CHAPTER 9
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He's already talking when I come down, which means he started somewhere I couldn't hear him.
“—and they aren't good eggs, I'll say that myself so you can't accuse me of overselling them. The pan was too hot and I got impatient with it, which is the entire story of my cooking in one sentence.”
He's at the range in yesterday's shirt with the sleeves turned back. His hair's still damp. He doesn't look like a man who slept, and I didn't either, and neither of us is going to say so.
Nobody has mentioned the study. That silence started at six this morning and it's the loudest thing in the house.
He scrapes the burnt toast into the sink. Black flecks settle in a ring around the drain and he doesn't see one of them.
I sit at the island and put both hands flat on the stone. My sleeves are down over both wrists and I've decided I'm not explaining that to anybody.
“There's juice as well. I squeezed it, badly, and then I strained it twice because I know you hate the bits.” He sets the plate down the way you'd set down something you made at school.
“Eat a little of that, and then I want to talk to you about a piece of housekeeping, because I've been carrying it around for two days and it's making me odd.”
“You've been odd for longer than two days, so you'll have to be more specific than housekeeping.”
“That's fair. That's completely fair.” He pulls out the stool across from me and sits, which he almost never does.
“It's Thursday, so Nora's not in until noon, and I did want us to have this without anybody's footsteps in the hall.
That's not sinister. It's just that you deserve to hear it in a quiet room.”
That's how he works. He tells you the room is safe before he tells you why you'd need it to be.
“There's a hearing,” he says. “In Calder County, in the probate court, and it's on the calendar, and it's about you, and I should have told you the day it was set instead of rehearsing it in the car for two days like a coward.”
The stone under my hands has a seam in it where two slabs were joined. It's a good join. I've run my thumb along it for six years without once wondering who paid for it.
“Say the rest of it,” I tell him.
“It's a petition for a temporary conservatorship.
That's the actual name for it and I'm not going to soften it, because you'd catch me at it and then you'd trust nothing else I said.” He turns his glass a quarter turn.
“There's a medical affidavit attached, from Simon, covering the head injury and the memory gaps and the medication history.
The court reads that and sets a hearing, and the hearing's the twenty-first of October. Thirty-three days.”
I count the flecks around the drain instead of looking at him. There are eleven.
“Say the word conservatorship again,” I say.
“Conservatorship. Temporary.” He says it kindly, the way you'd repeat a street name for somebody lost. “And I know how it lands, darling, I do.
It sounds like a cage. It's a schedule. It means that when somebody rings about the accounts at half seven in the morning, you can hand them straight to me and go back to bed, and nobody makes you sign a thing on a day when you can't hold a pen.”
“That's the pitch. I'd like the drawing.”
“You've lost me completely, and I say that as a compliment.”
“The drawing.” I put my fork down. “When somebody hands me a set I didn't stamp, I ask four questions before I read a single dimension. What's the scope. What's the term. What triggers a review. And who decides when I'm finished.”
He doesn't flinch, and that's the part I'll think about later.
“Scope is financial and medical,” he says. “It doesn't touch where you live, who you see, what you do with your day, and it doesn't touch your correspondence. It's the accounts, the property instruments, the insurance, and consent for treatment. That's it. That's the whole envelope.”
“Then the term. How long does it run, and does it lapse by itself, or does somebody have to go and end it?”
“Twelve months, renewable on application. It's temporary in the way that word actually means in a courthouse, which is that somebody has to go back and ask again.” He almost smiles. “I'd rather it were six. Simon says the court won't set six on this kind of history.”
“Now the review. What exactly has to change about me before anybody looks at this a second time?”
“Any material change in your condition triggers a review, and either party can request one at ninety days on written notice.” He's got all of this. He isn't reaching for it. “You could file for one yourself, in your own name, and nobody in that building could stop you.”
“And who decides I'm finished?”
He picks up my plate, which doesn't need picking up, and takes it to the sink.
“Eat the toast at least,” he says. “I'll do you another slice and I'll watch it this time.”
I sit with that for the length of it. Three of four. He answered three of four and he didn't even have to work at the fourth, he just carried a plate.
“Julian. Whose money is in it?”
“Every account there is, and that includes yours.” He says it facing away from me, and then he turns round so I can watch him say the rest. “All of it, Evelyn.
Mine, the house, the foundation, and yours — the Halloran and Voss pension, the money from before me, the little account you keep at the credit union that you think I've never noticed.
It has to be all of it or the whole thing's meaningless, because a court can't half-protect somebody.
That's not me being greedy. That's the form.”
“You could have told me before you filled the form in.”
“Yes.” He doesn't argue it. “I could have, and I'll tell you exactly why I didn't, and you're not going to like it, and I'd still rather you had the true reason than a kinder one.”
He wipes his hands and folds the cloth in half and folds it again.
“In August you asked me the same question about the car insurance four separate times in one afternoon, and the fourth time you were furious with me for never having answered it.
