PART 5 — FORTY PERCENT
Nothing happened to anybody criminally.
The limitations period on all of it ran out sometime around 2005 and Detective Rourke told me that on day nine and did not pretend otherwise.
What was left was civil, and what was left was mine, because my mother left me that company in 2015 and I have run it for ten years.
Forty percent of Oyen Aske Millwork was never hers to leave me.
Bram Oduya, who is my attorney and who has been extremely patient, set out four options over about two hours in the April and I picked the one he thought was the worst.
I gave it back.
Not the shares themselves; Corbin Aske is eighty-one and did not want them and said so. A settlement, negotiated, paid over eleven years out of the business, to him and to his sister’s estate and to his two children.
It is not what forty percent of that company is worth. It is what that company can pay and survive, and it took four months of accountants and everybody in that room knowing it.
We are smaller. We laid nobody off but we have not replaced three people, and the second unit went in the autumn.
The sign says Oyen Aske Millwork and it always did.
Corbin Aske has been to Draymoor once, in the September, and stood in the shop for about forty minutes and did not say very much and touched a bench he built in 1989.
His sister died in 2011 believing he had walked out on her.
That is the thing that cannot be paid for and everybody at that table knew it and nobody said it.
Gethin and I are still married.
Twenty months and a great deal of talking and neither of us is certain, and Nessa is twenty-seven and has an opinion about it that she is entitled to and that I am not going to write down.
He left the company in the June. That was his decision and I did not argue with it.
The maple is still there. I have been asked eleven times whether I took it out.
I did not, because it is a thirty-foot tree and because taking it out would be a thing I did for myself, and I have had about enough of things done for the sake of how they look.
You don’t speak for this company. You never have, and you know exactly why.
My mother said that in a function room to my husband in front of forty people, with four lines he had written in a car folded under her bread plate.
She was not insulting him. I understood that about eleven days after I opened that box and I have not been able to put it down since.
She was reminding him.
Every holiday for twenty-seven years, every short answer and every long silence and every time one of them suddenly remembered somewhere else to be — that was not two people who disliked each other.
That was two people who could not be in a room without both of them thinking about one o’clock in the morning on the eleventh of November 1998.
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