The Lake House He Thought He Kept

The Morning I Signed Away the Lake House

The courthouse in Alder Falls smells like every county courthouse smells, floor wax and old radiators and coffee that has been sitting on a burner since eight in the morning. I noticed that smell more than anything else on the day I stopped being married. It is strange what your mind decides to hold onto when the rest of it is trying not to fall apart.

I was seventy two years old, sitting on a hard bench outside courtroom two with a folder of papers on my lap and a suitcase by my feet, because I already knew I would not be going back to the house that night. Forty six years of marriage, ended by a stack of documents that took less time to sign than it takes to bake a casserole.

Don sat two benches down with his lawyer, in the good blue jacket I had bought him for our fortieth anniversary. He did not look at me. He looked pleased, the way a man looks when a deal has gone exactly his way and he is trying not to show it in front of a judge.

When it was over, he did not wait for me to reach the door. He caught up to me in the hallway, close enough that only I would hear him, and said the thing I have turned over in my mind every day since.

“You’ll never see the grandkids again. I’ve already talked to Sean about it.”

Then he smiled, like he had won something, and walked out ahead of me into the parking lot.

I did not give him the satisfaction of an answer. I picked up my suitcase and walked out into a gray Wisconsin morning in late November, the kind where the sky and the lake are almost the same color, and I told myself I would deal with the rest of it later, one piece at a time. I had no idea yet how much of it there would turn out to be, or how it would end.