Chapter 4: The Curb

Pio drove.

"Seven minutes to Cranston," he said. "Don't talk to me."

Raf sat in the back seat beside me in his shirtsleeves, with his mother's apron string still caught on one cuff.

He had stood up from the table as soon as I came back for my purse.

He had not asked why.

"You don't need to come," I said.

"I know."

"It's my house. It's my sister's husband."

"It was your house," he said. "And you're not walking into it alone."

I looked out the window and didn't answer.

It had started to rain.

At the end of my old street, eleven cardboard boxes sat at the curb in a row, soaking through.

My winter coat lay across the top one.

The mattress stood on its side against the mailbox.

Craig's silver Audi was in the driveway, and the front door of the house I had paid for stood open.

Pio parked across the end of the driveway.

I got out and picked up the first box, and the bottom fell out.

Books, a toaster, a photograph of my mother in a frame, and my mother's good enamel pot spilled onto the wet grass.

"Carla," Craig said from the porch.

He had on a clean quarter-zip and an expression of mild regret.

He held a travel mug.

"Don't make this ugly," he said. "I put them out to save you the trouble. You can pick them up."

"You put my mother's pot in the rain."

"It's a pot."

"It was hers."

"The house is in my name," Craig said.

"My lawyer says your down payment was a gift to the marriage. I'm trying to be fair."

I stood there with a soaked photograph in my hand.

I had always thought I'd cry.

Instead I felt a clear, cold quiet.

"Fair," I said. "You moved fifty-eight thousand dollars at 11:40 at night."

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