15. Keith
Keith
Sherry calls me Monday afternoon.
I'm at the office because I don't know where else to be. There's an earnings call Wednesday and I've read the same slide eleven times and Devi has stopped asking me questions.
"I heard," she says. "April told me. Keith, I'm so sorry."
"It's fine."
"It's not fine. Do you want to get a coffee? You sound like you haven't eaten."
We meet at the place on Excelsior at four. She's in the cardigan. She's got that way of sitting with both hands around a cup like she's warming them, and for about twenty minutes it's the most comfortable I've felt since Friday, and that alone should have told me something.
She listens. She's good at listening. She says the right things about how a marriage that survives twenty-two years survives a bad month, and about how Marnie is stronger than anybody gives her credit for, and I sit there in a coffee shop nodding along while a woman describes my wife to me.
Then she says, "Can I ask you about something? It's a bad time. I'll wait if it's a bad time."
"Go ahead."
"I've been looking at moving closer."
"Yeah?"
"I hate the drive. It's forty minutes each way, and April's here, and if there's ever grandkids." She laughs a little. "I know how that sounds."
"It doesn't sound like anything."
"There's a house." She takes out her phone. "It's on Alder Ridge, off Vine. Three bedroom. It's from the eighties and the kitchen is terrible, which I weirdly like."
She turns the screen toward me.
I look at the picture for about two seconds and then I look at the number under it, because I'm a man who reads numbers before pictures.
One million, two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.
"That's Edina," I say. It’s a nice neighborhood, nicer than I expected.
"I know." She looks embarrassed before I can say anything else. "And I know how this sounds. That's why I almost didn't bring it up."
I wait.
"What I was thinking was not that you give me a house.
God, no." She shakes her head quickly. "One of the holding companies could own it.
Or whatever entity makes sense. I'd pay rent, what I can afford, and it stays an asset.
If it appreciates, it appreciates for you.
I just..." Her eyes go down to the phone.
"If April has children someday, I don't want to be forty minutes away from another life I only hear about after it happens. "
It's good. The way she says it is good. So good that three weeks ago I might have started solving the mechanics before I asked myself why I was solving them.
"No," I say.
She blinks. "Okay."
"I'm not buying a house for you to live in, Sherry. Not through a holding company. Not as an investment."
Her mouth tightens and then smooths again.
"Of course. I shouldn't have asked." She puts the phone face down. "I just thought maybe helping me stay close to April wouldn't feel like helping me. That's all."
The espresso machine hisses behind us.
I watch her hands. They're folded neatly around the cup.
"How's your car running?" I ask.
She looks up. "What?"
"The Elantra. The transmission."
A pause.
"Fine."
"You're in a Kia."
Another pause, longer this time.
"I traded it."
"When?"
"Keith, it wasn't worth fixing."
"Then what did the five thousand pay for?"
Her face changes so little I almost miss it.
"I put money down. I needed a reliable car."
"You told me the money was for the transmission."
"Because I was embarrassed." She picks up her purse, still soft, still reasonable. "Do you want me to apologize for buying the less stupid option? Fine. I'm sorry."
"I'm not asking for an apology. I'm asking why the story changed."
She stands.
"I think this is a bad time for you, and I think I'm making it worse." She leaves a five under the cup for a coffee I already paid for. "Call me when things are calmer."
She walks out before I answer.
And I sit there with something I have not let myself feel since August.
Suspicion.
I sit in my car in the lot for a while.
Then I call Mona, who runs investor relations, on a Monday at five thirty, and I ask her a question I would have been ashamed to ask three days ago.
"Can you pull anything from the IR inbox for the spring? Anything from a private individual. Name would be Corbett, C-O-R-B-E-T-T. Sherry."
She calls me back in nineteen minutes.
"Two things," she says. "There's a voicemail on the general line on March fourteenth. And an email on the seventeenth."
"What do they say?"
"The email asks whether the founder's ownership percentage after the offering would be public information, and where a person would find it. Very polite. She says she's a former family member." Mona pauses. "Keith, do you want me to flag this to legal?"
"No."
"It's not unusual to get these. We get about six a week."
"I know."
"The voicemail is basically the same question. She asks if there's someone she can talk to about the lockup period."
The lockup.
March fourteenth.
Two days after the filing hit. Seven weeks before April announced her engagement on Instagram in a post my wife has saved on her phone. Five months before a message about therapy and a woman named Rosalind and a door that had gotten too heavy to open.
"Thanks, Mona."
"Are you okay? You sound weird."
"Long weekend."
I hang up and I sit in a parking lot outside a coffee shop on Excelsior and I put my head back against the seat.
My wife told me this in our kitchen on the third of September with a screenshot on a laptop and her hands flat on the table and her voice coming apart, and I looked at her and said the word jealous, and then I said it in front of a bug light at a supper club, and then I asked her for a chair.
She was right in August. Right from the day it started. She was right when I liked a photograph, and when I sent five thousand dollars, and when she stood in a gravel lot in Chanhassen and told me twelve days out is when it costs the most.
And it doesn't matter.
That's what comes to me in the car, and it comes with an actual physical sensation, like a floor giving.
Because if Sherry Corbett had turned out to be a saint, if she'd never asked for a dollar, if she'd sat in the second row at that wedding and wept with gratitude for the rest of her life, every single thing I did to Marnie would still have happened exactly the way it happened.
I didn't fail to see through a con.
I failed to stand next to my wife.