A Marriage Left Behind novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Serving Dish

At Sunday lunch Judith greets Brady first and Maura with a dish towel, calmly says the lodge is hers, and Brady tells Maura to just pay.

Eighty-four payments of four hundred dollars came to thirty-three thousand, six hundred, and I added them three times before sunrise.

Brady found me at the kitchen table with the laptop open.

"Your mother has taken that much from me since our wedding," I said. "Tell me what it bought."

"Not here. Come to lunch on Sunday and ask her."

On Sunday he drove us to his parents' house and told me not to go in looking for a fight.

"You said you'd talk to your mother," I said.

"I will. Let lunch go well first."

I had brought the serving dish Judith asked me to return.

For a moment I thought about leaving it on the back seat.

Then I carried it up the driveway, because seven years of habit don't end between the car and the porch.

His mother opened the door before we knocked.

She kissed Brady on the cheek first, and held his face in both hands.

"There he is. You look thin."

"Hi, Mom."

"Maura, sweetheart." She took the dish from me and looked at the bottom of it. "You washed it. You didn't have to."

"You asked me to return it."

"I did, and you did, and that's why I love you."

She said it warmly.

She said everything warmly.

In the dining room, Brady's sister sat with her phone held low between her and the table.

Kylie looked up when I came in, and so did Judith, who had followed me.

They both went still.

A photo was open on the screen before Kylie swiped it away.

I only saw that it was the front porch of the lodge, with a little chalkboard sign on an easel and a name written on it in white chalk.

It wasn't our name.

"Hi, Maura," Kylie said. "You look tired."

"I've been busy."

"Mm. I heard."

Brady's father was at the head of the table, carving a roast he hadn't been asked to carve.

He nodded at me and went back to the knife.

He was a quiet man.

In seven years he had said maybe two hundred words to me, and one hundred of them were about the weather on the lake road.

"Put that in the kitchen," Judith told me, holding out the dish again. "There should be room next to the sink."

I took it.

It was the same instruction she had given me at every holiday for seven years, and I had never minded.

I minded now.

I put the dish down next to the sink, and when I came back to the doorway I stayed there.

"Judith, can I ask something before we eat?"

"Of course, honey."

"Who owns the lodge?"

Brady's fork hit his plate.

"Maura," he said.

"It's a plain question."

Judith smiled and passed a basket of rolls to Kylie.

"Why, I do, dear. Didn't Brady tell you?"

"No."

"Well, it's been in the family for years. His grandfather built it and left it to me."

"And the money I send you every December?"

"That's the family's Christmas. The food and the firewood and the heat. Somebody has to hold it all together."

"And the four hundred dollars every first of the month?"

Kylie set her phone face down.

Judith didn't stop smiling.

"Upkeep, sweetheart. The roof, the plowing, the pump. Everyone chips in."

"Who is everyone?"

Nobody answered.

Brady's father put the knife down.

"I only see my name on the transfers," I said. "I don't see anyone else's."

"Maura, this isn't the place," Brady said.

"It's the only place you'd agree to come."

Judith put her napkin in her lap.

"Brady tells me the transfer didn't go through on Friday," she said. "I'm sure it was a bank glitch. Those do happen."

"It wasn't a glitch. I canceled it."

"Of course you did. You were upset. I would be too."

She reached across the table and patted my hand.

"Your December is due this Friday, sweetheart," she said. "It's always been due this Friday."

"I'm not paying for a Christmas you uninvited me to."

"Nobody uninvited you. We only suggested you rest."

"Which means I'm not going."

"Which means you're tired."

The room got very quiet, and I could hear the roast cooling.

I looked at Brady.

He had his eyes on the tablecloth, and his jaw was working the way it did when he wanted a conversation to be over without having to have said anything.

"Just pay it, Maura," he said. "Please. It's one week."

It was the first time all weekend he had looked straight at me.

He wasn't asking if I was all right.

He was asking me to make it stop.

"No," I said.

Kylie breathed in sharply.

Judith's smile stayed, but her eyes went to her son, and Brady pushed his chair back.

At the head of the table, for the first time that day, Brady's father looked up and looked at me.

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