Part 5
“I haven’t been calling the hospital,” I said. “But I’m not making up an explanation for you. If someone asks, you can answer.”
“I’m asking for a little discretion.”
The elevator opened behind him. A woman with a stroller waited for us to move, and I stepped aside. For years, I would have made a promise at that point just to spare him the discomfort of standing in public with an unanswered request.
“I can keep my own business private,” I said. “You’ll have to handle yours.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he asked whether I hated him.
I could have said yes and made the conversation shorter. I could have said no and watched him take relief from it. Neither answer would have explained why I still occasionally woke expecting to hear him getting ready for work, or why the sight of his handwriting could hurt after everything it had helped establish.
“I’m not going to help you feel better about this today,” I said.
He lowered his eyes. I walked back to Tessa, and we took the next elevator.
Outside, the wind caught the edge of my coat. I asked Tessa whether she had time to get lunch before her next appointment.
“Twenty minutes,” she said.
“I can do twenty minutes.”
We ate soup at a counter a few blocks away. She answered one call about her father’s furnace, and I found myself smiling while she tried to explain that turning the thermostat higher wouldn’t repair it. When she hung up, she caught me looking at her.
“What?”
“Nothing. I’m glad we can talk about something else.”
She reached for a napkin and nodded. I knew there would be more bills and messages about the sale. For now, we finished our soup while she told me about a furnace repair she’d already paid for.
The condo sold in April. The loan was paid as the judgment required, and I waited for confirmation from the lender before canceling the automatic payment. The final legal fees were more than I had hoped. Part of my property share was tied up in retirement money rather than cash I could use that spring.
I made a budget with Tessa’s last invoice included. I left room for car repairs. I put tuition on its own line and didn’t move it to the bottom when the total made me nervous.
Sometimes I still opened the lender’s app to check the balance. It took weeks to stop looking for a payment due date that wasn’t there anymore.
Five months after the hearing, I began my first full semester back in the program. I kept my grocery job with fewer hours and registered for the classes that would move me through the requirements, including one in the middle of the afternoon. I asked Denise for a different schedule before I paid, and got the arrangement in writing so neither of us would have to remember a hurried conversation at the service desk.
School didn’t make me instantly good at being a student again. I confused two software commands and lost most of an assignment. I went to an instructor’s office hours with a list of questions that seemed embarrassingly basic until he started answering them. On my first quiz, I missed a problem because I used a measurement from the wrong drawing.
At home, I taped the corrected page above my desk. It was useful there.
The old photograph of my model house sat on the shelf nearby. Some evenings I looked at it and felt sad for the woman who had been sure a year away from school would be only a year. Other evenings I barely noticed it because I was trying to finish the work in front of me.
On the second Thursday of the semester, we measured an empty room on campus in pairs. My partner, a woman who worked at a cabinet shop, held the end of the tape while I wrote down the dimensions. She caught an error before we moved to the next wall.
“Check that doorway again,” she said.
I checked it. She was right. We erased the number and kept measuring.
By the time I got home, it was raining. I left my wet shoes by the door, warmed leftovers, and cleared the table. There was still mail to open and a grocery bag to put away. I did those things before I sat down, because there would be time for the assignment afterward.
My phone buzzed with a message from Tessa: a blurry photograph of one of her twins asleep against a stack of school books. I sent back a picture of my own open notebook. Then I put the phone in the kitchen so I wouldn’t keep checking it.
At the table, I copied our measurements onto a clean sheet. The window wasn’t centered. One corner was slightly out of square. I checked the figures against my notes, sharpened my pencil, and began drawing the room as it was.