Chapter 16 Served
Summer
The attorney calls at ten in the morning Chicago time.
I am in the walk-up in Wicker Park, in the same kitchen I have eaten cereal in for over a month, with the same cold coffee in the same chipped white mug because the things you take with you aren't always the things you choose to take with you.
"Mrs. Bennet."
"It's Summer."
"Summer. Sorry. I have the petition ready to file. I want you to take one more look before I do."
"I read it three times yesterday, Patrick."
"I want to hear you say it out loud. Just for me. You understand what filing this triggers. You understand we serve him next week."
"I understand."
"You don't want a settlement first. You don't want a separation period. You don't want to negotiate."
"I talked to him. I warned him. I gave him time to get his shit together. I don't need to give him another minute."
A pause on the other end.
"Filing today, Summer?"
"Filing today."
"Service Tuesday."
"Where."
"His office. Open hours. I want him to be in his office."
A longer pause.
"That can be arranged."
"Thank you, Patrick."
I hang up.
I sit at the kitchen table in the Vandy t-shirt that no longer smells like Autumn's detergent because I have washed it eight times.
I sit until the coffee in the mug gets even colder than it was.
I think I am supposed to cry. The crying doesn't come.
It hasn't come for two weeks. What comes instead is a quiet that I have been waiting for, a settling of the things in me that have been moving since that night.
There is a version of this morning where I picture his face when the papers reach him. There is a version where I feel something about his reaction. I don't go to that version. I have been there too many times in the last five weeks and there is no answer for me there.
What I have an answer for is the woman I see in the mirror in this kitchen. She is the one I am protecting now.
I get up. I rinse the mug.
I go to Vibes early.
***
Colt
Tuesday morning at the office.
It is the thirty-eighth day Summer hasn't picked up the phone. I keep count. The number doesn't matter. I count because if I stop I'll drown.
I am at my desk. I have been at my desk for three hours.
The document on my screen hasn't changed and I haven't read a word of it since the second hour.
Cheyenne brought me coffee at nine. I didn't drink it.
She didn't acknowledge that I didn't drink it.
This is the new rhythm of every morning since the photos went up.
"Colt." Cheyenne stops in my doorway.
"Not now. I can't right now."
"We're going to have to talk about it eventually." She doesn't move. "We have something, you and me. And Summer's not coming back. You know that."
"We don't have anything to talk about, and you don't know what you're talking about. If it's about work, schedule a block with Cheryl."
She goes back to her office in a huff. I can't find it in myself to care. I'm barely hanging on as it is.
My father hasn't asked me a personal question in five weeks.
The firm hasn't asked me a personal question in five weeks.
I have been performing at work at a level I have never had to perform it before, and the performance is keeping me upright, and underneath the performance is a man whose hands shake when he sets his coffee down.
I am rereading the same paragraph for the third time when reception calls.
"Mr. Bennet, there is a gentleman here for you."
"Send him in."
"He says it's a personal delivery. He'd like to come up."
"Send him up."
I don't get out of my chair.
I hear the elevator open at the other end of the floor.
Footsteps. Cheryl from reception apologizing softly to the man as she walks him through the floor.
The conference rooms have glass walls and the floor is open-plan and Cheyenne is in her office across from my door and she looks up because everyone looks up when a stranger walks the floor.
The man stops at the open door of my office.
"Colt Bennet?"
"Yes."
"You have been served."
He sets the envelope on my desk.
He leaves.
The floor is silent. Cheyenne's eyes are on me through the open door. Somewhere on the other side of the floor a phone rings unanswered.
The envelope is manila. It is heavier than it should be. It has the seal of the Charleston County Family Court on it.
I open it.
I read.
It is a complaint for divorce. Petitioner Summer Eloise King, formerly Summer Eloise Bennet, against respondent Colt David Bennet. Irreconcilable differences. Adultery as constructive grounds. Filed yesterday. Signed by an attorney in Charleston named Patrick Hammond.
She did this.
She actually did this.
The realization comes in two pieces.
The first truth hits hard and clean.
She did it.
My wife hired a lawyer. She filed for divorce. She paid a stranger to walk into my office and place the end of our marriage on my desk.
Summer isn’t coming back.
The second truth comes slower.
It is worse.
I did this.
I am the reason her name is on these papers. I am the reason she is in another state building a life that does not have me in it.
She didn’t leave our marriage.
I gave her no reason to stay.
She didn't leave me. I made her leave.
My ears start to ring. The room goes a little too bright at the edges. My breath does what it has been doing since the bathroom floor of that hotel.
I stand up.
I sit back down.
I stand up again because I can't stay in this chair.
My father walks into my office without knocking.
"What was that."
"Divorce papers."
He doesn't say anything.
He stands in the doorway and he looks at me and his face does what it does when one of his deals is in trouble. The calculations. The damage estimate. The contingency tree.
"Get a lawyer, son. Today. The firm's counsel can recommend somebody who works fast."
"That's the first thing you're going to say to me."
He looks at the floor. He looks at me. He does the calculation one more time. Then he says, "We will get through this. The firm has weathered worse. Calloway won't back out. The board will hold."
He turns. He walks out.
I sit at my desk in an office in a business I was supposed to inherit, in a job that has just survived a public divorce filing because my father has already filed it away as something the company can absorb, and I understand for the first time what my wife has been telling me all along.
He never saw me.
Not when I was four, not when I was fourteen, not when my mother stopped asking me how I was, not when I married a woman he didn't approve of, not when I closed Tidewater three days early. He has never seen me. He has only seen the version of me that runs the firm he built.
The man who is married to Summer King. The man who let her down. The man who is now divorcing her on paper. That man, my father has never seen.
Summer was the only person who ever saw that man.
I close my office door. The first time I have closed it since I started here. I sit down on the floor with my back against it.
I did this.
I did this.
I did this.
I take out my phone. I don't call my wife. I don't call her father. Dom's been quiet for weeks and his people are still working it, and for the first time since that hotel room I want them to hurry. I want a name. I want to know what happened to me, and then I want to know what to do about it.