The Burning Road to Divorce After the Fire novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Her Things on the Lawn

Lainey films the lockout, tells Brent's mother and the street what the helicopter did, and files for divorce while Brent posts that she is unstable; a lien letter says Pearl's land will be sold.

I set the groceries down on the porch step and turned my phone camera on.

"It's 12:14 on a Tuesday," I said, to the lawn, to the neighbors, to nobody. "My husband changed the locks while I was at work."

I walked the length of the grass and filmed every box.

My key did not turn in the front door.

The woman across the street lowered her phone and raised it again.

I called Kurt, because his was the only number in my phone that had said something true to me that week.

"I'm at your house in twelve minutes," he said, before I finished explaining.

He took eleven.

His pickup stopped at the curb with a scorched hose coiled in the bed.

He got out, looked at the lawn and the locked door, and said, "Where do you want it?"

"All of it. Pearl's quilt first."

We carried boxes without talking.

He lifted the heavy ones and left the small ones for me, and he never asked what was in any of them.

On the fifth trip a silver car swung into the drive, too fast.

Brent's mother got out.

She wore pearls and a linen jacket, and she gripped her sunglasses in one fist.

"Lainey. Honey. Stop this right now."

"Hello, Mrs. Breckenridge."

"The whole street is watching you. You're embarrassing my son in his own yard."

"He locked me out of my own house."

"He did it because you won't talk to him." She turned her whole face toward the porch, where the woman across the street had given up pretending. "A woman who loses her grandmother gets a little hysterical. Everybody understands. Come to dinner Sunday and apologize and we'll forget the rest."

I put down the box I was holding.

"Apologize for what?"

"For making this so difficult."

"His helicopter flew over me while she was dying," I said.

I said it loudly, so the porch could hear.

"It was four minutes away from us. It went to rescue a dog."

Kurt stopped with a suitcase in his hand.

His mother's mouth thinned.

"It was a priority call," she said. "Brent has explained all that."

"Ask him which priority."

I carried the last box to the truck myself.

Behind me, a car door slammed, and the silver car backed down the drive hard enough to put a wheel in the flower bed.

Kurt opened the passenger door for me and I got in.

"You said that to her face," he said, after a block.

"I should have said it to his."

"You will."

I laughed, and it came out wrong, and he drove on without looking at me, which was kind.

My things went into a storage unit on the edge of town.

Then I went to the county courthouse in the clothes I had worked in.

The clerk at the family law window slid the form across with a pen.

"Petition for dissolution of marriage," she said. "Fee's three hundred and fifty dollars. You can request a fee waiver."

"I'll pay it."

I had two hundred and ten dollars in my own account.

I put the two hundred and ten dollars down and charged the rest to a credit card I had opened before I met Brent, which he did not know I still had.

She stamped the petition and gave me a copy.

"Service is on you, hon. A neighbor or a friend can do it, anyone over eighteen who isn't you."

"A friend is fine," I said.

Kurt had been waiting in the hall with his arms crossed.

"Do you want me to hand it to him?"

"Yes," I said. "In front of people."

By evening Brent had posted first.

I read it on the courthouse steps while Kurt got me a coffee I did not drink.

The post had a photograph of the two of us at the county fair, three summers ago, with my face tipped up to him.

"Our family is going through the unimaginable," Brent had written. "My wife lost her grandmother in this fire, and grief is turning her into someone I barely know. Please give us privacy. I love her, and I will always be here."

There were four thousand hearts under it.

Someone had written: What a good man.

Someone else had written: Poor guy, she sounds unstable.

Breckenridge Air Rescue's account shared it with a line from the board.

"We stand behind our director and support his wife through her grief."

I read it until the words stopped being words.

"Don't answer it," Kurt said quietly.

"I'm not going to."

I closed the app.

"I'm going to wait until I have something nobody can answer."

I slept on the couch in the break room at the clinic, and in the morning the owner called me into her office with a courier envelope on the desk.

Her eyes were red.

"It came for you at seven," she said. "It's from a law firm. Lainey, I'm so sorry. Brent's mother is on the phone with me, too."

The letter was two pages.

I read the first line twice.

It said my husband's company held a lien on the Stauffer parcel at the top of Cedar Grade, and that Pearl's land would be sold to settle it within thirty days.

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