The Diary of an Unloved Wife novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: Nothing but Time
Margery tells Winslow she's divorcing him, takes her coat back off his girlfriend in her own burnt house, and lays the papers by his plate at his parents' Sunday lunch, and Winslow promises to drag it out five years.
I took my phone out of his hand.
My fingers were shaking with fever, but I got it.
"Yes," I said. "New York."
Winslow leaned back in the chair and crossed his legs.
He was still in the clothes from the fire, a grey sweater with smoke on the cuffs.
"You're not going."
"I've accepted."
"Then you'll un-accept. You're an Endicott. You don't run off to share a bathroom with graduate students."
"I'm not going to be an Endicott for much longer."
He went still.
"I'm divorcing you, Winslow."
For a second he didn't move at all.
Then he smiled, slow and tired, the way he smiled at waiters who got his order wrong.
"You've said that before."
He stood, kissed the top of my head, and walked out.
I lay there with my heart going hard under the blanket.
I had never said it before.
Not once in five years, not to him and not to anyone.
I had only ever written it.
The second winter, after the cellist, I'd written a whole page that began with those words.
It was the fever, I told myself.
He'd guessed, and I was too sick to tell a guess from a memory.
They let me go on Thursday afternoon.
Nobody came to sign me out.
I took a cab to Louisburg Square with my arm in a sling and my coat over my shoulders.
The square looked like a Christmas card except for my house.
The kitchen windows at the back were black holes.
Yellow tape hung across the area steps, and the snow in the little garden was grey with ash.
Two workmen were carrying a scorched stove out through the side gate.
A man with a clipboard was photographing the back wall for the insurance.
The front of the house had hardly a mark on it.
The smell hit me in the front hall, wet wood and burnt rubber.
I climbed the front stairs past the spot where I'd lain on the carpet.
Somebody was singing in my bedroom.
Keira was in my dressing room with three cardboard boxes.
She was folding my sweaters into them.
She was wearing my long cashmere coat, the camel one my father bought me in Paris the year before he died.
It hung to her ankles.
She saw me in the mirror and jumped.
"Oh. Margery." Her little voice went even smaller. "Winslow asked me to pack up his things for his parents' house."
"Those are my sweaters."
"He said you wouldn't mind. He said you'd want him to have everything in one place."
I looked at the boxes.
My winter boots were in there, and my mother's scarves, and my good silk shirts still on their hangers.
"Take off my coat."
She laughed.
"It's freezing in here, the heat's off."
"Take it off, Keira."
She didn't move.
I could hear the workmen coming up the stairs behind me with a ladder.
I stepped up to her, took the collar in my good hand and pulled it off her shoulders.
She stumbled out of it in a thin white sweater and stood there with her arms crossed.
The two workmen stopped in the doorway.
The insurance man stopped behind them.
"She's my husband's girlfriend," I told them. "She was packing my clothes."
Nobody said anything.
One of the workmen looked at Keira's bare feet on my rug and then at the floor.
Keira's face went red to the roots of her bleached hair.
"I was helping," she said.
"Help yourself out."
I put the coat on over my sling.
It smelled like her perfume, vanilla and something cheap.
She picked up her shoes and went past the men with her chin up.
When she'd gone, I unlocked the bottom drawer of my desk with the little brass key I kept on my bracelet.
Five black leather notebooks lay inside, one for every year.
The edges had gone grey with smoke, but the pages were whole.
I put them in my bag and didn't open one.
On Sunday I had the lawyer's papers in an envelope.
I'd called her from the hospital bed and she'd drawn them up in two days.
Winslow's parents lived in a limestone house on Commonwealth Avenue.
His mother held lunch every Sunday at one, and nobody in the family was ever late.
I walked into the dining room at five past.
His mother sat at the head with her silver hair set like a helmet.
His father was at the foot, cutting his lamb.
Winslow was on his mother's right.
And in my chair, on Winslow's other side, sat Keira.
She was in a pale pink dress with her hair curled, a napkin across her lap.
The maid looked at me, then at the chair, then at Winslow's mother.
"Margaret," his mother said. "You're late. And you're well enough to be out, I see."
"Well enough."
I walked around the table to Winslow.
He didn't get up.
I laid the envelope beside his plate, next to his wine glass.
"What's this?" his mother asked.
"Divorce papers," I said. "Your son can sign them whenever he finishes his lamb."
Keira made a little sound and put her hand on Winslow's arm.
His father's knife stopped.
His mother set her fork down very precisely, tines up.
"No Endicott has been divorced in a hundred and ten years," she said. "You will not be the first."
"Then I'll be the first Cabot."
"Sit down, Margaret."
"There isn't a chair."
Keira looked at her plate.
Winslow's mother didn't look at Keira at all.
"The Christmas party is on Saturday," she said. "Two hundred people. You will stand next to your husband and you will smile, and after New Year's we'll discuss whatever this is like adults."
"I'm not coming to your party."
"You are, or the whole of Boston will ask why."
Winslow picked up the envelope, weighed it in his hand and dropped it back on the cloth.
He didn't open it.
I walked out.
He caught up with me in the front hall, under the portrait of his great-grandfather.
He took my good elbow and turned me round.
His blue eyes were perfectly calm.
"File them, then," he said quietly. "I'll contest every page. I'll drag it out for five years, Margery."
His thumb pressed into the inside of my arm.
"I've got nothing but time, and you've got nowhere to go."
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