Later that night, I told myself it was the medication. She’d been drifting for months. People said things at the end that didn’t mean anything.
I told myself that throughout her funeral, through the casseroles, and during the quiet drive home with Michael’s hand resting loosely on the steering wheel.
I cried harder than anyone at her funeral.
She’d been drifting.
***
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Three days after we buried Evelyn, Michael asked me to sit down at the kitchen table.
He slid a stack of papers across the wood with the same steadiness he used when handling grocery lists. I picked them up, still mourning my MIL.
Petition for Dissolution of Marriage.
I read the words twice. Then a third time because my brain refused to absorb what they said.
I stared at that first page for a while.
I picked them up.
I honestly thought it was some mistake.
“Michael, what is this?”
“I’ve already signed,” my husband replied.
I looked up at him. He was sitting on the other side of the table with his hands folded, like a man delivering a work update.
“Signed what? I don’t understand.”
“I’ve already signed.”
“The house was in my family long before we got married,” he said calmly. “My attorney says you’re not entitled to it.”
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“Your attorney?”
“I’ve had one for a while, Diane. I think it’s best if you’re out by the end of the month.”
The kitchen felt as though it tilted slightly, the way a boat does when someone shifts their weight. I gripped the edge of the table.
“By the end of the month?”
“You’ll land on your feet. You always do.”
“I’ve had one for a while.”
“Michael, we buried your mother recently. I bathed her. I stayed up with her.”
“And I appreciate that.”
“Oh, you do?”
“Diane, please don’t make this uglier than it needs to be. You can fight it, but you’ll spend whatever you get on the lawyer.”
I laughed. It wasn’t a real laugh. It was the sound something makes when it breaks quietly.
“‘Uglier.’ That’s the word you’re going with?”
“I appreciate that.”
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My husband didn’t answer. He just tapped the papers with two fingers, the way he did with bills he wanted me to look at.
I stared down at the petition. His signature was already there. It was probably days old, maybe even weeks. The kind of signature that had been sitting in a drawer, waiting.
“How long have you been planning this?”
“Does it matter?”
“It matters to me.”
“Long enough to be sure,” Michael said. “Look, I didn’t want to do this while Mom was still with us. I waited.”
“Does it matter?”
He waited, as if that was mercy.
I looked around the kitchen where we’d raised our children and suddenly realized he’d been planning this long before his mother died.
I thought about the long calls he’d taken in the garage. The boxes of Evelyn’s paperwork he’d suddenly wanted to sort himself. The casual questions about the deed, the mortgage history, and whose name appeared where.
He’d been planning this.
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Thirty-one years dismantled themselves in front of me in less than five minutes.
“I need some air,” I said.
“Take the papers with you. Read them tonight.”
I stood.
My legs didn’t feel like mine, but they held.
“I need some air.”
I walked past the fridge and the calendar still marked with Evelyn’s medication schedule in my own handwriting.
And that was when I heard her again, as clearly as if she were standing behind me.
“Don’t let Michael find it.”
Five words. I’d told myself she was somewhere else in her mind, talking to someone I couldn’t see.
I wasn’t so sure anymore.
I heard her again.
Michael hadn’t been sorting old paperwork for taxes. He’d been looking for something, and he probably hadn’t found it yet. Maybe that was why he was moving the divorce along so quickly.
