Chapter 6
Ron Nolan called on a Monday morning and said, "Well, I've been bought."
Laura had a patient face down on the near table. She stepped into the back with the phone.
"Say that again."
"The building. Sold it Friday." He sounded aggrieved about it, which was Ron's setting.
"Fella called from Nashville, offered me two hundred and forty thousand dollars for a storefront on Depot Street that I have not been able to give away since two thousand and nine.
I asked him three times was he serious."
Laura put her hand flat on the wall.
"Now, your lease stands," Ron said. "I told him that first thing.
He said he knew it. He said—" Ron cleared his throat, and something in his voice shifted from aggrieved to careful.
"He said to tell you the rent's zero. Said the lease is yours as long as you want it, and there's no rent on it, and there won't be. "
"Who called you, Mr. Nolan."
"Now, Laura—"
"Who called you."
A long pause. "Man named Stern."
She stood in the back room of her clinic with a patient on the table in the next room and looked at a mop and a bucket and a stack of towels she had bought with her own money.
"Thank you for telling me," she said.
"Honey, I want you to know I'd have called you first if I'd known what he—"
"You sold a building for two hundred and forty thousand dollars, Mr. Nolan. Nobody in this town would have done different." She meant it, too. "I'll call you back."
Then she went out and finished the treatment, and her hands were fine, and afterward she stood on the sidewalk and looked up at the front of the building she was in the middle of turning into the only thing she had.
The rent's zero.
He had bought the roof over her work. Not a gift she could send back on a truck.
Not roses. He had gone and bought the building, and now every morning for the rest of her life she would unlock a door that belonged to Jake Hayes, and every patient who came through it would be coming through a door he had paid for, and there would be no way for her to know, ever again, whether the thing she was building had been built by her.
And the beautiful part — the part that made her want to sit down on the curb — was that he would have thought it was the good version.
He would have sat in a room and thought it through and rejected the flowers and the car and the money and landed, finally, at she's worried about the rent, I'll take away the rent, and felt like a man who had listened.
She called Susan from the truck.
"He bought my clinic."
"He what?"
"He bought the building my clinic is in. Through Gary Stern. Rent-free lease, as long as I want it."
Susan was quiet for a second, and then she started to laugh, and then she stopped herself. "I'm sorry. I'm not laughing at you."
"Yes, you are."
"I'm laughing at nineteen years of my life." Paper. "All right. Do you want it?"
"No."
"Then here's your problem. You can't refuse a lease. It's already yours; you signed it in November. He hasn't given you anything. He's removed something. There's nothing to send back."
Laura sat in her truck outside her own clinic.
"Then I'll pay it," she said.
"Pay what? There's no rent to pay."
"I'll pay six hundred dollars a month into an account and I'll never touch it, and when this is all over I'll hand him a check for every month I was in that room." Her voice came out harder than she meant. "I'm not going to work in a building I didn't pay for."
There was a pause on the line.
"Laura," Susan said, and for the first time in four months she did not sound like a lawyer. "I've had two hundred women in that chair. I want you to know that's the first time one of them has said that to me."
The town knew by Wednesday, because Ron Nolan had a mouth on him.
That was the part she was not ready for. She had expected — she did not know what. Outrage on her behalf, maybe. Instead the salon was full of women saying what a sweet thing that was.
"Two hundred and forty thousand dollars," said a woman under the dryer.
"It's not sweet," Tammy said, from behind her chair, with a comb in her fist. "It's a leash with a bow on it."
"Well, Tammy."
"Well, nothing. You let a man pay for the room you work in and see how that goes for you." Tammy caught Laura's eye in the mirror and did not stand down one inch. "She's paying it anyway. Into an account. Tell them."
"Tammy."
"She's paying it into an account," Tammy announced, to the whole salon, "because she was raised right."
And Laura sat there in the second chair with a cape on and understood two things at once: that she was going to be talked about either way, and that Tammy Fowler would fight the entire county on her behalf for as long as it took.
The papers came Thursday.
