With my name on it.
I found it at midnight in the boring drawer.”
His brother looked at him.
“Russ.
What HELOC.”
“Dale, not now — ”
“You told me the boat was a bonus.”
“It was a — Colleen signed for — ”
“I did not sign for a boat,” I said.
“I have never signed for a boat.
My mother told me not to let you sign for me, and I’ve been dumb about a lot of things for thirty-one years, but I listened to that.”
Dale Delaney looked at his brother the way you look at a man who has just told you the lake is shallow while standing in it up to his neck.
“Russ.
Where’s the money.”
Russ did not answer.
Dale left.
Russ stayed on the porch for a while, and then he said the thing he’d come to say, which was that his mother’s eightieth birthday was Saturday, that the whole family would be there, and that “for Mom’s sake” I should come, “act normal,” and “we’ll figure the rest out after.”
“You want me at Marlene’s birthday.”
“She’s expecting you.
She doesn’t know about — any of this.”
“She’ll know Saturday,” I said.
“Because I’m coming.
And I’m bringing the boring drawer.”
Thursday, the pressure came the way it always does — from the soft side.
Russ’s sister called.
Janet.
Kind, church-going, the family’s designated peacemaker.
“Colleen.
Honey.
I heard.
And I’m not defending him.
But he’s sixty.
Thirty-one years.
The alarm — the whole neighborhood — was that really necessary?
Can’t you just… let it go?
For the family?”
“Janet, if a stranger had opened a ninety-thousand-dollar line of credit on your house with a forged signature and spent it on a boat and his girlfriend, would you tell me to let it go?”
A long pause.
“That’s — that’s not — ”
“Why isn’t it?”
She didn’t have an answer.
She did, however, come Saturday, and sit next to me, which I’ll get to.
Friday, Brandi came.
Not to the door.
To the fence — the same fence Mrs. Kowalski had leaned over — at dusk, in a hoodie, without lipstick.
“Colleen.
I need my phone.
And my — my things.
Todd’s changed the locks.”
I had her things.
They were in a paper grocery bag on the porch, folded, with the phone on top, and I had been waiting four days for her to ask, because my mother had also taught me that you do not throw a woman’s clothes in the trash even when she has earned it.
I handed her the bag over the fence.
“Colleen — ”
“Brandi, how many Tuesdays?”
“What?”
“How many.”
She looked at the bag.
“Eleven.”
Eleven.
The camera had seven.
I’d had the side gate camera installed in June.
