The Key My Husband Forgot I Had

The pen skidded across the table and stopped against my paper cup of water.

“Told you there’d be nothing to divide,” Wayne said.

He was not talking to me. He was talking to Tiffany, who sat in the chair by the window of the little conference room off Courtroom B with her purse on her knees, like a girl waiting on a bus. He smiled at her the way he used to smile at a man who had just paid full price for a riding mower.

I looked at the clock over the door. It was 4:49 on a Monday afternoon. The judge had signed at 4:41.

Eight minutes. Twenty-six years of marriage, and it took him eight minutes to say it out loud in front of me.

His attorney, a gray-suited man from Lexington who had never once looked me in the eye, slid a check across the table with two fingers.

Six thousand dollars. Half of the joint checking account, which turned out to be the only thing in the world with both our names on it.

“The building is in the Crandall family trust,” the attorney said, for what must have been the tenth time that month. “The inventory is pledged against the note to Mr. Crandall’s brother. The business itself has shown a loss three years running.”

“I know what it’s shown,” I said. “I’m the one who used to carry the deposits to the bank.”

“You carried them,” Wayne said. “You didn’t own them.”

My own lawyer, a tired young woman I had been paying forty dollars at a time, put her hand on my arm. She had already told me in the hallway that she was sorry. She had told me that a wife who works a counter for twenty-six years without a paycheck has, on paper, given a gift to the marriage.

A gift. I had opened that store at 6:30 every morning since I was twenty-five years old.

“I just want to be sure I understand,” I said. “The store I ran is yours.”

“It was always mine, Paula. It’s got my name over the door.”

“It’s got your daddy’s name over the door.”

“Same name.” He leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head. He was wearing a golf shirt to his own divorce. “You were never an employee. You were my wife. Wives help. That’s all that was.”

Tiffany gave a little laugh by the window. It was not a mean laugh. It was the laugh of somebody who does not know where to put her hands. She was thirty-four, she did hair at a shop out by the bypass, and the whole room smelled like her vanilla lotion.

“Wayne,” she said softly, “maybe don’t.”

“I’m just saying what the paper says, hon.”

I picked up the check. I folded it once and put it in my purse, in the zipper pocket where I kept my reading glasses. Then I picked up his pen from where it had stopped against my cup, capped it, and set it down in front of him, square to the edge of the table, the way I used to square the receipt pads every night at closing.

“Thank you, Wayne,” I said.

He blinked. He had been ready for a lot of things. I could see that. He had been ready for crying, and for a scene in the hallway, and for me to call him what he was in front of his girlfriend. He had his face all set for it.