12. Grant
GRANT
I went to the house first.
I hadn’t been back since the day she left. The lights were still on timers. The heat still ran. It looked exactly the way a house should look when someone lived there, except no one did.
I went upstairs to her study.
I’d only been in the room once. The door had been locked and I’d used the spare key to leave a folder on her desk.
A folder of houses. Places she could live that weren’t this one.
I’d left it on top of whatever she’d been working on and I hadn’t looked at what was underneath because I’d told myself it didn’t matter.
The folder was exactly where I’d left it.
She hadn’t moved it. She hadn’t even picked it up.
I moved it now, and underneath was a ledger. Handwritten. Three years of entries in her careful, slanted print. Monthly deposits. Running totals. A photocopy of a city tax assessment clipped to the front page.
One North Ashbury Avenue. Assessed valuation: three hundred and ten thousand dollars.
She’d been saving to buy the building.
Not to renovate it. Not to expand it. To buy it. From the city. At assessed value. Because the city owned the land and she held the lease and my name was on the guarantee and she’d been putting her own money aside, month by month, for three years, to buy my name off her lease.
I sat down on the floor of the one room in my house I’d never looked at, and I read all of it.
Every entry. Every deposit. Three years of a woman building her way out.
I didn’t move for a long time.
When I finally got up, I went to the bedroom. To the wardrobe. To my side, where her things had been.
Half her clothes were gone. I’d known that. I hadn’t looked closely enough to know which ones.
I looked now.
The navy sweater was missing. The old one, older than the tower, older than most of what I owned. She always smiled when I wore it. I’d never once asked her why.
It was gone now. I didn’t know what had become of it, and I didn’t let myself guess.
I drove to the tower.
The office was empty. It was New Year’s Day and no one was there but me. The skate bag was still on the glass conference table where she’d left it three weeks ago. No one had moved it. No one had asked what it was.
I still didn’t know either.
I picked it up. It wasn’t heavy. I didn’t open it. I just took it with me.
I went back to my desk and I pulled out a sheet of paper. Not letterhead. Just paper. And I started writing.
Not typing. Writing. By hand. Because if I was going to say any of this, I had to say it the way a person says things when they can’t hide behind anything.
I started with the guarantee.
I pay the guarantee on your lease. Every year. I wrote that in my ledger like it was generosity. It wasn’t. It was insurance. I was making sure you couldn’t leave without me knowing about it. I was making sure I had a line into the one part of your life I didn’t control.
Then the insurance.
I pay the insurance on a property the city won’t insure. I told myself I was protecting you. I was protecting my investment. I never asked what you were building because I didn’t think it mattered. I thought the only thing that mattered was that I was paying for it.
Then the rest of it. Seven years of never asking what any of it was for. Never asking for a business plan. Never asking her to justify the expense or show me a return. I’d called it generosity. I’d called it a hobby.
I have never once asked you what any of it is for.
Seven years. I’d say I’ve been fairly generous about a hobby.
That’s what I called it. The thing you’ve built.
The thing you open at five in the morning and close after midnight.
The thing you’ve given eleven years of your life to.
I called it a hobby because I didn’t think it was real work unless it looked like mine.
October. The promise I’d made and broken twice.
I promised you I’d be there. In October. I promised again at the centennial. I told you I’d come early because you told the kids I would. And I didn’t. I left you standing there with good ice and an empty seat and a boy named Connor asking where I was.
The six-forty message. The one I’d read in the car and hadn’t answered.
You sent me a message at six-forty. “The kids asked where you were.” That’s all it said. I didn’t answer it. I told myself you were tired. I told myself it wasn’t a big deal. I told myself you’d understand.
The one hour.
I had to stop writing. I had to put the pen down and look at the words she’d sent me, the ones I’d read on my phone and dismissed because I’d had a working session with Corinne and a call with Frank and eleven days to close.
I picked the pen back up.
You wrote: “I’m not angry about Thursday.
Really, I’m not. But I’m scared and I think I’ve been scared for so long that I don’t even know how to tell you I am except like this.
One hour, Grant. That’s all I’m asking for.
Anywhere you want, anytime you want. But all I want is that hour. Please. For me?”
I wrote back: “Delia, I can’t. I have a working session with Corinne tomorrow and a call with Frank on Monday and the close is in eleven days. I’ll call you when I can.”
