The balance was two hundred and eighteen thousand dollars. The account had been receiving a monthly deposit since the week our divorce was finalised, every month, without fail, seventy-two of them. The envelope held six years of statements and one letter in Ambrose’s handwriting, lodged with the branch under instruction to be released only when I came in person.
He had been ill when he left. He had known for four months by the day at the courthouse and had told nobody, including our children. The letter said he could not bear to make me a nurse for the second half of my life after I had spent the first half raising his family, and that he had chosen to be remembered as a man who walked away rather than one I had to watch disappear. He wrote that he had put in everything he earned and everything he sold, and that he had said four thousand because he knew I would refuse a number that sounded like an apology.
He died in the spring of the second year. Our daughter told me at the time. I did not go to the service.
I was numb at that counter for entirely the wrong reason. Not the money. Six winters in a room that shook, hungry nights, bottles collected in the rain, all of it, while a man who thought he was sparing me was in fact leaving me to survive a decision I was never given the chance to make.
I am angry still. I am also, underneath it, something I have not found a word for.
I paid for the treatment. The doctor was right and I was lucky. I bought a small house near my daughter in Waukesha with a kitchen that gets the morning, and I put the rest into accounts for my grandchildren, which I think is what he intended and which I would have decided anyway.
I keep the letter in the box the card lived in.
He spent four decades deciding what I could carry, and then made one last decision for me in a courthouse hallway without ever looking back. Protecting somebody from the truth is not the same as loving them, and the last six years of my life were the price of that difference. I will never again let anyone choose my hardships for me.
