My Wife's Last Call I Never Answered novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Four Hundred Thousand

My mother had taken a corner suite at the Driskill and left every lamp off but one.

She sat in a wingback chair with a glass of water she had not drunk and her coat still folded over the arm.

She looked, for the first time in my life, smaller than the chair.

"Sit, Hayes," she said.

I sat on the sofa across from her.

"Four years ago," she said, "you were thirty, and you were going to ask Philippa to marry you."

"I remember."

"You had a ring. You hid it in your sock drawer."

"You went through my socks?"

"I went through everything. That is what mothers do when they're frightened." She turned the glass a quarter turn on the arm of the chair. "I had met her six months before. I watched her at your birthday dinner check what every guest at the table did for a living. When she found out your father's money was gone, she lost interest in the dessert."

"That isn't fair."

"It isn't fair. It was also accurate."

I said nothing.

"I asked her to lunch," my mother said. "I put a cashier's check on the tablecloth, between the bread and the butter. Four hundred thousand dollars."

The lamp hummed.

"I told her she could take it, go to Vienna, and study under whoever she liked. Or she could stay and marry you and see how far your love went when I told you what I'd seen."

"You bought her."

"I offered. She decided." My mother's mouth was a straight line. "She said she needed to think. She was gone for a little less than two hours. Then she came back to the table, folded the check into her purse, and said, 'I'll need a plane ticket, too.'"

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