Men are stupid in pools.
I care about the pen.”
And there it was, under a banner about love, in front of twenty-six people: the Delaneys, turning — not on me, for once, but on the one of them who had finally done the thing their mother couldn’t forgive, while a canister of sugar sat on the picnic table and a d*ad woman’s note lay beside it, saying exactly what it had said eleven years ago.
Russ left without the cake.
Dale drove him.
At the tent flap, Russ turned back, and did what men like Russ do when the room has turned.
He said the sentence again.
“You didn’t have to make a scene, Colleen.”
I looked at him.
“I didn’t, Russ.
I pressed a button.
The scene was already in my pool.
I just turned on the lights.”
PART 5 — FINAL
Marlene’s checkbook was not for Russ.
It was for me.
“Ninety thousand,” she said, at the picnic table, after the cake, after the relatives had drifted into the reasonable murmur families make when the thing has happened and cannot unhappen.
“I’ll cover the line.
He’s my son.
His debts are his, but that bank has your name on it, and I’m not having Ruth Callahan’s house carry my boy’s boat.”
“Marlene, you don’t have to — ”
“I know what I have to do.
I’ve known since the sugar.
Sign the receipt.”
I signed my own name.
She checked the loop on the C.
“Good,” she said.
“That’s yours.”
The divorce took nine months.
It was not dramatic.
Russ’s lawyer argued for “the marital residence” for exactly as long as it took to read the deed, and then argued for “the marital contribution to the pool,” and then stopped, because Mr. Abernathy’s doorbell footage had made its way to the file along with eleven Tuesdays and a question about whose signature was on a bank application.
The forgery was referred.
Russ took a plea in the spring.
Restitution to a bank that had already been paid by his mother.
Probation.
A note in a file that will follow him to every dealership in the state, which Todd Marsh, I’m told, made sure of personally.
Todd and Brandi are divorced.
Brandi lives in the condo on the river.
It was, in the end, the only thing Russ had actually bought her, and it was bought with my house, and she knows that now, and I have decided that knowing it is her whole sentence.
Some things did not come back.
Thirty-one years.
I’m not going to pretend they were all Tuesdays.
There were Sundays in there, and a daughter, and a basil plant.
And the basil — Russ pulled it up, the Wednesday he came with Dale, on his way off the porch, one handful, the way a child kicks a sandcastle.
I planted mint there instead.
It’s harder to k*ll.
Erin came home for Christmas.
First time in four years.
She stood in the kitchen and looked at the sugar canister and said, “Mom, you kept it?”
“I kept it.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not hiding it.
That’s what he wanted.
Everything in a drawer.
Everything a formality.”
I picked it up.
It had a label on it now, in my handwriting, on masking tape, the way my mother labeled everything in her pantry.
“BORROW ANYTIME.
BRING IT BACK.”
