I Left to Make Him Follow, and He Let Me Go for Three Years novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Hook by the Door

At the Lawrenceville row house she finds her own mug and the monthly pharmacy statements, mocks his hands in the hall, and takes his bedroom key from the hook herself.

The hotel had no rooms until Monday.

A convention of orthodontists had taken the whole of downtown.

I stood at the front desk at midnight with a roller bag and a coat that smelled of cedar soap.

"I can put you on a waiting list, ma'am," the clerk said.

So I took a cab to Lawrenceville.

I told myself it was for my boxes.

Eleven cartons stood in the back bedroom of the row house, labeled in my handwriting, along with a winter coat and a passport I did not need.

None of that was why.

The house was dark brick, third on the left, with a bay window and a green door he had never painted.

I still had the key on my ring.

I had carried it through three airports and a flat in Leith and never taken it off.

It turned as if I had oiled it yesterday.

The hall smelled of floor wax and old wood.

My mug stood in the drying rack, the blue one with the chip, which I had bought at a church fair in Bridgeport for a dollar.

His mug stood beside it.

Neither had been put away.

I took mine down and held it.

Then, because I am a coward about the wrong things, I went into his study.

He had left the desk lamp on.

The top left drawer was unlocked, and in it, laid out like a ledger, were the statements.

Not the old ones.

Three more years of them.

*Pawlak Rx.*

*UPMC Transplant Follow-Up.*

Each line gave the name of a pharmacy or a clinic, and a dollar figure, month after month.

Three years ago I had read the first lines and stopped.

I had seen a woman's name and a monthly sum, and that had been all the story I could stand.

This time I read what the money was paid to.

A pharmacy.

A medical office.

I turned the page, and it went on for thirty-six months, to the same two places.

The story I had told myself for three years shifted by a quarter inch.

I did not let it.

A man can pay for a woman's prescriptions out of love as easily as out of kindness.

A man can pay anything out of guilt.

I heard the front door open.

I put the page back and shut the drawer.

When he reached the study door I was at the window with my mug, as if I had only come in to look at the street.

He was in his shirtsleeves, with his jacket and tie gone and two buttons undone at the throat.

He had walked home from the Strip, four miles.

His hair was wet at the temples.

"The hotel is full," I said. "The orthodontists."

"I know. I called them," he said.

"You called them?"

"At nine, to ask if they would turn you away."

I stared at him.

"You wanted me turned away?" I said.

"I wanted you to come here," said Ansel.

He said it without any shame at all.

I set the mug on the sill.

"You have a strange way of asking for things," I said.

"I have a very bad one," he said.

"There are a dozen boxes in the back bedroom and no bed," I said.

"The bed is in our room," said Ansel.

"That isn't my room."

"It has been your room for five years." He stopped. "I did not change anything."

"That's the whole trouble," I said.

I walked past him into the hall, because I could not stand in that study another minute with the drawer behind me.

He came up the stairs one step behind me.

At the top I turned and put my hand flat against his chest.

I meant to hold him back.

His shirt was damp, and under the cotton his heart was going hard.

"First rule," I said, and my voice shook.

"Name it."

"I came to leave you. I sit through one night, hand you the envelope, and go."

"You broke it at ten forty-five," Ansel said. "In the cutting room."

"You kissed me."

"I did. And you let me."

The heat of his chest came through my palm.

I did not push.

"Second rule," I said. "No touching. Not until you sign."

"Then I will not sign tonight."

I laughed, short and unwilling.

"That is cheating."

"It is the only argument I have."

His hand came up and covered mine on his chest.

He did not press it there.

His big hand rested over my small one, with his heartbeat going under both.

"You have a nick on your jaw," I said, because I could not think of anything else.

"I shaved in the dark," he said.

"You always do."

"I thought you would not look," he said.

"I looked," I said.

"I know," said my husband. "I watched you looking."

I slid my hand out from under his.

I stepped around him, my shoulder brushing his arm, and went down the hall to the brass hook beside the bedroom door.

It held the key to our room.

He had never locked that door in five years.

But in our first year we had kept a key on that hook as a joke, and one night he had hung it there and said, "Whoever wants the other one goes and gets it."

I took it down.

It was cold, and it had my name scratched into the bow.

I had scratched it myself, with a glass cutter, on a Sunday.

He had kept it, and he had hung it back on the same hook.

"Sign first, Mr. Kowalczyk," I said, "and then we'll talk about what your hands are allowed to do."

"And if I do not sign?"

"Then you had better be very good with them."

I turned the key in the lock myself.

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