He tried it again. Then again. Then he banged on the door, and I opened it, dressed, with a coffee in my hand and an envelope in the other.
“What did you do to the lock?”
“I changed it. It’s my house.”
His mother came up the path. “What is this nonsense?”
I held up the deed. A copy. The original was with the lawyer.
“One name,” I said. “Mine. Trey can’t give you this house, because Trey has never owned this house. You can call any lawyer you like. Mine’s already checked.”
Nobody said anything for about ten seconds. The movers stood by the truck pretending to look at their phones.
Then I handed Trey the envelope.
Divorce papers.
“Your clothes are in the garage,” I said. “The side door’s open. Everything else we can split through the lawyers — including every mortgage payment you made, which you’ll get back, fairly. I’m not your mother. I don’t take things that aren’t mine.”
His mother found her voice. “We gave up our apartment!”
“I know,” I said. “You told me on Tuesday.”
They spent the next four months in Trey’s sister’s spare room. All three of them. With the sewing machine.
Trey called me twice in the first month. The first time he was angry. The second time he cried and said his mother had pushed him into it, that he hadn’t really meant it, that he’d been trying to keep the peace.
“You didn’t keep the peace,” I said. “You just picked which woman you’d let down. You picked me. Every single time, for six years.”
The divorce was final in the spring.
I kept the house. I unpacked my own kitchen. I put every plate back exactly where it was.
And I turned the room she wanted for her sewing machine into a reading room, with my grandmother’s photo on the shelf.
It seemed fair. It was her money that bought it.
