Chapter 4: The Other Woman’s Voice
I called the bank at 8:00 a.m. sharp.
The woman on the line was kind and careful. The savings account was joint, so Mr. Delaney had every right to move the money. The receiving account was at a bank in Savannah, opened five weeks ago. In his name only.
Five weeks ago was the week he’d cried at dinner about his mama’s knees.
He wasn’t planning a trip. He was planning a landing.
Tom was in the shower, singing. I sat on the edge of our bed with the phone in my lap and looked at the number Kelsey had texted me from the vault. C. A Georgia area code.
I’d never done anything like this. I’d spent twenty years not making calls that might start fires.
I pressed it before I could think.
It rang four times. Then a woman’s voice, soft, Southern, careful. “Hello?”
“Crystal. This is Maureen Delaney.”
Silence. A long one. I could hear a dog barking somewhere behind her and a screen door slapping shut.
“Oh my God,” she whispered.
“I’m not calling to scream at you,” I said, and found that it was true. “I just want to know what he told you.”
She started crying before she started talking. It came out in pieces.
They’d been engaged at nineteen. He’d left for basic training and promised to send for her, and he never did. She married Wade at twenty-three because Wade asked. Thirty years of a hard man in a small town where everybody knows your business. Then last January, a friend request.
“He said you were sick,” she said. “I knew that much. Everybody here knew. But Maureen, he said you were dying. He said hospice had been called in. He said the doctors gave you till spring and he was just doing his duty, sitting with you, and you’d want him to be happy after. He said you’d told him so.”
I looked down at my own hand on my own knee. Pink. Steady. Alive.
“I’m not dying,” I said. “My last scan was clear. I’m having another one on the twentieth.”
She made a sound like something tearing.
“Did he ever send you pictures of me?” I asked. I don’t know why I needed to know.
“One,” she said. “You were asleep on a couch under a blanket. He wrote, This is what my life looks like now. I felt so sorry for him, Maureen. I prayed for him. For you, too.”
I remembered that blanket. Fleece, with little cartoon cats. Kelsey bought it for me after my third chemo, when I couldn’t get warm.
And here’s the part I didn’t expect. It wasn’t Crystal I was angry at. It wasn’t even Tom, not yet.
It was me.
Because I had been living like a dying woman. Shrinking into the couch. Apologizing for taking up air. Handing over my card, my money, my bedroom, my daughter’s right to be angry on my behalf. I had believed my body made me less of a wife, less of a woman, less of a person who got to say no. Tom had only told Crystal what I’d been telling myself for two years.
“I’ll call it off,” she said. “I’ll tell him today.”
“Don’t,” I said. “Not yet. Please. Don’t tell him I called.”
She hesitated. “Why?”
“Because I need to think. And because he’s used to being the only one who knows things.”
We were both quiet. The shower shut off down the hall.
“Maureen,” she said, very low. “There’s something else. I didn’t think it mattered, when I thought you were going anyway.”
“Tell me.”
“He told me not to worry about money. He said the beach was only the start. He said once you passed, he’d have the house in Ohio and your life insurance, and he’d move down for good.”
The bathroom door opened. I heard Tom whistling.
“He said,” she whispered, “you’d be gone by Christmas.”
