A Marriage Left Behind novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Just This Year
Brady tells Maura to stay home from the Christmas she pays for, Judith soothes her by phone, and Maura cancels the transfer and finds eighty-four monthly payments she was never told about.
Brady told me to stay home from Christmas while I was kneeling on the living room rug, wrapping his mother's present.
It was a camel wool coat with a cashmere collar, and I had spent two evenings picking the right size.
He stood over me with his phone open to the grocery list for the lodge.
"Mom thinks it would go smoother if you sat this one out."
The scissors stopped in the middle of the paper.
"Smoother than what?"
"Than last year. My sister is still upset about the toast."
"I toasted her promotion, Brady."
"I know. It's just this year, okay? Things are tense."
I looked at the list on his screen.
Eggs, two kinds of butter, coffee for Mom, the good cider.
"Who is paying for the lodge week?" I asked.
"The transfer goes out Friday, same as always. Sixty-two hundred."
"From me."
"From our account. You make more, Maura. That's all it is."
"So I pay for the week and I stay here."
"They're my family," he said, softly, and waited for me to agree.
For seven years I had driven three hours north every Christmas Eve with a trunk full of food I'd cooked.
I had never once been asked whether I wanted to go.
His phone rang before I could answer, and the screen said Mom.
He put her on speaker, and I heard her voice come bright into the room.
"Is Maura there? Let me say something to her, Brady."
"I'm here, Judith."
"Sweetheart, I told him to be gentle. Was he gentle?"
"He told me."
"I only want a calm holiday, and you have been working yourself to the bone. Rest. I'll send you home with a plate of everything."
She was always like this, soft and thoughtful and a little bit generous with other people's time.
She was also the one who had introduced us, at a church supper, by pushing Brady across the basement to ask for my number.
I had always felt I owed her for that.
"Oh, and the coat," Judith went on. "Did you get the medium? I never know about sleeves."
"I got the medium."
"You think of everything. I don't know what this family would do without you."
She hung up before I could say that I didn't know either.
Brady slid his phone onto the arm of the sofa, face up, and went to look for his keys.
It buzzed against the cushion.
Two messages from Kylie, his sister, slid down the screen.
"Did she say yes? Mom needs the money in by Friday."
Then, a second later: "Don't let her ask questions."
Brady came back with his keys and saw me looking at it.
He turned the phone over.
"It's nothing. Kylie worries."
"About what?"
"About Christmas going well."
I set the scissors on the rug.
I had a ribbon half cut, a coat I had chosen with care, and a husband standing in the doorway with his thumb over his screen.
I thought about the lodge, and the stove I had cleaned every Christmas Eve, and the stockings I had sewn names onto.
Mine had never hung on the mantel with the others.
I had always told myself it was because I was the last to arrive.
So I stopped.
I got my laptop from the couch cushion and opened the bank page, and found the transfer scheduled for Friday.
Brady had set it up our first December, and I had signed in every year and watched it go out.
I had never looked at the name it went to.
I looked now.
The payee was Judith Ostlund, personal checking.
Not a lodge, not a rental company, not an owner I had never met.
His mother.
"Maura," Brady said from the doorway. "What are you doing?"
"Canceling the transfer."
"You can't. Mom already booked everything."
"Then your mother can pay for what she booked for the people she invited."
"Don't make this ugly."
"I'm not coming, you said. And I'm not paying for it either."
I pressed cancel.
The screen asked me if I was sure, and I was.
Then, because my hand was already on the trackpad, I opened the history for that payee.
Brady had told me there was one cost, once a year, for the lodge.
The history showed seven Decembers.
Under them, in a long column, were eighty-four smaller payments of four hundred dollars, one on the first of every month.
None of them had a note.
I had never been told about a single one.
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