I wrote her name. Corinne’s. It was right there in the four lines I’d sent back, the way it had been in a hundred answers before that one. I didn’t explain it. I didn’t defend it. I just wrote what had happened.
I gave her the inside of my life. I gave her my time and my attention and the version of myself that still listened.
I gave her everything I didn’t give you.
I never touched her. I need you to know that.
But I also need you to know that I’m not asking you to credit me for it.
Not touching her is the floor. It’s not proof of anything.
It doesn’t mean I didn’t betray you. I did.
I gave another woman my life while you stood outside it for seven years.
Then the six weeks.
I said: “Just give me six weeks, Delia. That’s all I’m asking for.” I didn’t hear what you were telling me. I didn’t hear that you’d already given me seven years. I just asked for more.
The folder.
I left a folder of houses on your desk. I thought I was helping. I thought I was solving the problem. I didn’t look at what was underneath it. I didn’t know you’d been saving for three years to buy a building I thought I owned. I didn’t know you were buying your way out from under my name.
The last one. The worst one.
I said: “You’re tired. That’s all this is. You’ve been opening that building at five in the morning for eleven days straight, and when you’re tired you read things into rooms that aren’t there.” I said that to you. I made you think you were the problem. I made you think you were imagining it.
I wrote one more line.
I don’t expect anything. I don’t have a right to. I just needed you to know that I know what I did. I know what I didn’t do. And I’m not going to make excuses for any of it.
I didn’t sign it. I didn’t date it. I just folded it once and put it in an envelope.
Then I took the ring out of my pocket. The wedding band I’d been carrying since the day she left. I’d kept it because I didn’t know what else to do with it. I couldn’t wear it. I couldn’t put it back in the box. I couldn’t give it to her because I hadn’t earned the right to ask her to wear it.
So I put it in the envelope with the letter. Not because I was returning it. Not because I was keeping it. Because I was leaving it somewhere it could wait for a decision that wasn’t mine to make.
I drove to the Ashbury just after seven. Evening public skate. I walked in with everyone else. Families. Teenagers. A couple holding hands. No one looked at me. No one knew who I was.
Her office door was closed. The lights were off. I didn’t knock. I didn’t wait. I just slid the envelope under the door and walked back out.
I didn’t see her. I didn’t expect to.
I went home. I didn’t sleep. At quarter past four in the morning I got in the car with the skate bag and I drove back.
The back door. The service entrance. The same door Walt had turned me away from at midnight three weeks ago.
I knocked.
Walt opened it. He looked at me. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. I could see it on his face. He recognized me. He was about to tell me to leave.
Then he looked at what I was carrying.
He went still.
“Where’d you get that?” he asked.
“She left it,” I said. “At my office. I’m bringing it back.”
He stared at the bag for a long time. Then he looked at me.
“You know what’s in there?”
“No.”
“Skates,” Walt said. “Men’s. Unopened. She packed two bags the morning she left. Hers and that one.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.
“She was going to ask you,” Walt said. “To skate with her. That’s what those were for.”
I felt it land. I felt every inch of it. She’d been coming to ask me for the one thing I’d have said yes to, the one thing I’d have loved, and I’d been laughing in a conference room.
Walt stepped back. He held the door open.
“You can leave it inside,” he said.
I walked in. The hallway was narrow and cold and it smelled like ice and old concrete.
There was a clipboard hanging by the door.
Volunteer sign-up for the winter carnival.
Five weeks out. Morning shifts, evening shifts, setup shifts.
Someone had written their name in blue pen. Someone else in pencil.
I picked up the pen.
I wrote Gus. I left the surname line blank.
There was an early shift. Five to eight, day of. Some kid named Tyler had signed up for it and crossed himself out. I wrote my name in his spot.
Walt was watching me.
“That’s the worst one,” he said.
“I know.”
“You ever volunteered at a rink before?”
“No.”
He didn’t ask anything else. He just reached into his pocket and pulled out a key. He handed it to me.
“Don’t lose it,” he said.
I left before five. Before she got there. I didn’t see her. I didn’t try to.
Walt didn’t say anything to anyone. I knew he wouldn’t. That was who he was. You could see it in the way he stood there, holding the door, watching me walk out into the cold with a key in my hand I couldn’t have bought my way to with anything I owned.