The Call My Husband Never Ended

“Loman, I can explain,” Merlin started, and I let him get exactly that far.

“You don’t need to,” I said. “I already know everything I need to know. What you should be worried about right now is that the trust cleared four days ago, into an account with only my name on it, and that the bank’s compliance office already has a written statement describing what you were planning to do with a customer’s funds while employed there. That’s not a marriage problem anymore, Merlin. That’s a job problem, and depending on how the examiners feel about it, it might be a legal one.”

He tried anger next, the same cold voice I had heard through the car speaker, but it had nowhere to land. I was not the woman crying alone on a gravel shoulder anymore. I slid the divorce papers across the table, already filed that morning, citing adultery, which in Missouri does not change the money much on its own, but it does something else. It puts the truth in the public record, and in a town the size of Sweet Springs, the public record travels faster than the newspaper ever could.

Nolabelle would not meet my eyes. She kept her hands folded over her belly like she was bracing for me to say something she could not take back. I did not raise my voice. I told her, as gently as I could manage while my hands were still shaking under the table, that I hoped her son grew up better than his father, and that she was welcome to keep the baby quilt, because whatever she and Merlin had done to me, that child had not asked to be born into the middle of it. She started crying then, the real kind, not the kind meant to move me, and for one strange second I almost reached across the table out of pure habit before I remembered why my hand needed to stay exactly where it was.