Chapter 12
SIENNA
“Your grandfather sat in that chair,” Marsh says, “and told me the company would outlast every storm except a bored Ellerin.”
“When was that?”
“The year the port closed for six weeks and we paid everyone anyway.” He lowers himself into his chair in stages, one hand flat on the desk. “You don’t look bored, Ms. Ellerin. You look decided.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“It’s a fact. I stopped complimenting Ellerins in the eighties. It goes to your heads.”
Nothing in the room has changed. The radiator bangs twice and then behaves. There is a crack in the leather of the visitor chair that catches the back of my skirt in the same place it caught it when I was nine.
I set my bag on the floor and ask the thing I came in to ask.
“If I divorce Cade, what happens to the company?”
Marsh does not blink and he does not soften it, which is why I came to him and not to somebody kinder.
“Nothing,” he says.
“Marsh.”
“Nothing, Sienna. The money came in the day the deal closed. The covenant your grandfather wrote was satisfied by the wedding happening, not by the marriage lasting. It was done the Saturday you married him, and it has stayed done. The debt is restructured. Payroll has cleared every month since. The name is fine.”
“The agreement said the marriage secured the restructuring.”
“Secured. Past tense.” He turns his hand palm up on the desk. “You could have walked out the next morning and this building would still have opened on Monday.”
Every night I rolled toward the cold side of that bed, I told myself it was duty. There was no duty. There was a door in the language, and I had spent two years standing in front of it without knowing it opened.
“Why didn’t he tell me?”
Marsh rests his hand on the desk. “He saw how you looked at Cade, sweetheart. He told me he hoped you’d be happy together. I don’t know why he didn’t explain the terms to you, but he made sure the company wouldn’t depend on you staying married.”
“All right,” I say, because my voice will not carry anything bigger.
“That’s all? All right?”
“Give me a minute for the rest of it.”
He gives me the minute. He does not fill it, and he does not look away from me while I take it, and both of those are him.
“There is money owed to you out of that marriage,” he says, when I can speak again. “Whether you like the sound of it or not.”
“I’m not taking anything from him.”
“I heard you.” He opens a drawer that sticks and gives the way it always has, and writes a name on the back of a card in fountain pen, the pen that has ruined three of his shirts that I know about. “I didn’t say I agreed.”
He holds the card out. The ink is still wet and prints faint on my thumb.
“Third floor, four blocks down, past the bank. She has never done an hour of work for this company and she is not going to start. She’s yours, not ours.” He sits back. “The old man’s gone, sweetheart. He wanted you provided for, not diminished.”
“I am provided for. Cade didn’t do that part. My grandfather did.”
He looks at me for a moment. Then he taps the desk twice with two fingers, which has meant the subject is closed for as long as I have been alive, and opens the deep drawer on his left, and lifts out a green cloth book with a rubber band around it, worn soft at the corners.
“You still have it.”
“I still keep it up.” He slides the band off and lets it fall open, his handwriting running up both margins.
“Whose boy made the team. Whose mother was in the hospital. Whose girl was the first in her house to finish school. He kept it so he would never stand in front of one of them and not know the thing that mattered.” He looks at me over the top of it.
“You used to sit beside him and read it while your feet dangled above the floor.”
He closes it gently, like it might bruise, and puts it away.
“Are you coming back to us?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“The seat’s been yours since he died and I have never once mentioned it, because you had a house down there and I didn’t think it was mine to make harder.” He shuts the drawer. “I’m mentioning it now.”
“Marsh.”
“Don’t answer today. I’d rather you didn’t.”
I look down at the card he gave me.
“Go see her. And if you’re going to turn that money down, you’ll do it sitting across from somebody who’s paid to argue with you first.”
The lawyer’s office smells like toner, and the plant behind her desk is browning at the edges, more dying than dead.
She is somewhere near sixty, gray cardigan, reading glasses pushed up into her hair, and she lets me finish every answer before she writes anything down, which I trust more than I would trust sympathy.
The inventory does not take long. The house is his, the cars are his, and I left the jewelry and my ring behind. She writes all of it without a change in her face.
“Then we’re at support,” she says. “Maintenance, which you would be within your rights to ask for. And a schedule in your prenuptial agreement that triggers on a divorce inside the first five years. That one you don’t have to ask for. It’s already agreed. Page two.”