Not by courier. Susan drove them out herself, ninety minutes east, which she had never done for anything, and she sat at Laura's mother's kitchen table with her coat still on and put a folder down and said, "I need you to hear this from me and not read it."
"Okay."
"He's not fighting the divorce. We knew that." She opened the folder. "What I got yesterday is something else. Three days ago he executed a transfer of the Belle Meade house into your name, free and clear. Not in the settlement. Outside it, unconditional, done, filed."
Laura looked at the paper.
"And this." Susan turned it over. "An irrevocable trust. Funded Monday.
You are the sole beneficiary and you cannot be removed, and — this is the part I want you to actually hear — he cannot be added, he cannot reverse it, and he cannot attach any condition to it.
Not a reconciliation clause. Not a confidentiality clause.
Nothing. It's the cleanest instrument of its kind I have ever seen and it is worth a great deal of money. "
"How much."
Susan told her.
Laura sat back in her mother's kitchen chair.
"There's more," Susan said. "His counsel sent a second letter.
He's instructed them to withdraw every position they'd taken, including two they were entitled to take and would probably have won.
He's waived the prenup — the whole thing, not parts of it.
And he told them in writing to stop contesting anything at all, in his words, regardless of what she does. "
"Regardless of what she does," Laura repeated.
"That phrase is in the letter. His words, not theirs." Susan took her glasses off. "I want to be honest with you, because I told you in October there were two kinds of men who do this and I told you I'd only ever seen the second kind."
"And?"
"The second kind never gives up the prenup," Susan said.
"Ever. The prenup is the whole reason they're being pleasant.
He gave it up before we asked. He gave it up before we knew we could ask.
" She rubbed the bridge of her nose. "I don't know what to tell you.
I've stopped being able to read it as strategy, and I'm a very cynical woman. "
Laura looked at the papers on her mother's table, on the vinyl cloth with the strawberry print that had been on it since 1998.
"Did he ask you to tell me any of this?"
"No."
"Did he send a note. A letter. Anything."
"Nothing," Susan said. "Not one word. That's the other thing that's bothering me. Men who do this always want you to know they did it. He hasn't asked for a call, he hasn't asked me to pass anything along, and when I confirmed receipt his lawyer wrote back four words: He doesn't want thanks."
Laura sat there a long time.
She wanted, with an intensity that frightened her, for it to be a trick.
She had spent four months building a man in her head who could be left — a man who was careless, who bought his way out of things, who had let a stranger take up six weeks of his life because it was easy and she was there.
That man was necessary. She had built him carefully and she was standing on him.
And a man who quietly hands over everything he owns and then instructs his lawyers to say he doesn't want thanks did not fit anywhere on that structure.
"Susan. If I signed everything today. If I took the trust and the house and I never spoke to him again — would he still be doing this?"
"Legally, he already has. That's what irrevocable means." Susan started putting papers back in the folder. "But that's not what you're asking me."
"No."
"Then I don't know. Nobody knows that." She snapped the folder shut.
"Here's my advice, and it's the same advice: take nothing you don't want, sign nothing today, and do not have one unrecorded conversation with that man.
Everything I just told you can be true and it can still be the most expensive apology in the history of Davidson County. An apology isn't a marriage."
"I know that."
"You know it today," Susan said, not unkindly, and stood up to go.
She opened the account Wednesday morning at the bank on Depot, two doors down from the salon.
The girl at the window was young enough to have gone to school with nobody Laura knew, and she typed for a while and then said, "And what's the purpose of the account, ma'am? For our records."
Laura thought about it.
"Rent," she said.
She put six hundred dollars in it. It was most of what was left after the power bill.
Walking back up the street she did the arithmetic and it came out ugly — six hundred a month against eleven patients a week at forty dollars and change, minus the power bill and the insurance she was still catching up on — and she was smiling by the time she got to her own door, which made no sense at all until she worked out why.
It was hers. All of it. The ugly number was hers.
That afternoon, between patients, she did something she had not done in four months.
She got out her phone and went and found the voice memo.