My husband asked me for a divorce in front of nine relatives, and before he finished his speech, I said, “Yes.” Three days later, I stopped four automatic payments I had quietly made for his family for years—including his sister’s son’s $14,000 private-school tuition. She thought her brother had been paying it. So did almost everyone else. What none of them understood was how much of their family life had been running through my bank account…
Buffford had clearly rehearsed the speech.
We were sitting around his sister Rolene’s dinner table with nine people when he lifted one hand and started explaining that maybe we both knew the marriage had run its course.
I didn’t let him finish.
“Yes.”
He stopped.
I said it again.
“Yes. That’s fine.”
Nobody spoke.
Rolene lowered her fork.
My mother-in-law, Willadine, kept one hand beside her water glass.
Even eleven-year-old Marcel stopped kicking the table leg.
Then Buffford looked at Rolene.
Not me.
His sister.
It happened so quickly that I almost missed it.
He asked his wife for a divorce and immediately checked his sister’s face to see whether he had done it correctly.
That was the part I remembered later.
I folded my napkin, told Rolene the roast was good, asked where she bought it, then got my coat.
Buffford and I had come in one truck, so I waited outside.
I drove us home because he had stopped liking night driving years earlier.
Halfway through Kettering, he finally spoke.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?”
“You asked for a divorce. I said yes.”
“You could at least be upset.”
“I could.”
Then I reminded him that for about five weeks he had already been behaving like somebody halfway out the door.
He slept in the office that night.
I lay awake doing arithmetic.
.
That is what I do when something scares me.
I own a hospital linen route.
Not a laundry.
A route.
Three trucks, four drivers including me, a leased dock on Springfield Street, and about nine hundred rolling carts moving soiled and clean linen between a hospital system and two surgical centers six days a week.
I bought the business in 2011 when I was twenty-six.