Chapter 4: Terms

"No," my mother said.

She had her wooden spoon in her fist, the one she's used for thirty years to stir and to point.

"Ma, listen to him."

"I listened. He wants to marry my daughter for fourteen months like it's a car lease."

"I want to keep her out of that," Nathan said, and tipped his head at the window.

"And you'd marry her for that?"

"I'd marry her for the three of them."

My mother put down the spoon and picked it up again.

I'd never seen her so tired and so angry in the same face.

"Letty," she said. "What do you want?"

Nobody had asked me that all day.

"I want the babies safe," I said. "I want your house safe. And I don't want to be bought."

"Then write it down," my mother said, and slapped a legal pad and a pen on the table.

Nathan watched me pick up the pen.

"Fourteen months from the wedding," I said. "After the birth, two months, and then either of us can divorce."

"Agreed."

"Joint custody. The kids are with me half the time and no judge decides that for us."

"Agreed."

"My mother's mortgage is paid the day we sign, with no strings attached. The ninety thousand from the clinic is mine, and I keep it."

"Done."

"I can walk out any day I want, and you let me."

He paused a moment on that one.

"Done," he said, and I saw it cost him.

I turned the pad around, and he read it from top to bottom.

"One line from me," he said.

He took the pen and wrote slowly, in square, even letters.

I read it upside down.

It said, "The marriage is real in my house and in my bed. I want my wife there, and I won't pretend I don't."

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