Chapter 3 #2
That was the afternoon she stopped being able to describe herself, even privately, as a woman who had given up her business for a marriage. What she had done was hand a life over to a system, and the system had run it beautifully, right up until the night it needed somebody to go and look.
* * *
Cheryl Lassiter called on Saturday.
Talia nearly didn’t answer. Nine years of Cheryl was nine years of a particular kind of phone call: pleasant, brief, and constructed like a room you weren’t allowed to sit down in.
“Talia. It’s Cheryl.”
“Hello, Cheryl.”
“I won’t keep you. I understand you’re at the hotel.”
“The inn.”
“The inn. Yes.” A pause. “I’m told your hands are healing.”
“They’re fine.”
“Good.” Another pause, and this one went on long enough that Talia moved the phone to the other ear. “I’ve been sitting here since Tuesday trying to work out how to say a thing, and I’ve decided there isn’t a way, so I’m going to say it badly.”
“All right.”
“They put me in a hotel,” Cheryl said.
Talia didn’t answer.
“On the Friday night. A boy from the office called at ten o’clock and by midnight I was in a room at the Park Place with a tray coming up, and I have thought about very little else since Monday.
” Her voice was completely level. It was the levelness that did it.
“Somebody made a list, Talia. And I was on it.”
“Cheryl—”
“I’m seventy years old and I was on it and you were not, and I want you to understand that I know exactly what that means, because I have been married into that family for forty years and I know what gets onto a list and what doesn’t.”
Talia sat down on a stacked chair.
“He didn’t do it on purpose,” she said, and she could not afterward account for why she said it.
“No,” Cheryl said. “That’s right. That’s precisely right, and it’s worse, and if you don’t understand why it’s worse yet, you will.”
“Is this you telling me to leave him?”
“This is me telling you that I didn’t,” Cheryl said. “Goodbye, dear. Eat something.”
* * *
The lawyers started the following week.
Talia had called a woman in Traverse City on Bailey’s insistence, a family attorney with forty years of this county in her filing cabinets. She had expected to be told what it was going to cost her.
“Well,” the attorney said on the phone, on the second call. “That’s unusual.”
“What is?”
“He’s not contesting anything. He’s not contesting anything he hasn’t been asked about yet.
” Paper moved on the other end. “The Tierney House he’s disclaiming any interest in, which — he never had any, but somebody made him say it twice.
The house on the lake is in both names; he’s not asking you to sign anything about it.
The accounts are open to you. He’s instructed his people to stop the clock on everything and he’s asked that nothing be filed that would require you to appear anywhere. ”
“There’s a prenup.”
“There is. He’s waived the section you’d have had to fight.
” The attorney let that sit. “Mrs. Lassiter, in this county, at this level of money, I have done this maybe thirty times. Twice I have seen a man do a piece of this. I have never once seen a man do all of it in nine days, and I want you to hear me say that I do not know what it means.”
“It means he’s sorry.”
“It might.”
“It means he’s got good lawyers who told him it’s cheaper.”
“It doesn’t. I’d have told him it was cheaper to fight you on two of these and he did neither.” The attorney let a beat go. “Can I say one more thing outside my remit?”
“Everybody’s saying things outside their remit this week.”
“Don’t sign anything for a year.”
Talia switched the phone to the other ear.
“You’re my divorce lawyer.”
“I’m your family attorney, which in this county means I’m whatever you need on the day, and what I am today is a woman who has watched four hundred of these.
” A chair moved somewhere. “People get divorced in the first six weeks and then spend nine years wishing they’d waited, or they go back in the first six weeks and spend nine years wishing they hadn’t.
The ones who come out of it all right sat still for a year while their own opinion arrived.
“So sit still. Nothing gets filed unless you call me. He’s already given up everything he could use against you, which means there is no clock on this except the one in your own head, and I’d like you to hear that from somebody who bills by the hour and is arguing against her own interest.”
Talia stood at the pass with her bandaged hand flat on the steel and looked at nothing.
“Did he ask you to tell me?”
“No. He asked me not to.”
* * *
Bailey came by that night with two beers and put one on the pass.
“You look like hell.”
“Thank you.”
“I mean it as information.” Bailey hitched up onto a stool. “Word is he signed everything away.”
“Word is right.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t do the thing.” Bailey pointed the bottle at her. “The thing where he does one decent thing and you start building a whole man around it. You’ve done it before. You did it with the inn.”
Talia put down the towel.
“That’s not fair.”
“It’s not,” Bailey agreed. “I’m not a fair person this month. I pulled you out of a ditch, Tal. I had my hands on you and you were sixteen minutes from the kind of cold where it stops mattering how fast anybody drives.”
“I know.”
“You don’t, actually, because you were unconscious, and I’m the one who had to stand there with your head in my lap doing the math.” Bailey drank. “So he can give you every dollar he has. It’s not a gesture. It’s just money he’s got. The thing he didn’t do was drive two miles.”
“He couldn’t. The road—”
“Tal.”
“I know,” Talia said. “I know. I’m not defending him. I’m just—”
“You’re just saying the sentence out loud to see if it sounds true.” Bailey nodded. “It doesn’t.”
They sat in the kitchen a while with the ovens ticking as they cooled.
“He waited for a crew,” Talia said, eventually, to the counter. “That’s what he said in the hospital. The tree’s across the road and they told him nine o’clock, so he sat down.”
“Yeah.”
“If it was you, and it was me in that house.”
“I’d have walked it in my slippers and you know it.”
“I know it.”
“That’s the whole thing,” Bailey said. “That’s the entire thing. Everything else is weather.”
* * *
She didn’t sleep that night either.
At four in the morning she came down the back stairs because there was no point lying there, and she stood in the dark dining room in her coat.
Twenty-two tables. A hundred and four covers if you used the private room, which her father never would.
Two ranges, a flat top, a salamander that would want a new element, a walk-in that would need a compressor.
Somebody would have to look at the roof over the kitchen.
The floor in front of the service door had been soft since before she was born.
She got a pencil and the back of a delivery sheet and started a list, and when she ran out of room she turned it over, and when she ran out of room again she found another one.
It took until it started getting light.
At seven she called Bailey, and Bailey picked up sounding like a woman who had gone to bed at two.
“Somebody better be on fire.”
“I’m not closing it,” Talia said.
A pause.
“Say that again.”
“When it warms up. I’m not closing it again. I’m opening it for real — the dining room, the rooms upstairs, all of it. I’ve got the building, I’ve got the ranges, I’ve got the gas, and there hasn’t been a place to eat in this village in February since I shut the door.”
“Tal—”
“Say it’s a bad idea.”
Bailey was quiet for a second.
“It’s not a bad idea,” she said. “It’s the only idea you’ve had in eight years.”