I Left to Make Him Follow, and He Let Me Go for Three Years novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Sign It
At the glassworks' annual dedication night, Neve hands her husband divorce papers in front of the board and finds a place card for a woman named Magda Pawlak; she writes her own name under the family's and sits.
I put the envelope in my husband's hand before he had finished turning around.
"Three years, Ansel," I said. "Sign it."
A hundred people stood in the chapel hall holding champagne flutes.
Every one of them stopped talking.
Ansel did not look at the envelope.
He looked at me, and his thumb closed across the back of my fingers, and he did not let go.
I had planned for everything except his hand.
I had planned the grey wool coat I wore on the plane, and the words, and the cab waiting outside.
My ticket back was folded in the right pocket, dated Sunday.
I had not planned for his palm, rough from glass and warm against my knuckles for the first time in three years.
"You are late for the toast," he said.
His voice was the same, low and level.
"I'm not here for the toast," I said.
"My mother is about to give it."
"Then she can give it to the envelope," I said.
I tried to pull my hand back.
He held on one moment longer than a stranger would, and then he let me go.
My knuckles felt as if someone had pressed a hot iron to them.
He was thirty-four now, and the years had not been unkind.
He still had the small white scar through his left eyebrow, where a pane had split on him at nineteen.
His black suit fit across the shoulders the way suits only fit men who lift sheets of glass for a living.
There was a nick under his jaw where he had shaved badly.
I noticed it and hated that I had.
"You look tired," I said.
"You look well," he said.
"That doesn't answer anything."
"You have not asked me anything yet. You told me to sign."
He slid the envelope into the inside pocket of his jacket and buttoned the jacket over it.
Behind him, the great rose window of St. Stanislaus Kostka hung on the stone wall, lit from behind.
Only a third of it was glass, and the rest was bare iron.
His family had been building it for eleven years.
"Neve," said a woman's voice at my shoulder.
I knew it before I turned.
Halina Kowalczyk, his mother, was sixty-two, with silver hair in a French twist and a black wool dress cut like a verdict.
She looked at my coat and then at my boots.
"You came," she said.
"I came to see Ansel," I said.
"You came the one night a year the whole city is in this room."
"I know what night it is," I said.
"Then you know where the family sits," she said.
She turned and walked to the long table at the head of the hall without waiting for me.
Ansel stood where he was.
He did not take my arm, and he did not say a word for me or against me.
I followed her, because I had decided to sit through this one night, and I never leave a thing half done.
The table was white linen and crystal, with a hundred cream place cards in Halina's careful hand.
I walked down the family side and read them.
*Mrs. H. Kowalczyk.*
*Mr. A. Kowalczyk.*
*The Monsignor.*
Then, at Ansel's right hand, in the seat the wife of the house would take, I found a card in the same ink.
*Miss J. Pawlak.*
I knew that name.
I had found it three years and eight months ago, printed on a stack of bank statements in a drawer in his study.
It sat in a column of monthly transfers that began before I ever met him.
*Pawlak, J. $2,400.*
On the first of every month, in cash, like rent.
I had asked him about it once.
He put down his coffee and said, "It is not what you think."
Then he said nothing else for nine days, until I packed.
I never asked him a second time.
I told myself he would come after me and say it.
He did not, not to the airport and not across the ocean, and three years of silence is its own kind of answer.
He sent money instead, two thousand dollars a month into my account in Edinburgh, with no note.
Behind me, Halina said, very evenly, "Magdalena will be here shortly."
I heard the pleasure under it.
She had wanted me to read that card.
Ansel had come up beside me, and I felt him go still.
"Mother," he said. "Neve will sit with you."
"She is a guest," said Halina.
"She is my wife."
It was the first thing he had said all night that I could not have predicted.
His mother did not blink.
"Then she may sit where wives sit," she said, "when they are in the room."
I picked up the card.
*Miss J. Pawlak.*
I turned it over.
The Monsignor's silver pen lay on the linen beside the dedication book.
I uncapped it.
On the back of the card, in my own handwriting, I wrote: *Mrs. Neve Kowalczyk.*
I set it at the chair beside Halina's, and I sat down in it.
Then I slid the card that said *Miss J. Pawlak* two seats down the table.
"I'll stay for the toast," I said.
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