Chapter 13 #2
"It's the only one I've got," he said. "It's the one I've had since October.
Everything else I can work out — the money, the ledgers, the apartment.
I understand all of it, I understand it better than you'd think.
But you heard me say that on a Wednesday night and three days later you stood up in a tent and said the whole thing, and you meant it, I was three feet away and you meant every word.
" He turned his hands over on his knees.
"And I've never been able to get to the end of that. "
Erin looked at the street.
"Because I don't leave things," she said.
"That's what my mother said."
"Your mother's right, but it's not the whole of it.
" She took a breath. "The whole of it is that I was eight weeks pregnant with no family, no money that anybody knew about, and a man who had just said out loud that he was marrying me out of obligation.
And I had about four hours to decide what I was going to be for the rest of my life. "
"Erin—"
"Let me finish, because I've never said this out loud and I'm not going to get it out twice.
" Her voice was very level. "I could be a woman who got left, or I could be a woman who stayed on purpose.
Those were the two. And I decided at about two in the morning at a desk with three hundred place cards on it that I was not going to spend the next forty years being something that happened to me. "
She looked at her hands.
"So I married you and I was excellent at it," she said.
"For five years. And I want you to understand that none of that was for you.
Not one day of it. It was so that when it ended — and I always knew it would end, I had the date wrong, that's all — it would end because I finished it.
Not because you got tired. Not because your sister found the right piece of paper. "
Graham did not say anything for a long moment.
"That's the worst thing anyone's ever said to me," he said.
"I know."
"No — " He shook his head slightly. "Not because of what it says about me.
I've had a year of what it says about me and I've got the measure of it now.
It's the four hours." He was looking at the pavement between his feet.
"You had four hours. And I had five years, and I used them to not have a difficult conversation with a woman I didn't love, four times a year, ninety seconds at a time. "
The tide.
"Yes," Erin said. "That's it. That's exactly it."
"Yeah."
"You're not going to argue with me."
"No," he said.
And that, more than anything else that happened all summer, was the thing that got through.
Because the old Graham would have argued.
Not aggressively — he had never in his life been aggressive.
He'd have been reasonable. He'd have found the true and complicating thing, the piece of context, the yes but you have to understand what that year was like, and he would have said it kindly, and by the end of it she would have been the one apologizing for the tone.
He just sat on a step and agreed with her.
Erin sat beside him with her arms around her knees on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend and felt the entire structure she had been living inside for a year move about a foot to the left.
"I'm going to say one thing," she said, "and then you're going to go home, and I want it clear that this is not an opening of any kind."
"Okay."
"I know what you did in June."
Graham went still.
"All of it," Erin said. "Vanessa, the trust powers, the deal.
The letter." She kept her eyes on the street.
"You told me in a diner because I asked you a direct question and you don't lie, and I have spent ten weeks being extremely careful not to feel anything about it, and I want you to know that the being-careful is a full-time job and I'm tired. "
"Erin, I didn't do it so that—"
"I know why you did it. You told me that too.
" She turned her head then and looked at him properly for the first time all day.
"Graham, listen to me. It isn't enough. Do you understand?
It's not — you don't get anything for it.
A man is supposed to do that. That's the floor.
That's not the ceiling, that's the floor, and you took six years to find it. "
"I know."
"Say it back."
"It's the floor," he said.
"Right." She stood up. "Go home."
He got up. He put his keys in his pocket and he did not touch her and he did not look back at the window, and he said "Goodnight, Erin," and walked off down Main Street toward a car four streets away.
Erin watched him go. Then she went up the stairs and let herself in and stood in her own dark kitchen with her back against the door.
And she was frightened.
Not of him. She wanted that absolutely clear, standing there at midnight with her heart going, and she made herself put it in words the way she made herself put everything in words.
She was frightened of the fact that for four seconds on that step, sitting a foot away from a man who had agreed with her, she had wanted to put her hand on the back of his neck.
Not forgiveness. Nothing so large. Just her hand, on the back of his neck, for a second, the way you do a thousand times in a marriage without ever once noticing you're doing it.
She had bolted a door in September and had held it, through a trust and a plane and a hospital and a custody motion and a woman in Camden, and not one of those things had ever come close.
And now she was standing in her own kitchen at midnight, with him gone, and the door was still bolted, and her hand was on it.
She stood there for a while.
Then she did the only thing she knew how to do with a feeling she could not put down, which was go and sit at the table and open the file.
Not the book. The other one. The blank one with a single line in it, typed in June, that she had not touched since.
What if he stops asking?
She looked at it.
And underneath it, at twenty past midnight on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, with fireworks smoke still hanging over the north end and her son asleep in a room she had furnished two years before she ever used it, Erin Brooks typed a second line.
What if he does — and I'm the one who has to say something.
She read it back.
Then she got up, quickly, and shut the laptop, and stood with both hands flat on it like a woman holding a door.
There was a date on the refrigerator. October the sixteenth, in her own handwriting, between Wyatt's swimming and a dentist.
Six weeks.
Six weeks and a judge in Knox County would take twenty minutes and it would be finished, and she had wanted that since a Tuesday in September, and had built an entire year on wanting it, and it was going to happen whether or not she was still sure.
I finish things, Erin thought.
And then, for the first time in her life, in her own kitchen, in the dark:
Which one.