Chapter 2 #2
She blocked the number at nine forty. She blocked his mother at nine forty-one, which was preemptive and which she did not regret.
She left the house account alone for exactly one day and then wrote to the bank and had her name taken off it, which took four minutes on the phone with a young man in Fargo who called her ma'am and did not ask a single question, and when she hung up she sat in the truck and thought: that was it.
Four minutes. It was four minutes the entire time.
Blake did not call, because she had made it so he couldn't. He did the next thing.
Friday afternoon: a car. An actual car, delivered, a Land Rover with two hundred miles on it, parked at the end of the lake road with a young man from the dealership standing next to it holding a folder. Kristin came out of the storefront and looked at it for a while.
"It's already in your name," the young man said. He was maybe twenty-three. He looked like he wanted to be anywhere else.
"I have a truck."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Do you have to drive it back?"
"I think so, ma'am."
"I'm sorry," Kristin said, and meant it, and went back inside.
Saturday: a house in Wayzata. Not an offer of a house — a house, under agreement, four bedrooms on a hill, sent to Lena as a fact.
Lena called her about it and Kristin listened to the whole description and then said, "Tell him no," and Lena said, "I did that already, I'm telling you as a courtesy," and Kristin laughed for the first time in nine days, one short ugly bark of a laugh in an empty room.
Sunday: an account opened in her name at a bank in Minneapolis with a number in it she made Lena stop reading out loud.
"He's not doing it to buy you," Lena said. "For what it's worth. I've been on the other side of a lot of these. He's protecting you and he's not asking for anything and he's not attaching a single condition. It's the cleanest thing I've seen a man in his position do."
"I know."
"You do?"
"He'd give me all of it," Kristin said. "Every dollar. Today, without being asked. That's not the part that's wrong with him."
She refused the account. Lena wrote the letter.
Monday there was nothing, and the nothing was worse than the car.
Kristin caught herself at eleven in the morning with the phone in her hand checking a number she had blocked herself, and put the phone face down on the counter and went and stood in the stairwell with the smell she could not identify until it passed.
That was the shape of the first week. Every single one of his moves was a thing arriving.
A car arriving, a house arriving, a number arriving.
Nothing he sent required him to be anywhere.
It occurred to her, standing in that stairwell, that she had been married for eleven years to a man who had never once in that time had to be in a room where the outcome was not already arranged, and that she had thought of this as him being busy.
She went back up and did the putty. Twenty. Rest. Twenty.
The apartment was over a storefront on the lake road in Mound that had been a bakery and then a phone repair place and then nothing for two years. There was a smell in the stairwell she never did identify. The floor was slanted enough that a dropped pen would find the north wall.
It had two rooms and a window that looked at the road, and the first night she slept eleven hours, which she had not done since before February, and woke up furious about it.
Tilly could not do the stairs. Kristin carried her up and down four times a day, and by Wednesday her right shoulder was a knot and her left arm ached from the elbow to the two fingers that did not work, and she looked around the second-floor rooms of a shut bakery and thought, clearly, in her own voice: this is going to be harder than the marriage and I am going to like it more.
The lake started talking on the fifth day.
That was fast, even for that stretch of water. Brynn Marlowe came up the stairs on Tuesday evening with a casserole she had visibly bought and a face like a woman who had been holding something in for six hours.
"Okay," Brynn said. "So."
"So."
"Nan Petree told me at the feed store that you're staying in Mound." She set the casserole down. "She told me the way you tell somebody their barn's on fire."
"I am staying in Mound."
"Kristin."
"Sit down. There's one chair. You take it."
Brynn sat. Kristin sat on the floor with her back against the wall and the dog beside her, and told it in about four minutes, flat, in order, the way she would have given a history on a case. Three letters. The initials. The eighteen days. The twenty-ninth of December.
Brynn did not say anything for a long moment.
Then she said, "Did he touch her."
"No."
"You're sure."
"I'm sure."
"Then—" Brynn stopped herself, and Kristin watched her do it, watched her get right up to the edge of then it's not really and hear it and pull it back. Fifteen years of friendship in that half second.
"Say it," Kristin said. "I'd rather you said it."
"I wasn't going to say it."
"You were and it's fine. Everyone's going to say it.
Nan Petree is going to say it in the feed store by Friday.
" Kristin put her head back against the wall.
"He didn't sleep with her. He just took the whole inside of himself out of our house and gave it to the woman whose job was deciding what got through to him.
And then a man wrote three letters about his dead wife and she decided those didn't get through either. "
Brynn's jaw moved.
"That's the part," Kristin said. "Everyone's going to be very interested in the first thing. The first thing is why I left. The second thing is why I can't hold a syringe."
She called the state board on Thursday morning.
It was not a decision so much as a thing she found herself doing, standing at the window of the second-floor room in her socks with the phone against her ear and a mug of coffee balanced on the sill. Her license had gone inactive four years ago. Nobody had made her let it go inactive either.
The woman on the phone was kind and had a Bemidji accent and walked her through it like it was nothing, which it was — a form, a fee, some continuing education hours she could do online, thirty days.
"Any restrictions I should note?" the woman asked. "Physical, anything like that?"
Kristin looked down at her left hand on the windowsill. The ring finger. The little finger, curled short.
She thought about the word restriction. She thought about eleven years of nobody being rude to her.
"No," she said. "Nothing to note."
She hung up and stood there. Down on the lake road a truck went by pulling an empty stock trailer, rattling, in no hurry.
Thirty days.