6. Marnie
Marnie
Three weeks in, Sherry Corbett is in our calendar.
Tuesday lunches with April. A Thursday where she drives Erin to a college fair in Rochester because I have a dentist appointment I could have moved.
A Saturday barbecue where she brings a pasta salad and remembers that Drew is allergic to walnuts, which I did not remember, and I've known Drew for three years.
She asks questions. That's her method, and it's a good one. She asks Nathan about his classes and Erin about the swim team and Drew about underwriting, and she listens with her whole body, and people leave conversations with her feeling like the most interesting version of themselves.
She asks about the company too.
Nothing you could write down. What does an acquisition even mean, is that a real thing or a news thing? Does Keith still own most of it or did that change when it went public? How does the lockup work, is that why he still goes in every day?
She asks Keith. She asks Nathan, who knows more than he should because he's twenty and his father talks to him like a colleague now. Once she asks me, at the sink, drying a bowl.
"Can I say something and have it be stupid?"
"Always."
"I don't understand any of it." She sets the bowl down. "I keep nodding. I nodded for forty-five minutes at that barbecue about something called a float."
"Nobody understands it. Keith doesn't understand it, he just knows where to sign the papers.”
"You understand it."
"I did the books for six years out of a bedroom."
"See, that's what I mean." She turns and leans against the counter, arms crossed, comfortable in my kitchen in a way that took Drew two years to get to. "You built this too. Doesn't it drive you crazy that nobody says that?"
Which is a nice thing to say, I suppose.
But is it really such a nice thing to say if you’re trying to weasel your way into my family and take my place? I don’t know, at that moment, I don’t know.
I find the transfer early one morning.
I'm reconciling the joint account, which I do on the first and the fifteenth, which I have done on the first and the fifteenth since 2005 when we bounced a check to the pediatrician and I decided I would never feel that specific way again.
Five thousand dollars. Out. Tuesday the 26th.
S CORBETT.
The memo line says car.
I sit at the desk in the kitchen for a while with the laptop humming. There's a hummingbird at the feeder outside the window and I watch it the entire time, this fat green idiot who fights the finches.
Then I take a screenshot, because apparently that's who I am now.
Keith comes home at six thirty. I let him eat. I let him tell me about the earnings call prep and the thing with the German distributor and a story about Devi's kid, and I laugh in the right places, and then I bring my laptop to the table and turn it around.
He looks at it for two seconds.
"Her transmission went out."
"Okay."
"Her car's a two thousand eleven Elantra with a hundred and sixty on it and the transmission went and she can't get to work.
" He says it steadily, no apology in it, which tells me he's had this argument in his head already and won it.
"She was going to finance it at thirty-one percent through some place in Bloomington. "
"Okay."
"That's it? Okay?"
"I'm waiting to get to the part where you tell me."
He sits back. "It's just five thousand dollars, Marnie."
And there it is. The sentence. The one I have literally never heard him say in any form for twenty-four years, out of a mouth I've kissed maybe forty thousand times.
"Twelve weeks ago," I say, "five thousand dollars was our roof."
"That's not fair."
"We priced the roof in May. You said we'd wait until spring and I put the number in the sheet, and the number was seven thousand four hundred, and you said we'd do it in stages."
"Things are different now."
"Apparently."
He drags his hand down his face. "What do you want me to say? That I should've asked permission to help a woman get to her job?"
"Not permission. Not once, ever, in this entire marriage, have I asked you for permission."
"Then what?"
"I want you to have told me." My voice comes up and I don't stop it. "That's it. That's the whole thing. You moved five thousand dollars out of an account with both our names on it to your ex-wife and you decided I wasn't going to be able to handle it, so you skipped me. You skipped me, Keith."
"I didn't skip you, I didn't want a fight."
"So you had one on a delay. And for the record, if you had just told me there wouldn’t have been a fight.”
He gets up. He goes to the counter and stands there with his back to me and his hands on the edge, and this is the moment where the old Keith turns around and says something that ends it.
"She's not the enemy," he says. "That's what you're not hearing."
"I never said she was."
"You've had a face on since the day she messaged. At dinner. At the barbecue. April sees it."
"Don't."
“April asked me if you were mad at her."
"Then April should have asked me." I stand up too fast and the chair rocks. "Do not put our daughter in the middle of this so you can win a conversation about money."
"Money." He turns around. "You keep saying money."
"Because it's about money."
"It isn't."
"Keith." I put both hands flat on the table because they need somewhere to be. "She ignored her daughter for almost twenty-four years. Almost twenty-four years, no birthdays, nothing, and then she surfaces three days after you become worth eighty-six million dollars. Three. Days."
His face changes.
I have known this man since 2001. I know the shape of every mood he owns and I have never seen the one that arrives now.
"You think this is about money," he says.
"Yes."
"You think a woman who cried at my daughter's baby pictures is running a con."
"I think a woman followed your company page on March twelfth, which is the day the S-1 hit, which is two months before April announced her engagement, which is the thing she said brought her back.
" My voice is shaking now, all the way through.
"I think that's a fact and I have been sitting on it for a month because I didn't want to take this from April. "
He is quiet.
Then he says, "Or she Googled her ex-husband. Which people do."
"On March twelfth."
"Marnie, I was on the front page of the business section. I got an email from a guy I haven't talked to since ninety-nine." He shakes his head slowly, and his voice drops, and this is the part I'll be able to hear for the rest of my life. "I think you might be jealous."
The refrigerator hums.
Somewhere upstairs Erin's music is going through the floor, a bass line, a girl singing about a boy.
"Say that again," I tell him.
"I'm not trying to be cruel."
"Say it again anyway."
He doesn't.
I go upstairs. I take my book and my phone charger and the water glass, and I make up the bed in the guest room where his mother sleeps at Christmas, and I lie down on top of a comforter that smells like the cedar bag in the closet.
Twenty-two years, four apartments, three kids, one company, two miscarriages nobody at that barbecue knows about, four hundred and twelve dollars in checking in March of 2003.
And I have never once slept in a different room than that man.
I lay in the dark and shake, rage or fear, I cannot tell.