The Lake House He Thought He Kept

Learning How Instead of Why

I called a lawyer of my own that December, not to reopen the settlement, which I had no interest in relitigating, but because I wanted, for the first time in my adult life, to understand exactly what still existed on paper with my name attached to it. Her name was Ethel, a younger woman with an office above the pharmacy who did not once treat me like I was fragile or confused, only thorough.

Ethel asked good, specific questions. Did I know the full list of insurance policies from the marriage. Had anyone confirmed the beneficiary designations were updated as part of the divorce. I told her, honestly, that I did not know, that the settlement had only ever talked about the house, the accounts, and the vehicles.

“That happens more than you would think,” she told me. “Divorce decrees divide property. They almost never specifically order somebody to go change a beneficiary form with an insurance company, unless a lawyer thinks to ask for it in writing. If nobody asks, the company just keeps whatever name is already on file, no matter what a courtroom decided about the house.”

I asked her whether that could cut both ways, whether I might still be named on something of Don’s that nobody had bothered to change.

“It’s possible,” she said. “It happens constantly, honestly. People assume divorce erases everything automatically. It does not. Only the policyholder can change a beneficiary, and only by filing the right form with the company. Until that form is signed and received, the old name stands, whatever a judge decided about anything else.”

I did not think much more about it after that conversation. I was not chasing a windfall. I was simply, for the first time since Don sat me down at our own kitchen table, trying to understand my own life instead of reacting to somebody else’s decisions about it. I went back to Joe and Lucas’s spare room, and I kept making my lists, and I let December pass the way December does in the north woods, early dark, wood smoke hanging low over the county road, church potlucks every other Sunday where the same six women brought the same six hotdishes and nobody asked me a single uncomfortable question, which I was more grateful for than they will ever know.