and he had noticed it was last season’s.
Not one of those things came with a note. I checked all three.
I went down the path to meet him. I did not want him on that step, and I did not want to say it in that kitchen, because I have to live in that kitchen.
He got out of the car and saw my face and stopped where he was.
“Say it.”
“I filed this afternoon.”
He stood on the lane with his keys still in his hand and I watched my husband take it, and in fairness to him, he took it. He did not argue. He did not tell me I was upset. He did not reach for me or try to hold my hands or do any of the things he usually does to make a moment smaller.
“Right,” he said.
“That’s it? Right?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know. I had a whole speech prepared and you’ve taken all the corners off it.”
“Do you want to do the speech?”
“No.”
“You can do the speech, Willow. Honestly. I’ll stand here. I’ll listen to the whole thing.”
“I’m not doing the bloody speech.” And I heard it come out with an edge on it and I did not take the edge off. “I’m telling you myself because I’m not having you hear it from Ackroyd or from your mother or from a woman in a shop.”
“Thank you.” His voice went somewhere and came back. “Genuinely. Thank you for telling me yourself.”
“Okay.”
“Can I ask who you’re using?”
“Alicia Harvey. Boston.”
“Boston.” Something happened around his mouth that might have been the beginning of a smile in a different life. “You went off-island.”
“I did.”
“Course you did.” He turned the keys over in his hand. “Is she any good?”
“Michael.”
“I’m not asking so I can do anything about it. I’m asking because if she’s not any good I’ll be sat awake worrying about it, and I’ve got enough on.”
“She’s good.”
“Right. Good.” And then, quieter, “Good.”
He looked down the lane, then at the house, then at me.
“Willow, can I-”
He stopped himself. He actually stopped himself, which he has never once done in the entire time I have known him.
“Can you what?”
“Can I still come tomorrow?”
And I stood in a lane in front of the house his grandmother taught me to cook in, holding nothing at all, having that afternoon paid four hundred and fifty dollars to begin ending my marriage, and I heard myself say it.
“Yes.”
He nodded once and got back in the car, and he did not thank me, which I noticed, and which I think he did on purpose, and I stood in that lane until I could not hear the engine anymore.