Chapter 24: The Bridge

The county clerk's office opened at nine on Saturday, and by five to nine my mother had already complained about the ramp.

"It's too steep," she said from the wheelchair.

"It's the regulation slope," Hazel said.

"Regulation was written by someone who has never had a valve."

Hazel pushed her up it anyway.

My mother wore her good navy dress and her silver bob had been set that morning at the salon on Humboldt.

I wore the gray suit I'd bought for the wedding that never happened, because it still fit and I was done wasting things.

Hazel wore white.

It was not a gown.

It was a plain white dress with sleeves to the elbow, and her brown hair down, and nothing at her throat but the pearls.

I had stopped in the doorway when she came out of my mother's bedroom in it.

"Say something," she'd said.

"I can't."

"That'll do."

The clerk was a heavyset woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain, just like my mother's.

The two of them looked at each other and became friends at once.

She took the folded paper from my hand and held it up to the light.

"The old name," she said. "Twenty dollars for the correction."

"I have it."

"You've had it a month, honey. I figured you might."

She stamped it twice.

The Milwaukee County seal came down on the page, and the letters of the wrong name went gray under the ink.

Hazel Cartwright, it said now, in a clerk's tidy ballpoint, beside mine.

We stood in front of the little rail in the corner room.

The window behind the clerk looked out over the river.

My mother was the witness, and she held a folded program in both hands.

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Stole My Fiancée, So I Took His Wife and His Company from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.