Chapter 12 The Empty Chair #2
He got back down on the box. The new pads went in.
The caliper went over them and the bolts went home, top and then bottom.
The wrench went round each until it stopped and a quarter turn past, and he didn’t count the turns.
He came out and lifted the wheel off the wall and onto the hub, and it was heavier than a wheel was when other men lifted it.
It left a wet mark on the wall where it had stood.
The nuts went on by hand, then with the wrench, each one across from the last. He let the jack down a click at a time until the tire took the floor.
The car stood on all four again, low and red in a gray shop, with the door still open on the rain. The rain on the tin didn’t stop.
He stayed where he was, on the concrete beside the wheel.
Kate
The storm came off the mountains at three, the way they do in February, without the courtesy of a warning. One minute the lake was the color of the sky and the next it was black to the far shore, and the wind got into the bare wisteria on the wall and shook it like a rug.
Marco came in from the forecourt with the post under his coat and his mouth open on the word “Rain,” and I was already past him.
I had the bucket out of the storeroom and under the north corner before he’d got to the end of the syllable.
The plaster up there had a brown stain older than my time in the house, and in a storm the stain gave first. I’d learned that in January.
Marco hung his coat and left the bucket alone.
Then the post. Four envelopes with rain spots on them, and he squared the stack on the corner of my desk with one finger, as he squared everything.
The top one had a downtown Chicago letterhead and a case number under it in a box.
He looked at it, and at me, and went back to the front desk without a word, and from Marco that was comment.
I sat down. The keys were on the bronze pear beside the blotter, where they lived when I was in the chair.
The paper was heavy and cream, better than anything we ordered for the villa.
Judgment of dissolution of marriage, Cook County, Illinois, and the names, his in full and mine in full, Katherine, as it went on forms. Then the house and the accounts, divided down the page in numbered paragraphs, sorted like linen into his pile and mine. His was the tall one. That wasn’t news.
I read it once for what it said. Then I read it again, slower, for the line about Maddie.
There was one, and it was one line. Allocation of parental responsibilities: reserved. Her name wasn’t even in it. Reserved, the way you reserve a table. A whole marriage taken apart on a few sheets of good paper, and the one thing in it I’d have fought for was held over for later.
A different woman would have called that mercy.
I’d had four years of him across a table.
He didn’t leave things out. He held them back, the way he’d hold a clause back until the other side had signed.
Maddie was reserved because the divorce was the small court.
The other one, the one with the word federal in it, was where he was keeping her.
I’d had since August to learn how his silences read, one call a week, and I read this one with my thumb on the case number.
“Well?”
Rosa was in the doorway with the storm’s worry on her, the one that came over her every time the lake went black, and her eyes went to the ceiling before they came to me.
I turned the paper face down.
“I’m not married.”
“Kiddo, you haven’t been since June.”
She looked at the bucket, not the envelope. She listened to it, the drip finding its note, and then she went off down the gallery to see about the covers on the terrace, and the terrace door went behind her.
He called that evening. He’d called every week since August, never the same day and never the same hour, so that I’d never quite stop waiting for it. I took it in the office with the door shut. Maddie was in the kitchen being fed by Pietro.
The cold voice, from the first word, with none of the syrup in it. Tonight he didn’t bother.
“You’ve got your papers, Katie. The other papers are next.”
I said nothing. He liked that as little as he liked being interrupted.
“A judge in Cook County has a long memory. You remember that.”
“Maddie’s fine,” I said.
He hadn’t asked. He went on for a while after that, as he did, and I held the phone a little off my ear and looked at the bucket, and when he stopped talking I hung up. I let him finish. I always let him finish.
My hands weren’t steady. There was a stack of hand towels on the chair by the door, back from the laundry and nowhere near folded.
I took the top one and folded it in thirds, house style, edge to edge and then over.
Then the next one. By the fourth towel the edges were meeting where they were supposed to.
The envelope went in the bottom drawer, under the wage sheets, where nobody looked but me, however much Marco wanted to. I didn’t write back. There was nothing to sign; he’d done all the signing. I didn’t take my name back, either. There’d be a form for that, and I’d had enough forms for one day.
I took the keys off the pear and put them on my belt.
The rain had quit during the call, and I hadn’t heard it go.
The bucket was a third full, the water in it brown from the plaster.
It was nobody’s job in the house, so it was mine.
I carried it out along the gallery with the keys knocking at my hip and poured it off the edge of the terrace into the lake.