Chapter 8: The Petition

Travis pushed back his chair, and it scraped the floor.

"Fine," he said. "Then we'll prove it."

He took Shelby by the elbow and walked her out of Dorothy's dining room.

The front door slammed hard enough to rattle the china.

Dorothy sat down slowly in her seat at the head of the table.

She looked at the strip of photographs in her hand for a long time.

"Althea," she said at last, without lifting her eyes. "Please eat something."

It was the first kind thing she had said to me in two years.

I ate three bites of cold roast so she would stop looking worried.

Jo drove me home to her apartment, and neither of us said a word until her door was locked behind us.

"Okay," Jo said. "That was the best dinner I've ever been to."

"He said it can't be his."

"I know."

"He'll go to a lawyer by morning," I said. "He'll ask for proof."

"Good, let him." She sat me on the couch and put a blanket over my knees. "Tomorrow we find out why."

The next afternoon, at 1:15, a man in a gray windbreaker walked into the front office of the elementary school where I work.

"Althea Colburn?"

I was holding a stack of attendance slips and a cup of crayons a first-grader had spilled.

"That's me."

"You've been served."

He gave me a thick envelope in front of the principal, the school nurse and a line of parents signing their children out.

Everyone in the room watched me take it.

I read the first page standing at the copy machine.

Petition for Divorce, it said, and then, in smaller type, grounds: adultery.

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