Chapter Fourteen
Thursday morning I did the arithmetic on the back of the motel notepad and the arithmetic said two weeks.
Two thousand three hundred and forty at the start.
Minus two nights at seventy-nine. Minus the seventy-five for the lawyer who told me not to send him the recording.
Minus a tank of gas, minus toothbrushes and a bottle of shampoo at the drugstore on Delmar, minus eleven dollars at the laundromat because I had one load of clothes and it was already the second time through, minus food.
One thousand nine hundred and forty.
At seventy-nine a night, plus what three people eat, with everything else held perfectly still, which nothing ever is, I had until the second week of November.
Then I opened the rentals.
I had never done this. I want to be plain about that. I had lived in exactly two places in my adult life. My mother’s house until I was twenty-three, and then a colonial on Larkspur Court with a man whose father put the money down on it.
I did not know how any of it worked. I found out over the course of one Thursday, and here is what I found out.
There were places. That was the surprise. There were more than I expected, and some of them were decent, and the prices were survivable if you didn’t look at them too long. Nine hundred. Ten fifty. Twelve hundred for a real two-bedroom in a building on Cedar with a playground behind it.
And then, on every single call, we got to the same three walls in the same order.
The first wall is income.
“What’s your monthly gross?”
“I’m starting a job.”
“Okay, but what’s your monthly gross.”
Most of them want you to make three times the rent. Three times a thousand and fifty is thirty-one fifty a month, which was thirty-one fifty a month more than I had.
The second wall is money up front. First month plus a security deposit equal to the rent. Twenty-one hundred dollars, all at once, before you get a key.
I had nineteen hundred and forty and I needed to keep eating.
And the third wall is references.
“Who’s your current landlord?”
“I don’t have one. I’m coming out of a house.”
“Whose house?”
That’s the whole conversation. That’s it, four exchanges, and it happened seven times on Thursday.
Nobody was rude to me. Not one of them. Two were genuinely kind about it.
A woman named Iva Prosser who owns a duplex on Bardwell Street listened to me for a full four minutes without interrupting once, which by then had become so unusual that I nearly lost my voice in the middle of it, and then she said she wished she could, and asked me to write my number down for her anyway.
“Not promising anything,” she said. “I’ve got a tenant in there till the end of the month and he’s a slow mover.”
“I understand.”
“You got a job coming?”
“I’m going to.”
“Mm,” she said. “Call me Monday either way.”
That was Thursday at eleven forty in the morning and it was the only thing that happened all week that wasn’t bad.
They can’t tell you no because of the children. That’s the law and I found that out on Thursday too, sitting in my car with the phone on my knee reading about it. Familial status. It’s protected. Not one person said the word kids to me in a way I could have written down.
They don’t have to.
They just ask for the pay stub and the deposit and the reference, and if you don’t have them you don’t get the apartment, and everybody stays perfectly polite the entire time.
Around two in the afternoon I did something it hadn’t occurred to me to do in eleven years. I pulled my own credit.
There was almost nothing there.
That needs explaining to anybody who has never looked, because I never had.
Every card in that house was his account with me as an authorized user, which is a thing that reads on paper as this person is allowed to spend somebody else’s money.
The mortgage was his. The truck and the CR-V insurance were his.
The electric, the gas, the water, the internet, all of it in Wade Kessler’s name at 11 Larkspur Court, because when we got married he handled it, and it was presented to me as a kindness and I accepted it as one.
Thirty-four years old. A master’s degree. Eleven years of running a household on a budget I balanced myself out of an account I wasn’t on.
And on paper I was a person who had never paid for anything.
He didn’t do that to me on purpose. I’ve thought it through from every angle and I don’t believe there was a plan. He did it because he liked handling things, and I let him because it was easier, and then eleven years went by.
It doesn’t matter what the intent was. The result is the same. On the twenty-fourth of October I was a woman who could not rent an apartment in the town where she had lived her entire adult life, and it took nine minutes on a website to find that out.
At three o’clock I called the insurance.
I had been putting it off since I saw the cards with a flashlight in my teeth, and I called from the Fenwick lot because I wanted to be somewhere I could see the doors.
I got a woman named Sherry.
“Can I get the subscriber’s ID off the card, ma’am?”
