PART 5 — THE BEAM
Here is the part I have had to get to, and it took a counsellor and about seven months.
I was not in that marriage.
I paid for it. Those are not the same thing and I ran them as if they were for four years.
In the autumn of 2022 Dessa asked me to drop the consulting work. She said it twice. The second time was at that kitchen table and she said she did not care about the holiday.
And I said after the next contract.
There were three more after the next contract.
I decided, somewhere in about 2022, that the way I loved my wife was by carrying the weight, and I made myself indispensable in the one way that meant I never had to be in the room.
She went and found somebody who was in the room. That does not make it all right and I am not going to write the version where I forgive her, because I have not.
But she did not thank the money at that microphone, and the money is what I had made myself into.
We divorced in the spring. She has the flat on Carrow Street. I have the house and a schedule of the seventeen and a half thousand, which is part of the settlement and which she is paying back at four hundred a month until 2031.
Nobody wants to hear about money. Emory pays the bills, everyone — that’s his thing.
She said that at her mother’s table in front of about twenty-five people, taking the final tuition receipt out of my hand and putting it under her plate, on the night I had come to say we were finished paying.
I laughed along with the rest of them.
She was right. It was my thing. It was the only thing I had made it.
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