The Wife They Burned novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Friday

Ada leaves Highmoor for the staff room at Lantern House, and Marshall's mother arrives in front of the families to cut the funding and evict them in thirty days.

"Then it loses it," I said.

Marshall stared at me.

"You'd do that to them? To sick kids?"

"No. You would."

I zipped the second suitcase.

He waited for me to cry, or bargain, or ask what I'd done wrong.

I'd done all three in this house before, and he knew the order.

I picked up the box of drawings instead.

"You're tired," he said. "Sleep on it."

He went back down the stairs.

I left at six the next morning, before the house was up.

Two suitcases. One box of drawings. My mother's old quilt, because it had been on my attic bed and nobody else would want it.

The gardener was raking leaves by the gate, and he took off his cap when I drove past.

Lantern House sat on a quiet street four blocks from Greenwich Hospital.

It was a big white Victorian with a wraparound porch and nine bedrooms.

We left the light over the door on every night of the year.

Families came there from Ohio and Maine and the Bronx, because their kids were in the hospital and hotels cost three hundred dollars a night.

They stayed free.

They stayed as long as their kids stayed.

Joy was on the porch in her slippers with a mug of coffee.

She looked at the suitcases in my back seat.

She set the mug down on the rail.

"Oh, my love," she said. "Oh, finally."

She came down the steps and hugged me so hard my ribs creaked.

"There's nobody in the staff room," she said into my hair. "There's never anybody in the staff room. It's yours."

"Joy, I can pay rent."

"You founded this place. You're not paying rent to sleep next to the boiler."

The staff room was at the back of the first floor, next to the laundry.

It had a single bed, a dresser with a sticky drawer and a window over the garden.

Joy made the bed with me.

She talked the whole time, about the dryer and a volunteer who'd shrunk six towels.

The boy in room seven had learned to whistle with his oxygen tube in.

She didn't ask me one question about Marshall.

When we were done, she set the box of drawings on the dresser and patted the lid.

"There," she said. "Now she's home too."

I had to sit down on the bed for a minute after that.

Joy sat beside me and didn't say anything at all.

That night I ate dinner at the long kitchen table with a dozen people I barely knew and three I knew well.

The boy from room seven was nine.

He had a cannula under his nose and a little green tank on wheels that he called his sidekick.

He wanted to know if I was the lady who owned the house.

"Nobody owns it," I said. "It belongs to whoever needs it."

"That's not how houses work," he said.

His mother told him to eat his peas.

I slept six hours, the first time since September.

Friday at four, I was folding towels in the front room when a black Mercedes pulled up outside.

Marshall's mother got out of the back.

She wore gray wool and pearls and the face she wore for hospital ribbon cuttings.

A man in a navy suit followed her with a leather folder.

The foundation's lawyer.

I'd sat across from him at six Christmas dinners.

She didn't knock.

The front room was full of parents and the game on low.

The boy from room seven was building a fort out of sofa cushions with his sidekick parked beside him.

"Ada," Marshall's mother said. "There you are."

"You can talk to me in the office."

"I don't think so. This concerns everyone."

She smiled around the room.

"Many of you don't know me," she said. "I chair the Kendrick Family Foundation. For six years we've been very proud to support this house."

Joy came in from the kitchen with a dish towel over her shoulder.

She stopped in the doorway.

"I'm afraid our family is going through a very painful time," Marshall's mother went on. "Mrs. Kendrick has chosen to leave her husband, in the same week she buried their child."

A mother on the couch looked at me.

"I'm sure you all understand that the foundation can't continue to fund a project run by someone in such a fragile state."

"Say what you came to say," I said.

She turned to me with real sympathy in her eyes.

"The foundation's support for Lantern House ends in thirty days," she said. "Food, utilities, staff. I'm so sorry."

"These people have children in the ICU."

"Which is why we're giving them a month's notice."

Joy threw the dish towel on the floor.

"You came in here," she said, "on a Friday, in front of these families, to say that?"

"I came to be transparent," Marshall's mother said. "I believe in transparency."

The boy from room seven was looking from her to me.

He'd stopped building.

"We'll find other money," I said.

"I'm sure you'll try."

She nodded to the lawyer.

He opened the leather folder and took out a single sheet.

He looked at a spot on the wall above the couch.

"There's one more matter, Mrs. Kendrick," he said. "The property itself."

"What about it?"

"This house was never given to you. The deed is held by the Kendrick Family Foundation."

He set the paper on the coffee table, next to the boy's fort.

"The foundation is selling it," he said. "The families have thirty days to get out."

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