Chapter 5: Forty-Eight Hours
The anniversary party was Saturday at six. Twenty years.
Gloria ordered the cake. Tammy hung the gold banner. I made the gravy.
By seven there were thirty people in my living room: Derek’s uncles, his business friends, two ladies from Gloria’s church, and a loan officer from Commonwealth Bank named Mr. Pruitt, holding a leather folder. And Ashley, in her cream sweater dress, with the baby on her hip.
“Claire, this is my cousin Ashley,” Derek said, his hand on the small of her back. “From Georgetown.”
“Of course,” I said. “And who’s this little guy?”
“This is DJ,” Ashley said, and turned pink.
Gloria watched me all night like a cat watching a closed door.
After the toast, Derek tapped his glass. “Okay, before cake, a little business. Babe, Mr. Pruitt has the guarantee. Just a couple of signatures. Then we celebrate the next twenty years.”
People clapped. Mr. Pruitt laid the papers on the dining table and uncapped a pen.
I picked up the TV remote instead.
“Before I sign,” I said, “I made us a little slideshow.”
Derek smiled, confused. I pressed play on the big TV over my mother’s fireplace.
The first photo was our wedding. Everyone said aww.
The second was the card statement, BLUEGRASS BIRTH & MATERNITY CENTER highlighted in yellow. Then the jeweler. Then the crib.
Then the map: Derek’s truck, parked every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday night on Clayton Avenue, Georgetown.
Then the photo I took from across the street: Gloria on a porch swing kissing a baby in a white knit outfit, and Derek walking up the steps with diapers on his shoulder.
And then I let the porch camera play, with sound.
Tell Ashley to keep the baby off Facebook till Claire signs the loan.
Nobody said aww.
Mr. Pruitt closed his leather folder very slowly.
“Mr. Pruitt,” I said, “I won’t be guaranteeing anything. And you should know the company received a demand on my note thirty days ago. It comes due Monday.”
Derek’s face went the color of the tablecloth. “Claire. Let’s talk in private.”
“We’re done talking in private.” I handed him the envelope Nora had prepared. “That’s a divorce petition. Your cards were closed this morning. The truck goes back Monday. It’s in my name.”
Gloria stood, gripping the back of her chair. “You can’t throw a man out of his own house.”
“It isn’t his house,” I said. “As of Thursday, it isn’t mine either. I sold it. The new owner takes possession Monday at six.” I looked around at the banner and the cake and my mother’s piano with a stack of Gloria’s dishes on top. “That’s forty-eight hours. I’d start packing.”
The room broke open. One of Derek’s uncles said, “Claire, that’s cold. It’s Christmas. She’s seventy-two years old.”
He wasn’t wrong. I’ve thought about it every day since.
Gloria cried real tears, about her hip and her age and the weather. Ashley left with the baby before the cake was cut, without a word to Derek. Tammy didn’t cry at all. She came and stood next to me.
I’d made one exception, and I still don’t know if it makes me kinder or crueler. I’d paid for a month at an extended-stay hotel near Mason’s school, in Tammy’s name. Not Gloria’s. Gloria had a son, a new grandson and an address in Georgetown she knew very well.
She went there. It lasted nine days.
Vance Outdoor Living closed in January. Derek owes me $250,000 plus interest, and Nora is collecting it like a woman collecting for her best friend’s daughter. The divorce was final in May. He kept his tools, his debts and his mother.
Tammy works at a dental office now. Mason mails me drawings. The last one was a piano.
Because I took the piano. It sits in my new condo by a window that looks out at nothing much. There are no casserole dishes on it.
Some nights I play the one song Mom taught me, badly, and think about Dad’s rule. Never give a man money without paper.
He was right about the paper. He just never told me the hardest part.
You have to be willing to use it.
