“How are they here before me? ”
That was the thought that stuck while Dr. Nwosu explained what had happened. Curtis had collapsed at an address I’d never heard of, and a woman had called 911 before disappearing before the ambulance arrived.
The words rolled over me — “massive coronary,” “no signs of struggle,” “he wouldn’t have felt pain. ” I nodded at all of it. I was somewhere slightly outside my own body, watching a stranger receive news about a life I thought I knew. Curtis had never once mentioned Sycamore Court.
That was my first question, and I don’t know why it was the one that surfaced. I knew exactly one thing about that place: it was four miles from our house, and it existed, and my husband had been there when he died. Then the door opened and my mother-in-law walked in. She had Curtis’s dark eyes, his way of tilting her chin up.
She was already wearing black. I remember thinking, absurdly, that she must have dressed before the call came. She hugged me and said, “My boy,” and then the funeral director stepped in with paperwork. “We’ll need a deposit by Friday,” he said.
“Probably around eight thousand. ”
My mother-in-law nodded and started listing expenses. The mortgage, the utilities, Curtis’s parents’ cell phone bill because they were between plans, his sister’s car insurance because she’d had a rough year. I had a platinum card in my wallet with a fifty-thousand-dollar limit.
I had never, not once, let anyone else use it. I looked at her for a long moment. Then I looked at the box of tissues on the table. Then I looked at myself in the mirror on the wall, and I saw my own face, and I heard my own voice say, “I’ll handle it.
”
That night I sat in the kitchen with the pot roast still on the stove. It was the kind with those little carrots Curtis always said were too fancy but ate every single one of. I didn’t eat any of it. I sat and stared at the table set for two, and I thought about how many nights I’d done that without ever once asking who else might have been sitting somewhere else.
I called my credit card company first. “I’m going to be making some charges,” I said. “I won’t be able to use the card for anything else. ” Then I called Valentina.
Val, technically, but no one calls her that. She’s my cousin, and she has approximately zero ethical qualms about things like this. “I need you to unlock his phone,” I said. “Curtis’s phone?
” she said. “Why? ”
“Because I need to know who Renee is. ”
There was a pause.
Then she said, “Who’s Renee? ”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. ”
Val drove over that night and had the phone unlocked in forty minutes. We’d never shared passwords.
I’d never thought to ask. I sat on the couch with his phone in my hands and I read, not all of it, but enough. There were 1,847 text messages from a contact named Renee from work. There was no Renee from work.
Enough to know this had been going on for at least two years. Enough to know she had a key to an apartment on Sycamore Court. Not hers, not his. Enough to know my mother-in-law had known.
There was a text from six months ago where Curtis said, “Told mom I work late Thursdays. She said she’d cover dinner, don’t worry. ”
I scrolled further. There were the details of a life I had been funding with my paycheck.
My money went into our joint account every month, and from there it flowed into a life he was building with someone else four miles away. There were receipts for furniture, for a new bed frame, for a weekend trip to a bed-and-breakfast I had certainly never seen. There was a conversation about whether they would tell me in the spring or wait until summer. He had a timeline.
I was not on it. Val said quietly, “What do you want to do? ”
I said, “I want to know everything. ”
I got a lawyer the next morning.
Alan, a small, precise man who wore bow ties and spoke in perfectly constructed sentences. He pulled up the relevant documents while I sat in his office with a cup of coffee I didn’t drink. He said, “You never added Curtis to the deed. That’s fortunate.
”
“I never got around to it,” I said. “Good,” he said. “Good for you. ”
Curtis had no significant assets of his own.
He had a life insurance policy through his contractor’s union, a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and I was the listed beneficiary. He had plans that did not include me, but he had not updated that one piece of paper. That was the last thing he ever did for me, whether he meant it or not. My mother-in-law called two days after the funeral.
“We still need to discuss the funeral costs,” she said. “I’m going to need some time before I’m in a position to be generous,” I said. “That has nothing to do with it,” she said. “It has everything to do with everything,” I said.
I stepped outside the door of my own house to take that call because I didn’t want her voice inside my walls. She said I had more than enough. She said the Christian thing to do would be to let them stay in the house while they got back on their feet. She said Curtis would have wanted that.
“Your brother’s name was never on the deed,” I said. “That is exactly the point,” she said. She said other things then, things I won’t repeat because I don’t need to give them more space than they’ve already taken. I hung up.
I didn’t call back. I want to be clear about something, because I’ve told this story to a few people now and I always get the same response. People say, “You were so cold. ” And I understand why it sounds that way.
But here is what else is true. I had spent six years building a life that I thought was ours. It was apparently only mine in the sense that I was the one paying for it. I had bought groceries for his parents’ apartment, paid their electric bill when they were short, driven them to doctor’s appointments and sat in the waiting room with a magazine.
I had done all of that because Curtis asked me to, and because I thought it was what a good wife did, and because I had genuinely cared about those people. They had known about the apartment on Sycamore Court. They had covered for him. They had eaten my pot roast and let him lie to me in the same week.
The storage unit was the last thing. I found out three weeks after the funeral, when the manager called about the rental fee being late. I went over with the key I found in his glovebox, and I opened the metal door, and I stood there looking at boxes of things I had never seen. Furniture from an apartment I had never visited.
Receipts from a bed-and-breakfast I had never stayed at. A second phone, prepaid, with two year’s worth of calls to a number I traced back to a real estate agent. He had been looking at property. He had been planning a future.
None of it included me. I donated the furniture. I shredded the receipts. I turned off the joint account.
Alan handled the rest — the insurance payout went through, I paid off what remained of my own debts, put a substantial amount into savings, and had what I needed to start over. I moved into a two-bedroom apartment across town with a north-facing window. I bought a plant. I named it nothing, because it’s a plant, but I water it every Thursday and it’s doing very well.
About two months after everything, I was meeting Val for lunch and I was maybe seven minutes early. I sat at the table and I thought about the candle I’d lit for no reason, the table I’d set for two people, one of whom was already somewhere else. I thought about how long I’d been setting that table. I thought about how I had never once asked if anyone else was setting one too.
The waiter came over. I ordered the thing I actually wanted, not the thing I always got because Curtis said the other thing was overpriced. I know it’s a small detail, but I sat there and I ate every single bite and it was good. The October light came through the window.
Somewhere across town, my plant was growing toward the sun in a room that was entirely mine. That was enough. That was more than enough. That was, I realized, exactly what starting over was supposed to feel like.
—
