The Alarm He Called Paranoid

The lawyer and the log

I got the lawyer Denise’s husband knew, a woman in the county seat named Pat Gorley who has been doing farm divorces for thirty years and has seen every trick a man can try.

Dale tried a few. First he wanted to come home and work on it, and there was a stretch of about ten days where the calls got gentle and the word counseling showed up, and I will admit I sat with that longer than I want to tell you, because twenty six years is a long rope and it does not cut clean. But then Pat pulled the paper. The truck he babied, it turned out, was not the only thing he had financed against my judgment. There was a card I did not know about with eleven thousand on it, and some of those charges had Crystal’s town on them, and a couple of them had dates on them that lined up with the Tuesdays I stayed late to close the co op books. He had been spending our money to build the very afternoons that ended in my pool.

That was the end of the ten gentle days. I told Pat to file.

The house was mine to keep, and this is the heartland part that a city lawyer might not understand. It is not a mansion. It is a brick ranch on four acres off a county road, worth less than a nice truck in some towns. But it was my mother’s brother’s land before it was ours, and Dale had married into it, and Indiana is fair about that. The judge gave me the house and the four acres and the shed with my cameras still on it. Dale got the truck he loved, and the note that came with the truck, and half of a checking account that was thinner than he thought because of the card he forgot I would find. He got to keep the fob too. Pat made a joke to the judge about the fob being at the bottom of the pool, and the judge, a woman near retirement, did not quite hide her smile.

The water and the corn

I drained the pool in September.

I stood in the yard while the last of it ran out down the ditch, and there at the bottom, on the pale vinyl, sat the fob to Dale’s truck exactly where I had dropped it, dead now, useless, a little black nothing. I picked it up and I set it on the picnic table next to where the corn had rolled and stopped in July, and I looked at the two of them together, the corn and the fob, the supper that never happened and the marriage that turned out to have never quite happened either, and that was the morning I finally cried, four acres from the nearest person, with a garden hose in my hand.

Then I took the pool down. Dale had put it up himself the second summer we were married, a secondhand above ground he got off a man in Halesboro for two hundred dollars, and it had leaned a little to the south for twenty years and we had always meant to level it. I took it apart panel by panel and hauled it to the scrap man, and where it had stood I turned the dirt over and let it rest through the winter.

This spring I put in a garden there. Sweet corn, because I will not let one man ruin corn for me, and tomatoes, and along the south edge a long row of basil, because Dale once said basil made the patio feel like home, and I decided I was not going to let him keep that word either. Home. I planted it right over the spot where the water used to be, and it comes up thick every morning, and it smells like something that is only mine.