PART 5 — THE COUCH
It finished in the December.
The apartment on Fenwick Row was mine from before and stayed mine and was never seriously in play once the earnings picture came out.
There was no maintenance. He had asked for twelve months minimum and he got nothing, and Raisa says that outcome had less to do with the money than with the resignation letter, because a court can forgive a man for being unemployed and cannot forgive a man for arranging it.
There was an equalisation payment that went the other way — to me — reflecting a proportion of eight months of undisclosed trading. It is not a large number and I have not spent it.
Northrun Supply Co. was wound up. There is a separate matter concerning the tax treatment of eight months of revenue in a sixty-one-year-old woman’s name, and I am not a party to it and I have deliberately not asked.
Ilma has said one thing to me since. In a corridor, in the March, on the way out of the room where she could not name a supplier.
She said, “He’s my son.”
I said I knew he was.
That is the whole exchange and I think about it about once a month, because it is, as far as I can tell, the entire content of that woman, and because I do not think she believes she did anything at all.
Wade is working. Somebody told me he is at a logistics firm two counties over. I hope that is true and I do not mean that generously; I mean that a man with sixty-one thousand dollars of proven trading in eight months is extremely employable and it would be absurd if he were not.
I did not put the couch out.
That is the thing people find strange when I tell this, and I have stopped trying to explain it properly.
It went out with everything else of his in the January, and there was a whole afternoon of it, and I made a point of not being in the building.
What I kept is the whiteboard.
I asked for it in the negotiation as a joke and Raisa put it in the schedule with a straight face, and it came back to me in the spring in a courier’s van, wiped clean.
It is in my hall now with the shopping list on it.
Take them. Either you go and clean my mother’s place right now, or tomorrow I file for divorce. Say yes, in front of everyone.
He said that to me in my own front room, with my platter in his cousin’s hands, at his mother’s birthday party that I paid for, in front of twenty people who all found somewhere else to look.
He wanted a yes in public because he thought a public yes would hold.
I gave him one. I said yes, all right, and I smiled, and every one of those twenty people watched me take the keys and go.
And nine months later, in a room in Harrowgate, a man had to explain to a court why his mother’s apartment was full of stock, why his own handwriting was on the numbers, and why a letter of resignation he wrote on the fourth of September was sitting in a lever arch file four feet from a whiteboard.
May you like
