Chapter 29 #2
That is the part nobody warns you about.
Five years of my life, every important piece of paper I signed had two lines, and mine was the lower one, and Ryder’s name was already there in that slanted printing he uses when he’s trying to be legible.
On these pages the second line simply wasn’t there.
There was white space where a husband goes.
I signed the first four without noticing and then I noticed, and my hand stopped on the fifth page in the middle of my own last name, and the closer waited, and Mia did not ask if I was all right, which was correct, and Brenda looked out the window at a parking garage.
Twenty-five thousand dollars left my account by wire at 10:41.
The confirmation came back on a slip of thermal paper the closer tore off and handed to me like a receipt for parking.
That money was six months of Ryder not existing, a hospital stay, a lawyer, and a woman on my porch. I put it in the folder with the rest.
At 11:20 the closer stacked everything, squared it, and said, “That’s a closing,” and Brenda took her key ring out of her coat pocket, worked a copper disk off the ring with her thumbnail, and put it in my hand. It was worn smooth on one face. THE COPPER KETTLE, stamped, the second E almost gone.
“Twenty-six years on my ring,” she said. “Put it on yours or don’t.”
I put it on mine, in the room, with everybody watching, and the new keys made a different noise than they had before closing.
Ryder learned it the way everyone else on that compound learned it, which was from a sheet of paper.
I posted the spring fundraiser notice in the clubhouse kitchen two days later: the Copper Kettle would supply it under a written order with a deposit, a delivery schedule, and a cancellation clause.
My name at the bottom as owner. His name nowhere, in any capacity — not husband, not investor, not guarantor, not driver, not emergency contact.
He was reading it when I came through with the second copy for Bear’s office and my keys pulling my coat pocket out of shape.
“Changes go in writing,” I said. “If Bear wants a different quantity or delivery time, he contacts me. Nobody asks you to negotiate because you happen to be standing in the kitchen.”
“I’ll send anyone who asks to you.”
“The bakery has its own driver. You don’t add a club vehicle.”
“Understood.” He was looking at the key ring.
“You may congratulate me,” I said, and heard how much I wanted it.
“Congratulations, Eden. You built it without putting your house or your business under anybody else’s name.”
“I didn’t do it alone. Brenda, Mia, June, Leah, the accountant, the attorney, the lender, and the employees helped.”
He took a second with that. “They helped. You own it.”
“Yes.” The copper disk turned over in my hand and caught the light off the ceiling fixture. “The seventh is still one date. Closing doesn’t change the terms.”
“I didn’t expect it to.”
“You hoped it would put me in a generous mood.”
“I hoped you’d want to celebrate with me,” he said. “I know you don’t owe me that.”
I went into Bear’s office and pinned my notice on his board, and on the way back out I heard Colin say it through the doorway, in the flat voice he uses on prospects.
“You signed away a cheap way into a profitable business.”
“It wasn’t mine.”
“You used to say that about her routes and then act like they were yours anyway.”
“I know.”
“Good. Stop saying it like knowing is the work.”
I stood in the hallway with two paper cups of Bear’s terrible coffee going cold in my hands and let them finish without me.
I sent the address through Mia on the sixth.
A used bookstore in a town twenty-two miles north that stays open until nine on Sundays, and then the glasshouse at the county conservatory, which is warm and green and full of wet air in February, and which I chose for my chest and not for romance and told nobody that.
He parked beside the porch rather than in front of the steps, and stood outside the truck in the cold with his hands where I could see them. I wore the dark green coat, which I had thought about for two days and put on anyway.
“Did you tell anyone where we’re going?”
“Mia has the route because you authorized it. Jax knows I’m unavailable and doesn’t know why. Nobody else heard it from me.”
“No tracking.”
“No tracking. My phone location is off.”
“If I ask to come home, you bring me home.”
“Yes.”
I walked to the passenger side and stood there, and he waited, and I understood that he was going to keep waiting.
“You used to open it,” I said.
“May I?”
“Yes.”
He opened it and kept his hand off my back while I got in, and the empty air where his hand would have been was its own kind of loud.
The bookstore smelled of paper, wood polish, and wet wool drying by the door.
I went to the mystery shelves without waiting for him to steer me, and he followed at whatever distance I set.
We talked about the sign out front of my bakery that I refuse to replace, and Brenda’s habit of filing repair receipts inside recipe binders, and whether the shop priced damaged books by age or by how bad the handwriting was.
In our first year married we came here and spent forty minutes arguing about a mystery novel some dead man had annotated in blue ink from the first page to the last. Ryder called it vandalism. I bought it. It is still on my shelf in the house he doesn’t enter.