A Marriage Left Behind novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Returned

Maura returns the coat she bought for Judith, Bev tells her the lodge is booked by paying guests every weekend, and the listing shows Maura's own wreath on the door.

Brady said nothing on the drive home from lunch except that he would handle his mother.

He didn't say how.

On Monday I took the coat back on my lunch break.

The woman at the counter checked the receipt and asked if something was wrong with it.

"No," I said. "I just don't need it anymore."

She lifted it out of the tissue.

I had spent two evenings measuring and comparing sleeve lengths, because Judith once told me she couldn't stand a cuff that stopped above the wrist.

I knew her size and her shoe width.

I knew which perfume gave her a headache and which brand of coffee she wanted on the lodge counter.

In seven years she had never asked what I liked for Christmas breakfast.

The clerk typed for a moment and handed me the receipt.

"Three hundred and eighty dollars back to your card."

"Thank you."

I folded the slip once and put it in my bag.

It felt good.

It felt like the first thing I had finished in a week.

Back at the hospital, I ate at my desk, and Bev Tanner rolled her chair over from the next one.

Bev had worked in billing for thirty years and buried a husband in the middle of them, and she was the only person in the department who ever told me my hair looked better down.

"You've been holding that sandwich for ten minutes."

"I'm thinking."

"That's dangerous, in this building. What happened?"

I told her.

I told her about the transfers, and the lodge, and Brady's thumb over his phone.

I did not tell her about the eighty-four payments, because I was still working out how to say a number like that out loud.

Bev heard the whole thing with her glasses pushed up into her curls and her mouth getting smaller.

"Judith Ostlund," she said, when I finished. "Pearl earrings. Runs the church flower committee."

"You know her?"

"I know of her. And my cousin cleaned that lodge for four summers."

I put the sandwich down.

"Your cousin cleaned the lodge?"

"Every Monday, changing the sheets. Fourteen beds. She quit when the pay stayed the same and the beds kept going up."

"Fourteen beds for a family cabin?"

"Honey, that's not a family cabin."

"It's his grandfather's. The family goes up at Christmas."

Bev took out her phone.

She tapped for a while, held it out to me, and said nothing.

It was a rental listing.

The title was Birch Lake Lodge: Sleeps 14, Lakefront, Woodstove, Sauna.

Under it were forty or fifty photos, and a calendar showing nearly every weekend of the winter blocked off in red.

The price was four hundred and eighty dollars a night.

I looked at the red squares on the calendar.

There were more booked nights in January than there were free ones.

"There's a family week," Bev said, reading over my shoulder. "See? Twenty-second to twenty-ninth. Blocked, no guests."

"That's the week I pay for."

"Looks like it."

"The rest of the year, strangers stay there."

"For four hundred and eighty a night."

I scrolled up through the photos, and my mouth went dry.

The great room, the kitchen, the sauna, the porch.

It was the same porch from Kylie's phone, with the little chalkboard sign on its easel.

The sign said Welcome, Friends of the Parish, and a date in January.

I kept going.

The photos had been taken in different seasons.

Snow in some of them, leaves in others, a green summer lake.

On the front door, in a picture from last December, there was a wreath.

It was a pine wreath with a red cloth ribbon and a bundle of dried orange slices tied into the bow.

I knew that bow.

I had made it at our kitchen table, three nights before the drive north.

I had hung it myself on Christmas Eve, and Judith had said how lovely it was, and had never said another word about it.

I looked at it for a long time.

It was in the listing's first photograph.

It was the picture strangers saw before they paid.

"Maura," Bev said quietly. "Are you all right?"

"That's my wreath."

"Honey."

"I made that. She's using it to sell it."

Bev took the phone out of my hand, gently, and put it face down on my desk.

"Eat your sandwich," she said. "And then I'm going to tell you what to do."

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