She slides it across. I read the number on page two.
It is a large number, and it does not move me.
My grandfather put everything he ever made back into that company, and wore the same brown suit until the elbows went shiny.
What he set aside for me is not a fortune.
It is enough, and it came from him, and no number on Cade’s page two is going to improve it.
I slide it back.
“No.”
“To which?”
“To both.”
She takes the glasses out of her hair and settles them on her nose. “Ms. Ellerin. That is a great deal of money, and people who turn it down at this stage very often feel differently a year or two on. I would be doing my job badly if I did not say that plainly.”
“I understand it.”
“Understanding it today and regretting it later are two different things.”
“I still want it waived.”
I already have everything I need and none of it came from him. But if I take that number, the marriage ends exactly where he always believed it began, at a price. I will not be a figure he settled.
She caps her pen. “Then the maintenance section comes out and the schedule gets waived on its own page. Give me an hour, and come back to sign clean pages.”
The clean pages come back squared, with colored flags down the right edge at every place my name goes. I expect my hand to stop at the last flag. It does not.
“He’ll have his tomorrow,” she says, squaring the stack. “Nothing gets filed until his signature is on it. You did that faster than most.”
“The leaving already happened. This is just the part with my name on it.”
I walk back to the company building.
It is the end of the day and the lobby is turning, the elevators letting out all at once across marble worn to a shine straight up the middle and left dull at the edges. I mean to go through it quickly. I get most of the way.
“Sienna?” Tom from shipping has gone almost all the way gray since I saw him last. “Look at you.”
Before I can answer, Ruth from accounts, who kept butterscotch in her second drawer my whole childhood, takes both my hands in the middle of the floor. “Are you back? Tell me you’re back.”
“I’m here today,” I say, which is not an answer, and she squeezes anyway, and I keep moving, because she looks so glad to see me that I might cry if I stay.
Before going down to the garage, I stop at my grandfather’s portrait on the mezzanine, where he hated it hanging. He would not sit for it in anything but the brown suit, and you can see the shine on the elbows, and when the painter tried to clean up his hands he made him put the wear back.
I am going to be all right, I tell him. I wish he were here to tell me that.
There is a low wall at the edge of the garage, and I sit on it because I am not ready to drive yet.
Lauren calls before I have worked out what I am waiting for.
“Please tell me there’s something in that cottage besides crackers.”
“There’s crackers.”
“I knew it.” A door shuts on her end and the noise behind her drops. “How are you? And don’t tell me fine. I’ve had fine out of you long enough.”
“I signed today.”
She goes quiet.
“Okay,” she says softly, and doesn’t ask me to explain.
Then, careful: “He came to my house. He asked me for your address, and I want you to hear this from me and not from anyone else. I said no. To his face. He did not get one word of it out of me.”
“But he found the cottage.”
“He found you?” She lets a breath go. “I can’t figure that man out. He couldn’t be bothered to learn one thing that mattered to you in your whole marriage. Now you’re gone, and suddenly he knows how to go looking.”
“How is he?”
She is quiet a second, because whatever Cade is to me now, he is still her brother, and I have just asked her to tell on him.
“He looks terrible,” she says, with enough satisfaction in it that I hear her put it down before she goes on.
“I’m telling you that as a fact, not a gift.
Men look terrible for a hundred reasons and most of them are about themselves.
Don’t let how miserable he looks make you question your decision. ”
“You think it doesn’t mean anything.”
“I think I love him and I could still shake him until his teeth come loose.” A pause, and when she comes back her voice has changed. “Sienna. I have watched my brother lose things his whole life. Deals, houses, a friendship, our mother. I have never seen him like?—”
She stops herself. I hear her do it.
“No,” she says, quieter. “You got yourself out the door today. I’m not going to be the one who props it back open. Some other day. Maybe.”
Whatever she isn’t telling me, it does not change the paper I signed today, and my heart is already broken enough without help.
“Eat something green,” she says finally. “A real vegetable. I’ll know if you don’t.”
“I love you too.”
She laughs, and we hang up.
I stay on the wall until my legs get cold. When I finally stand, I check the time out of habit.
There is nowhere I have to be.