Part 3 — A Lease in November
“He promised me he would be moving into the townhouse on Chinden by the first of the year,” Brianna said. Her voice was steady, as though she had rehearsed it, and the terrible part was that she probably had. “With me. With Mason. He told me Leah was good with Josie but that he had never really loved her.” Doug said her name once, like a man calling a dog off a road. It did no good at all.
Mason did not look at his father. He looked at me, and I saw that he had known since September and had said nothing, because he was sixteen and because nobody had asked him. “I am sorry, Leah,” he said. “I did not know how to tell you.” I told him it was not his to tell, and that nothing about this was his fault. He sat down again next to Josie and took her hand without a word.
Brianna held up her phone. On the screen was a lease for a three-bedroom townhouse in Nampa, signed by Doug in November, the first month and deposit paid in full. I recognized that amount, because it matched the bonus from the lumber yard that he had told me was delayed. He had said it was delayed. It had been spent. I stood in my own dining room and felt something very old and tired finally set itself down.
I did not shout. I turned to my daughter, knelt beside her chair, and took both her hands. “Josie, look at me. You did nothing wrong. Not one thing. I should have said so at the table this afternoon, when I nodded at you to say sorry. I will never again ask you to apologize to someone who was unkind to you. Never.” She nodded against my shoulder. Her cheeks were wet, and so, I realized, were mine.
Phyllis stood up. For a moment I did not know what she would do. Then she crossed the room, knelt on the carpet with her bad knees, and put her hands on the shoulders of Josie. “Sweetheart, Grandma owes you a very big sorry,” she said. “I told you manners matter. They do. They matter most for the grown people who ought to know better.” Josie said it was okay, and Phyllis said it was not, and they held each other for a long time.
Then Phyllis turned and looked up at her son. “Douglas,” she said, “you made a child apologize to the woman who was sleeping with her father. I will not stay at this table.” She took her coat from the hook and waited by the door for him. He took his, too, because there was nothing else in the world for him to do, and the door closed behind the two of them with a soft, final click.
Brianna left a few minutes later. Mason walked her out to the car and said something I could not hear. When he came back in, his face was wet and he said, “She is going to apologize to Josie in a letter.” She did, a week later. It was short and plain, and I let Josie decide whether to read it. She read it twice and put it in the drawer by her bed, and that was the end of that.
On Monday I sat in the office of Ms. Reyes, a lawyer on Main Street who wore reading glasses on a chain. She went through the records one at a time: the photograph with its date, the lease, the bank statement showing the bonus withdrawn from the joint account. In Idaho, she explained, property earned during a marriage is shared, and a deposit paid from joint funds would be accounted for in the settlement. I would keep the house. Doug would pay support for Josie, according to the state guidelines.
Mason asked to speak with me on Tuesday. He stood in the kitchen doorway with his hands in his pockets. “I want to stay here during the school week,” he said. “If that is all right. I want to see my dad on weekends, and my mom too, but this is where my room is.” I told him it always had been his room. He nodded, and then he hugged me, quickly and awkwardly, the way boys do when they have grown too tall for it.
Doug came to the door on Sunday. He looked ten years older. He asked if he could speak with Josie, and I stayed in the hallway where I could hear. He told her he was wrong to make her say sorry, and wrong about the rest, and that she was the best person in the house. Josie listened to the end. Then she said, “Thank you, Daddy. I am still mad.” He smiled through his tears and said that was fair.
A child who tells the truth with an open heart will always teach the grown people around her what manners are really for.
The divorce took four months, and it was quiet. Doug rented a small apartment near the lumber yard. He saw a counselor, kept every support payment on time, and learned to cook two meals, and in March he took Josie to a lake for a picnic. I do not know if I will ever fully forgive him. I know that I wished him no harm, and that I wanted him to be a good father, and that those two facts live side by side in me.
On the night after Thanksgiving, we brought the red bin down from the hall closet as we always do. Josie hung the first ornament, a paper star she had made in the first grade, on the lowest branch. Mason lifted her up to reach the higher ones. Phyllis arrived with a plate of cookies and sat in the corner without saying a word. The tree lit up, and the house felt, for the first time in a long time, entirely honest.