Chapter 8 - The Severing
Samuel Ortega had been gone for two hours when the sound of gravel crunching in the driveway signaled the arrival Marianne had been waiting for since dawn.
It was not a taxi. It was Ethan’s gray Honda. The right front fender was still dented from the time he had backed into a light pole at the shopping center two years ago—an accident he had begged his mother not to report to the insurance company because his rates would rise.
Marianne did not go to the window. She remained seated at the yellow table, her reading glasses on her nose, a blue ballpoint pen in her hand, working her way through the Sunday crossword puzzle in the county paper.
The screen door creaked.
The inner door opened slowly, hesitantly, an inch at a time, like a door being pushed open by a dog that knew the carpet was ruined.
Ethan stood on the linoleum.
He looked fifty years old. His white tuxedo shirt was unbuttoned at the throat, the collar limp, gray, and stained with sweat and yellow dust from the manor’s gravel lot. His black trousers were smeared with grease near the cuff where he had brushed against his car’s exhaust pipe. He had no socks on; his feet were shoved bare into his expensive Oxfords, the leather dull and scuffed at the toes.
He did not look at her eye. He could not. His gaze darted from the stove to the bread box to the calendar on the wall—the one from the feed store with the picture of a red barn in the snow.
"Mom," he said.
The word was dry, like an old husk.
"There's coffee on the back burner, Ethan," Marianne said, not looking up from her puzzle. "Five letters for 'a stone used for sharpening blades.' Starts with an H."
Ethan swallowed. His Adam’s apple bobbed violently against his throat.
"Hone," he whispered. "H-O-N-E."
"That's it," she said, writing the letters in the small square with a steady hand. "Your father had three of them. Kept them in an oiled lard tin under the workbench. I suppose you don't remember that."
"Mom... please," Ethan choked out. He fell onto his knees on the linoleum, his hands coming down on the edge of the formica table. He did not touch her hands; he hovered an inch away, his fingers trembling like leaves in a draft. "Mom, you have to help me. You have to talk to them."
Marianne set her pen down. She looked at him through the lower half of her bifocals.
"Talk to whom, Ethan?"
"The Hollingsworths," he said, the words spilling out of him now in a frantic, bubbling rush of saliva and tears. "Richard... he's going to call the bar association. He's going to tell them I committed fraud. Tiffany... she's at her mother’s house. She won't let me in. She threw my clothes onto the driveway from the second-floor window. My suit, Mom. The one you bought me for the interviews. It’s in a puddle by their garage."
"Why did she do that, Ethan?" Marianne asked. Her voice was mild, conversational, as if she were asking about the price of winter wheat.
"Because... because she said I lied," Ethan sobbed, his head dropping onto his forearms, his shoulders heaving against the soiled linen of his shirt. "She said I promised her we had money. She said you told her father that the farm was three hundred acres. I never said that, Mom! I swear to God I never said that! I just... I didn't correct him when he said it at the dinner! I was afraid he'd tell her not to marry me!"
Marianne leaned back in her chair. The wicker back creaked softly.
"Why were you so afraid she wouldn't marry you, Ethan?"
Ethan looked up, his face blotched with red, his eyes swollen and raw from twelve hours of crying in his car behind the gas station on Route 60.
"Because she was... she was everything I wasn't," he cried, his voice dropping into a high, childish wail that turned Marianne’s stomach. "She was pretty, Mom. Her family had that big brick house with the pool and the iron gates. People looked at her when she walked into the room. When I was with her, I wasn't just... I wasn't just the boy whose father died on a tractor with mud on his pants. I was somebody. I was going to be a partner in Richard’s firm. He promised me, Mom! He said if the wedding was right—if we showed the town that we were the right kind of people—he'd put my name on the stationery by next spring!"
Marianne looked down at her son’s wet, trembling face.
She felt no anger. That was the most terrible thing; the anger had evaporated during the long, gray hours between midnight and dawn, leaving only a vast, cold clarity that felt like limestone after a river has dried up.
"Ethan," she said, her voice dropping into that quiet, terrifying classroom register. "Richard Hollingsworth is three hundred thousand dollars in debt to a finance company in Illinois. He has three mortgages on his house with the pool. The car his wife drives is leased under a corporate name that is currently two months delinquent on its commercial property taxes. The firm has had three liens filed against it by the state revenue department since March."
Ethan stopped crying. His mouth stayed open, a string of saliva hanging from his lower lip.
"What?" he whispered.
"He didn't want your name on the stationery, Ethan," Marianne said. "He wanted my six acres. He thought that if you were married to his daughter, I would sign the remainder of the land over to you as an advance on your inheritance. And then he would have had his son-in-law pledge that land as collateral for a commercial line of credit at the Shelby County Bank to keep his firm from going into receivership before Christmas."
Ethan stared at her. His eyes moved frantically from her left eye—the dark, swollen plum—to her right eye, which was clear and cold and ancient.
"No," he said, shaking his head. "No... Richard... he gave me a watch. An antique watch. For the rehearsal dinner."
Marianne reached into the pocket of her cardigan. She pulled out a small, flat piece of metal and tossed it onto the table between them.
It was the back plate of the gold watch Richard had presented to Ethan with such theatrical solemnity at the country club forty-eight hours ago.
"Samuel Ortega found the clasp near the service bar," Marianne said. "It’s gold-plated brass, Ethan. The movement is quartz, made in Malaysia. It costs forty-two dollars at the outlet mall in Simpsonville. You can buy them by the gross."
Ethan picked up the little piece of metal. He held it between his two fingers, turning it over and over, staring at the cheap, stamped letters that read *Base Metal - Swiss Design*.
"She hit you," Ethan whispered. It was as if the fact had only just penetrated the thick, soft layers of his vanity. "Mom... she hit you."
"Yes," Marianne said. "She did."
"And I... I didn't do anything."
"No," Marianne said. "You didn't."
Ethan began to shake. Not with the theatrical, self-pitying sobs of an hour ago, but with the deep, violent tremors of a boy who had looked into a mirror and found that he didn't have a face.
"What do I do, Mom?" he asked, his voice barely a breath. "What am I supposed to do now?"
Marianne picked up her blue ballpoint pen. She looked down at the crossword puzzle.
"You're going to get up off my kitchen floor, Ethan," she said. "You're going to go into the bathroom, wash your face with cold water, and use your father’s safety razor to take that three-day stubble off your chin. Then you're going to put your shoes on properly, walk out to your car, and drive to the courthouse in Shelbyville."
"The courthouse?" he croaked.
"Judge Harlan is in his chambers on Sunday mornings from ten until noon," Marianne said. "He has an annulment petition on his desk that Samuel Ortega’s cousin prepared at eight o'clock this morning. It cites physical battery, fraudulent misrepresentation of material assets, and non-consummation."
Ethan looked at her with wide, terrified eyes.
"An annulment?"
"You have two choices, Ethan," Marianne said, her voice as level and final as the horizon line across the timber tract. "You can sign that petition today, let Samuel’s cousin file it when the clerk’s office opens tomorrow morning, and spend the next five years of your life working sixty hours a week to pay back the forty-seven thousand dollars you took from this house."
She looked up from the puzzle, her one open eye drilling through his skull.
May you like
"Or you can go back to that brick house with the pool, tell Richard you're sorry his daughter’s hand hurts, and never set foot on this hill again as long as you live."
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