PART 5 — THE SECOND SATURDAY
The divorce was straightforward and slow, which Junia says is the best kind.
The house was never in play. Purchased before the marriage, titled solely, financed and paid off with traceable separate funds — the insurance payout out of my father’s union policy, and my own account statements going back to the laundromat years. Junia said it was the cleanest separate-property file she’d had in a decade and that she wished more people were as boring as I am.
The ninety-one thousand was a harder argument and we settled it rather than litigate it, which I was fine with, because by then I understood something: I was not going to be made whole. I was going to be made finished. Those are different and only one of them was available.
He moved out in January. He took the furniture he’d brought, the television, and the good knives, and he left the peace lily, which had somehow ended up in my hallway during the reverse-loading and which I have not managed to kill.
He lives out by the interchange now. He has the room he wanted for his mother, more or less — she moved into a senior building in Brayton Falls in the spring, which she found herself, and which I understand she likes.
We are not in contact. I sent one card when she had her hip done, and she sent one back, and neither of us said anything about any of it, and I think that is probably where it is going to stay. I don’t hate her. She stood on my porch and put her hand on me and said a cruel thing in a pleasant voice in front of twenty-five people, and she did it because her son had spent eleven years letting her believe something that made him look good at holidays.
She was a weapon he had been loading for a decade without ever intending to fire it.
Bridget I have not spoken to and will not.
The neighbors were strange for about two months and then it was fine. Dell Ivorson came over in October with a ladder and cleaned my gutters and did not mention September, and when he was done I gave him a beer and he said, out of nowhere, “I should’ve got out of that chair.” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “Yeah,” and that was the whole conversation and it was enough.
This September was the block party again. Second Saturday. Chairs down both curbs.
I hosted the table this year, which I have never done, because it turns out it’s just a folding table and a canopy and somebody has to put them up.
Around four in the afternoon I was carrying a stack of chairs out of my garage and I stopped for a second in my own driveway, in the exact spot where a cruiser had parked a year before, and I looked at my house.
Four bedrooms. Gutters clean. A peace lily in the front window that I refuse to be sentimental about.
My son owns this house.
She said it loud, on purpose, so the whole street would hear it and I would have to stand there and take it.
The street did hear it. All twenty-five of them. And then they all watched her carry her suitcases back down my steps.
She was right that somebody owned that house. She just had the wrong name, and the wrong story, and the wrong man telling it to her.
The right name has been on the deed since November, eleven years before she ever set foot on that porch, and it is on the mailbox now too, because I had it repainted in the spring.
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