The Other Man in My Wife's Tent novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Her Nine Years

"No," I told the phone.

"Mr. Niskanen, I'd advise you to think..."

"I did my thinking in a tent. No."

I hung up and found Eli staring at me, a half-eaten sandwich in his hand.

"Who was that, Dad?"

"A man selling windows."

"In winter?"

"They're very determined," my mother said.

At six o'clock the phone rang again.

Freja answered it, because I had gone rigid at the table.

She listened, said "Uh-huh" three times and held the phone out to me with her eyebrows up.

"The judge declined the emergency order," she said. "Dean's own lawyer is whining. Apparently a mother has to consent to a removal, and the mother just said no."

I looked at the ceiling.

Upstairs, behind a closed door, my wife had called the court clerk herself ten minutes earlier.

I never found out what she said.

I only knew that for one evening she had picked her son's roof over the man in the black truck.

It didn't fix anything.

But it let me breathe.

My mother put Eli to bed at eight with the hall light on and a very long story about a bear.

At nine she put on her coat in the front hall and looked at me, and then at Freja, who was drying a plate for the third time.

"I'm staying the night," my mother announced. "In the den. You two go and see to that truck of hers."

"What's wrong with my truck?" Freja said.

"Nothing. Go see to it."

Freja and I stood very still.

My mother opened the front door, because she was a woman who believed in stage directions.

We ended up at Freja's clinic, forty minutes away.

Her house on the hill had Dean's name on it as well as hers, and she wouldn't sleep a night there.

The clinic was dark and smelled of hay and disinfectant.

She flicked on one lamp in the back office and locked the door behind us.

"I have a cot," she said. "It's for lambing season. Don't read anything into it."

"I'm not."

"You're smirking."

"It's a very nice cot."

She laughed, and then she stopped, and she sat down on the edge of it and looked at her hands.

"Nine years," she said.

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