The Call My Husband Never Ended

The next morning I drove to my father’s attorney’s office before Merlin was even awake, and I played him four minutes of audio in a quiet room that smelled like old paper and coffee. He did not say much. He picked up his phone, called someone he trusted at the trust company, and by that afternoon the distribution had been redirected into a new account under my name alone, a spendthrift trust that no joint signature could ever touch. Two days before it was scheduled to clear into what Merlin believed would be an account he had quiet access to, it was already gone somewhere he could never reach it.

I kept going to work at the grain elevator office like nothing had changed. I smiled at Merlin over supper. I let him talk about a fishing trip he was planning for the following month, the same month he intended to be gone with another woman and another man’s supposed son. I even let Nolabelle hold my hand at quilting circle that Thursday and ask me how I was holding up since my father passed, and I told her I was managing, which was, in its own way, true.

It took eleven days to get everything in place. A divorce attorney two towns over, recommended by a woman from my church who had been through her own hard year. Copies of the recording, saved in three places, one printed to a memory stick that I kept in my glove box and another mailed to myself so it would carry a postmark. A private meeting with the bank’s regional compliance officer, a woman I had known since high school, in a windowless conference room that smelled like burnt coffee, to explain that a loan manager at her branch appeared to be planning to redirect a customer’s trust distribution into an account for his own benefit while concealing an affair with that customer’s spouse. Compliance people do not like hearing sentences like that. She set her pen down halfway through and asked me to say it again, slower, and then asked if I would be willing to put it in writing. I told her I already had.