I Woke Up Married to My Worst Enemy novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Thirty Days

Milo recites his mother's twelve rules and Hattie sets terms for thirty days in the house. In a desk folder she finds a check ledger ending Payment 96 of 120 and decides her husband is blackmailing her.

At six o'clock Milo stood on a kitchen chair and read me my own house rules.

He held a laminated card. I had apparently made it myself.

"Rule one," he said. "Nobody is nice for free."

"That one's good," I said.

"Rule two. Shoes off at the door."

I looked down at my sneakers, which were on, and stepped back into the hall.

"Rule three. Nobody eats dinner standing up."

I sat down. I had been eating a cracker over the sink.

"Rule four. Say what you're mad about before bed."

"I'm mad about all of it," I said.

"You have to pick one," Milo said. "That's rule five."

Gus carried a pot to the table and said nothing. He had learned not to help.

By rule eight, I had broken four of them. By rule twelve, the card said, in my own handwriting, that Coke fixes everything.

"Does it?" I asked.

"Not everything," Milo said. "But it fixed you."

I looked at Gus.

"The curb," he said. "He's been doing it since he was three. You fainted at the sink once and he poured juice on you."

"It was a good plan," Milo said.

I wrote in my notebook: Milo: 1 Coke, saved my life, owe.

Then I wrote: Dinner, $9.

Gus read it upside down from across the table.

"You don't owe me for dinner."

"A meal like this is nine dollars at the diner. Pot roast is eleven."

"It's meatloaf."

"Nine, then."

He set down his fork very carefully.

"Hatt, I'd like to say a few things, and you don't get to write any of them down."

"I'll write what I want."

"Fine." He took out his own pocket notebook, small and green, and set it on the table next to mine.

"What's that?" I asked.

"Same thing," Gus said. "Mine says the same thing on every line. Hattie: zero."

I did not know what that meant, so I decided it was an insult.

After Milo went to bed, we sat across the table and made terms.

I wrote them on a paper napkin, because I trusted my own handwriting more than anyone's memory.

One: thirty days. I would stay in the house for thirty days and decide at the end.

Two: separate rooms. I would sleep in the guest room.

Three: pillows stayed where they were.

"That's not a term," Gus said.

"It's a pillow term."

"Fine."

Four: hands to himself.

"I'm not going to touch you," he said quietly. "You woke up at eighteen. I know that."

"That's a lot of information for a man who's not touching me."

Five, which he added: no thank-yous.

"What does that mean?"

"You don't thank me for things. I'm not doing them for thanks."

"You're not doing them for free either," I said. "Nobody does."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"Then write it down however you want," he said. "Just don't thank me."

I gave him the napkin to sign. He signed it with the pencil from his apron, and the signature was neat and slow.

My father gave me a used car for my sixteenth birthday. In March he came back for it, with a bill for the oil.

That was how I learned the rule.

At midnight I lay in the guest room and could not sleep.

My own ceiling had a crack I had never seen. The comforter smelled like a laundry soap I didn't know.

So I got up and went through the house.

The desk was in the hall closet, which was an odd place for a desk.

The top drawer held a calculator, pens and a roll of stamps.

The second drawer had a folder.

It was green, with a label in my handwriting. G.B.

I turned on the closet light and opened it.

It was full of check stubs.

I flipped through them. Four hundred dollars. Four hundred dollars. Four hundred dollars. Each one signed by me, each one made out to Gus Brannigan.

The earliest was dated eight years ago.

The last page of the folder was a typed table, the kind I would make, with a column for dates and a column for amounts.

Payment 96 of 120. Balance: $9,600.

I sat down on the closet floor.

I had been paying this man four hundred dollars a month for eight years.

Why would I do that?

I knew one reason. I could think of only one.

He knew something about me, and I was paying him to keep quiet.

I took a pen and wrote in my notebook, in block letters.

BLACKMAIL.

Then I shut the folder, and I heard a small sound behind me.

Gus was standing in the hallway in a T-shirt, holding a glass of water.

"Hatt," he said. "That's not what it looks like."

"It looks like four hundred dollars a month."

He opened his mouth.

"No," I said. "Don't. I'll find out myself."

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