Дуглас Кеннеди - Five Days

‘Let me think about that,’ I said.

I called Lucy. She called a man named Russell Drake in Brunswick who organized mortgages. Money was cheap right now, he explained. Around $75 a month repayment per $1,000 borrowed. So if I was to borrow $150,000 dollars for a period of twenty-five years, I’d be paying $1,350 dollars a month. just a bit more than what I was paying right now for rent. And yes, the sum borrowed would be the equivalent of two and a half years of my salary at the hospital, so several banks would be most pleased to offer me a mortgage. ‘You’ll probably have a bunch of suitors — which means we can negotiate the finer points to your advantage. And yes, I think a two-month closing is perfectly doable. So shall we meet within the next day or so and get the ball rolling?’

I called the realtor back and said:

‘One sixty-five is what I can pay. If the sellers accept that, we can close within the time frame they want.’

The offer was accepted the next morning.

Home.

The apartment no longer would be someone else’s property in which I was loitering for a spell. It would be mine — and a place for Ben and Sally to return to in the years to come before it became theirs. The place you ‘return to’ inevitably becomes the place you ‘come into’. As my father used to say, the farce of life is grounded in one terrible truth: we are all just passing through.

Home.

On the morning that I was to sign my divorce agreement I did my post-dawn run, then came home and showered and changed into a suit — the one suit I own. The black suit I wore at my father’s funeral. The suit I should have augmented with another suit by now. But since I never wear suits.

There was absolutely no need to put on these funereal clothes — except that something within me told me I should mark the occasion formally. Even though my lawyer said that she could mail or courier the papers to me at home or work, I told her I would come by her office and sign them myself.

And if you are signing a legally binding document that is about to end a two-decade relationship — and one which has taken up half my life — dressing formally for the occasion seems only appropriate.

Amanda Montgomery’s office was a ten-minute drive across Casco Bridge in an old warehouse building in South Portland. A quasi-funky, quasi-gentrified area. Amanda was a large, relentlessly cheerful woman around my age. She worked alone — only employing a receptionist who doubled as her bookkeeper, secretary and general major-domo. She made a point throughout the divorce of trying to keep the process as non-disputative as possible in order to keep the cost reasonable. She coolly stood down Dan’s initial belligerence. Once he saw sense (and it was his lawyer who — according to Amanda — got him to lose his anger and realize that we were offering him a very good deal), it was simply a matter of ‘the usual legal and state bureaucracy — and a considerable amount of tedious paperwork’.

Here I was today, on time for our prearranged morning meeting, being offered coffee by her assistant before being ushered into Amanda’s office.

‘My, you’re dressed up,’ she said as I came in. Her office had a big old-fashioned wooden desk. A big high-back swivel chair, also very much a throwback to the 1930s, a pair of overstuffed armchairs for clients. A small conference table, covered with documents. Amanda was dressed in a similarly somber suit, and explained she was due in court in an hour ‘to try to stop my client from being eviscerated by his soon-to-be ex-wife. Your ex doesn’t know how lucky he was that you were not interested in the sort of scorched-earth divorce I am trying to quell right now. Then again, did he ever know how lucky he was?’

‘You’d have to ask him that,’ I said quietly.

‘Somehow I don’t think that opportunity’s ever going to arise. Anyway, you have a job to go to, and I have a courtroom fistfight to go to. So all we have to do now is sign the papers and they will get shipped back to the court for official judicial signature. Then they will go up to Augusta where the actual Final Decree is issued.’

I nodded, saying nothing. I could see Amanda studying me.

‘You OK, Laura?’

‘You mean, am I having second thoughts?’

‘That has, in my experience, happened. though, most of the time, six months later, the client was back here again.’

‘I’ve never had second thoughts from the moment I decided to end the marriage.’

‘I always knew that. But I am still bound — not by law, but by my own set of rules — to ask that question before a client signs the papers and things are all but writ in stone.’

‘I wish I had second thoughts.’

‘It’s a terrible moment, even if it’s the right decision. The death of—’

‘Hope,’ I heard myself saying. ‘The death of hope.’

I blinked and felt tears. Amanda said:

‘I’ve sat here and seen the toughest businessmen in the state — real cutthroat bastards — sobbing their eyes out before signing the papers. One guy — I can’t tell you who he is or what he does, because you’d know his name — old schoolfriend of mine which is how I got the case. he actually spent almost half an hour just staring at the document before I gently told him that his wife was categorical about the fact that the marriage was over. “I’m afraid you have to sign the papers.” But he kept shaking his head, all disbelief. The death of hope. You got that one right. But when one hope dies—’

‘It really dies,’ I said, cutting her off before she could talk about new hopes, new dawns, buds sprouting from barren land, sunlight always following the darkest of nights.

‘Sorry, did I say the wrong thing?’ Amanda asked.

‘No. I believe in hope as much as the next fool. I just know that disappointment is such an equal part of the equation.’

‘Well, they’re counterweights, aren’t they? And you are, in essence, signing off on disappointment this morning.’

‘And signing on for what?’

‘Whatever you do or find next in your life. Which could be wonderful or terrible or just plain banal or a mixture of all of the above. But whatever arises, even if you make the worst decision or choice imaginable, it will all be driven by one basic thing — hope. Which is the one commodity we all desperately want to hang onto. And that’s my sermon for the morning,’ she said with a smile. ‘Shall we get this done?’

She ushered me over to the conference table — and a legal document. I’d already read the draft some weeks ago and then the final fine-tuned version just last week.

‘Nothing’s changed in the interim,’ she said. ‘But if you’d like to read it through again. ’

‘No need.’

She proffered a pen. She flipped through the document to a signature page right at the end of it all. I looked down and saw that Dan had gotten there before me — as his tightly knotted signature adorned the line above his printed name.

‘The other side did the deed yesterday afternoon. Then his lawyer dropped the papers in here yesterday evening on his way to a hockey game. Very Maine, eh?’

The pen was shaking in my hand. Why is it that your body so often tells you things that your mind is trying to dodge?

I steadied my hand. Signing the divorce agreement took two seconds. Then I pushed the document away. I wiped my eyes. I took a deep becalming breath. I sat there, knowing I had to move. Amanda put a hand on my shoulder.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Not really. But. ’

‘What are you going to do now?’ she asked.

‘What everyone else does. I’m going to go to work.’

I saw the cancer immediately. It was right there in front of me. A cancer called despair.