Chapter 3 #2
“Doing what?”
“Fixing it. Paying for it. You think if you hand me a big enough thing, it’ll be over.
” She put her hand through the gap in the door and took the keys out of his palm.
His fingers didn’t close. He let her have them.
Then she held them back out to him through the same gap, dangling from one finger.
“I don’t want the house. I don’t want an account.
I don’t want you to buy me anywhere. I want you to take these back and go. ”
He didn’t move.
“Take them, Lucas.”
Slowly he held out his hand, and she dropped them into it. The little peach landed on top.
“I’m not trying to buy you,” he said quietly. “I’m just trying to—”
“I know what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to arrange it.” She started to close the door. “Go home. Your house is empty.”
She closed it. She stood on the other side of it with her hand flat on the wood. Then she heard him go down the steps. She heard the car door. She did not hear the engine for a long time.
When it finally started, she let her breath out.
Roxanne was standing at the end of the hall with a dish towel over her shoulder.
“Well,” Roxanne said. “He didn’t bring flowers. I’ll give him that.”
“He brought a house.”
“That’s worse than flowers.”
“It’s so much worse than flowers,” Amelia said, and to her own surprise, she laughed. It came out cracked and wet. Roxanne came down the hall and put an arm around her waist, and they stood there together in the smell of floor wax until it passed.
* * *
Thursday morning the Foundation called.
It was Patrice Holloway, the executive director. Patrice was sixty and gray-haired and plain-spoken, and she had been the only person on the Foundation’s staff who never treated Amelia like the boss’s wife. Amelia liked her.
“I’m not calling about any of it,” Patrice said. “I want that clear. Your business is your business. I’m calling because you have a right to know something, and I’m not sure anyone else is going to tell you.”
Amelia sat up on the couch. “All right.”
“Maureen called me Monday.”
Amelia’s stomach went cold. Maureen Fletcher chaired the Foundation’s board. She had for twenty years.
“She was very gracious,” Patrice said. “She’s always very gracious.
She said she was worried about you. She said with everything going on, you shouldn’t have to carry the scholarship program on top of it.
She said it would be kinder to give you a rest. She had a name for who should take over while you rested.
Someone from the board. She wanted it done this week, quietly, before the selection weekend. For your own good.”
For your own good. Amelia could hear Maureen saying it. The soft voice. The small cool hand on the shoulder.
“And?” she said.
“And I said I’d look into it. What else was I going to say?” Patrice sighed. “Then Tuesday morning, Lucas called.”
Amelia went still.
“It was the shortest phone call I’ve ever had with a Fletcher,” Patrice said. “He said, and I’m quoting, Amelia runs the program. Nobody touches it. If my mother calls again, tell her to call me. Then he said one more thing.”
“What?”
“He said, Don’t tell her I called.” Patrice paused. “So I’m telling you. Because I’ve worked for that family for fifteen years, and that’s the first time I’ve ever heard one of them do something and not want credit for it. I thought you should know. Do what you like with it.”
* * *
It didn’t fit.
That was the problem. Amelia sat with it all afternoon, and it wouldn’t fit anywhere.
For five days she had been building him.
The real him. The one under the husband she thought she had.
She had been putting him together piece by piece, from the frame and the pause and the it doesn’t matter why, from the rides and the apology that sounded like a press release, from the keys held out through a door.
She needed that man. She needed him whole and clear and simple, because it was the only way she could stand up.
A man who made a bet about a woman whose name he didn’t know. A man who kept his word to a bar bet and his silence to his wife. A man who thought he could buy his way out of anything. She could leave that man. She could hate that man clean.
That man would not have called Patrice.
That man would have let his mother do it. Would have been relieved, even. One less thing. One less reason for Amelia to be in rooms where people would look at her. Or he would have called and made sure Amelia knew he’d called, so it could be one more thing on the scale.
He had called, and he had said don’t tell her.
She didn’t want it. She didn’t want one single thing that didn’t fit.
* * *
On Friday she found the apartment.
It was in Cabbagetown, on a narrow street of old mill houses painted every color a paint store sells.
The apartment was the top half of a pale yellow shotgun house, up an outside staircase, four rooms in a row, front to back.
It had a claw-foot tub and a kitchen the size of a closet and a window over the sink that looked out at a fig tree.
The landlady was eighty and lived downstairs and wanted first and last month and no pets.
Amelia paid it out of her own account. The one she had kept since before him, where her Foundation salary went every two weeks. She had never touched it much. For five years there had never been any reason to.
She stood in the empty front room after the landlady left. The floors were old heart pine, worn soft in the middle. The walls were bare. The air smelled like dust and fresh paint and the fig tree.
Nothing in it was his. Nothing in it had ever been his.
She looked at her phone to check the time and saw the date.
It was their anniversary. Five years.
She had forgotten. For the first time in five years, she had forgotten, and she stood in the empty room and felt it hit her, and she let it.
* * *
Roxanne helped her move that night, which took one trip. The duffel. Two boxes of files. An air mattress, a lamp, a set of sheets, two plates, two mugs, a skillet, and a coffee maker, all from Roxanne’s garage, all of it pressed on her with a look that said arguing would be pointless.
“You’ll bring it back when you buy your own,” Roxanne said. “Or you won’t. I don’t care. I have six coffee makers. Don’t ask me why.”
“Why do you have—”
“I said don’t ask.” Roxanne kissed her on the cheek, fast and hard, at the top of the outside stairs. “Call me if you need me. Call me if you don’t. Lock the door.”
She went. Amelia locked the door.
She sat on the air mattress in the front room with her back against the wall and the laptop on her knees.
The lamp threw a small circle of light on the old pine floor.
Outside, somewhere down the street, someone was playing music on a porch, and a dog was barking at it, and a train went by far off with a long low horn.
She opened a new message to Lucas.
She had known she would do this. She had known since the kitchen table. It was the next thing, the clean thing, the thing a woman with any dignity did. You didn’t wait for him to decide. You didn’t let him arrange it. You told him.
She typed the first sentence without stopping.
Lucas, I’m going to file for divorce.
She looked at it. It looked fine. It looked true.
She started the second sentence.
I want you to know that
She stopped.
She sat with her fingers on the keys. She didn’t know what came next.
She had known a minute ago. She had known the whole thing, start to finish, the way you know a song.
I want you to know that I don’t want anything from you.
I want you to know that I’ll never forgive you. I want you to know that it’s over.
I want you to know that Patrice told me.
She deleted that.
She typed I want you to know that again and looked at it. The cursor blinked after the last word. It blinked and blinked. Down the street the music stopped and the dog stopped, and the only sound was the fig tree moving against the window in the dark.
She sat there a long time. She did not send it. She did not delete it either.
She just could not get past the second sentence.