I couldn't work out how to put a court paper in front of somebody who'd have to be told about it again the next morning, and the morning after that.
So I did the whole thing quietly and badly, and I'd do it that way again, and I am sorry.”
Here's what I want the record to show, and there's no record, so I'll show it to myself.
I'm not a woman without money. I've got fourteen years of my own contributions and a stamp that used to be worth something and a name that used to open a site gate.
My problem isn't cash. My problem is that a man with a soft voice and rimless glasses spent forty minutes in this house yesterday and wrote down that my judgment can't be relied upon, and against that, everything I own is just an amount.
“Who filed it, Julian?”
“We did, darling. Both of us.”
He says it without a flicker. He says it the way he'd tell me we'd booked a table.
“Say which parts of that were me, because I've been inside this house for ninety days and I have never once been in a room with a lawyer.”
“You and I, yes. Joint petition. It's stronger that way and it's kinder that way, because a contested one is a horrible thing to sit through and this one won't be.” He comes back around the island.
“You signed with me. It was the week you came home, and you were doing better than you'd been, and we sat by the fire in the study and I put the flagged pages in front of you and you read them and you signed four of them and you asked me whether the pen was mine because you liked the weight of it.”
I remember the fire. I remember the weight of the pen, actually, which is the worst thing about it. I remember the sound of paper against my knee, and Nora somewhere behind me with the ash bucket, and a headache sitting behind my left eye like a coin.
I cannot tell you what a single one of those pages said.
“I signed four pages,” I say.
“You did, and you asked me twice whether the light in there was good enough to read by.”
“I couldn't describe one of them to you now if you offered me the house for it.”
“I know that, and I've known it since the week you came home.” He reaches over and takes my wrist, two fingers on the inside of it, checking my pulse the way he's checked it every day for ninety days.
I let him. I hold perfectly still and I count to eight and I say nothing at all.
“That's rather the point, my love. That's what the affidavit says. You're not being punished for it.”
Then he lets go and rinses his hands and asks whether I want the eggs after all, and the horror of it is that a courtroom would love him. He'd be the best thing in the room. He'd be patient with the clerk. He'd bring his own copies.
I make my voice as flat and reasonable as a specification.
“Send me a copy, then. If it's mine as well, I should read it.”
“Of course. I'll print it after breakfast.”
“Thank you.”
The east wing is cold until about ten and then the sun comes over the ridge and finds the reading nook, and the window seat runs to the floor, so I sit there with one thigh warm and the other one against glass that's still holding the night. It's a stupid piece of design. Somebody chose it anyway.
I don't have paper. He'd see paper.
So I do it the only way I trust, which is loads.
The load is a court date. Everything else on this property is just what's carrying it.
Bearing members: a doctor's signature, four pages with my name on them, and a husband who will be word-perfect and warm and never once raise his voice.
Applied load against that: one woman saying she doesn't remember signing.
That's my word against a medical record, and I've sat in enough rooms to know how that resolves.
It isn't a collapse. Nothing snaps. The member just stops carrying me, quietly, over the weeks I've got left, and everybody in the room agrees the structure was always like that.
So I stop arguing with the drawing and start looking for what I'd need to condemn it.
Something dated, first. A signature isn't worth anything without a date beside it that somebody else recorded.
Something physical, second — paper or a photograph or a pill in a foil blister, something with mass, because this house eats anything that only exists as a sentence I said.
And third, and this is the one that hurts, something that lives off this property.
Off the drive, past the gate, in a building with its own address and its own clock.
Dated. Physical. Elsewhere.
I say it under my breath three times so it sticks, because my memory's a joke now and I've stopped pretending otherwise.
There's a fourth thing, and it isn't a requirement, it's just true. In ninety days the only person who's walked through that door and spoken to me like somebody who holds a licence was the man who came to look at the alarm panel, and he was here about wiring. Everybody else asks how I'm sleeping.
I could ring him. The house owns my phone.
I go back down at noon and the hall table is where things arrive here — post, gate fobs, Julian's gloves, the dish for the spare keys. There's a glove. There's the dish. There's a delivery slip for something that isn't mine.
There's no envelope with my name on it and no printed pages and no stapled corner, and it's been three hours, and the printer is fifteen feet from where he's standing.
He's in the doorway of the study with his coat over one arm, going somewhere, already half gone.
“I'll be back before dark. Marguerite's had her gutters done and she wants somebody to admire them, God help me.” He kisses the top of my head. “Eat something at one. You didn't at eight.”
“The copy,” I say. “The petition. I'd like it today, please, not because I'm being difficult, but because I'd like to read it while I'm sharp, and I'm sharp until about four and then I'm no use to anybody.”
“Of course,” he says, and he means it the way he means everything. “I'll have it on your desk tonight.”
I say thank you. And I get all the way to the east wing before I let myself finish the thought, which is that I do not have a desk.