I read it to her.
“And you are?”
“I’m the spouse. Nora Kessler. My children are on this plan.”
“Okay, and I’m going to need the subscriber’s authorization to discuss the policy.”
I sat there.
“I’m on the policy.”
“You’re a covered dependent under the policy. The subscriber’s the employee. For anything about coverage, changes, effective dates, I’d need him on the line or a signed authorization on file.”
“These are my children.”
“I understand.” She said it like she meant it. She probably did. She had said it before. “I’m not allowed to go into it, hon.”
I asked her one question that she was allowed to answer, because it isn’t private, it’s on a wall in a break room somewhere.
I asked her when open enrollment was.
“November first through the fifteenth,” she said. “Changes effective January first.”
Nine days.
I thanked her and hung up and sat in my car and did that math too.
A man in open enrollment can move from employee-plus-family to employee-plus-children. It takes about four minutes on a website. The children stay on. The wife comes off, effective the first of January.
And the thing I did not know, sitting in that parking lot, was whether he’d thought of it.
That was the whole question. Not whether he was allowed to. He was allowed to. Whether it had crossed his mind.
I decided he’d think of it around the second week of November, and I was wrong. He thought of it on the thirtieth of October, and I found out about it in a way I would not have chosen.
I got a quote on continuing the coverage myself.
There’s a federal thing where you can keep the same plan after you come off somebody’s, and you can, and it costs what the employer was paying plus what you were paying plus two percent, which for me and the two of them came to fourteen hundred and eighty dollars a month.
Fourteen eighty a month against nineteen hundred and forty dollars total.
I put the phone in the cup holder and laughed. Out loud, alone, in a school parking lot. It was not a good laugh and it only lasted about two seconds but I want it in here because it happened.
Then I scrolled down to Bernie Halloran’s name and pressed it.
It rang four times and went to her voicemail, which still had the old outgoing message on it from when the clinic had a different name.
I hung up without leaving anything.
Thursday night Ruby got a nosebleed at nine o’clock, the way she does in dry air, and I sat on the edge of the tub with her leaning forward over my hand and a wad of motel tissue against her face, and Jonah stood in the doorway holding the ice bucket without being asked.
It stopped in four minutes. It always stops in four minutes.
I want it recorded that I sat on the edge of a bathtub with a bleeding six-year-old and did the insurance math again in my head while I counted, and I do not think there is a mother in this country who would not know exactly what I mean.
Friday she went to school. Friday he went to school. Friday I called five more listings and got four more versions of the same four exchanges and one voicemail box that was full.
At ten past three on Friday I was the first car in the Fenwick pickup line, the way I’d said I would be.
I got out and stood by the front bumper so he’d see me from the door. That was the whole plan for the afternoon. Be visible. Be exactly where I said I’d be, in the same spot, so that a nine-year-old walking out of a building could find me in under a second.
There were maybe fifteen cars behind me and a knot of parents on the sidewalk by the flagpole.
A man came up the row between the cars.
Fifties. Windbreaker, khakis, a phone in his shirt pocket and a manila envelope folded lengthwise in one hand. He didn’t hurry. He looked at the plate on my car and then at me.
“Nora Kessler?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve been served, ma’am.”
He put it in my hand, said “have a good weekend,” and walked back down the row toward a gray sedan parked on the street.
The whole thing took nine seconds.
Nobody on that sidewalk made a sound. Nobody had to. Two of those women I had stood with at that flagpole for three years.
The doors opened and the kids started coming out.
I got the envelope under my arm and got Ruby’s backpack off her shoulder and got them both in the car and got the doors shut, and then I sat down behind the wheel and opened it with the engine off.
There were two documents.
The first was a Complaint for Divorce, Larkin County Court of Common Pleas, Domestic Relations Division. Wade R. Kessler, Plaintiff. Nora E. Kessler, Defendant.
The second was longer.
Motion for Temporary Orders. And down in the middle of the second page, in the middle of a paragraph, in the same flat font as everything around it:
...that pending final hearing, the Court designate Plaintiff as the temporary residential parent and legal custodian of the minor children.
There was a date stamped at the bottom.
Hearing: November 12.
Jonah leaned forward between the front seats.
“Mom,” he said. “What is that.”