Chapter 4 : She took a cab home because her hands were unreliable and she did not want to be in a car by herself on the harbor road with the water on one side and the lights on the other. The cab driver had a small brass Buddha on the dash and a pack
At the condo she paid the driver, walked up the one flight, let herself in, and locked the door behind her with her back flat against it, and stood there for a minute, and then she laughed, and then she cried, in that order, because her body had finally caught up with her face.
She did not cry about Julian. She had stopped crying about Julian in the way you stop crying about a bus you have already missed. She cried because she had spent three years holding the edges of herself in, every dinner, every insinuation, every "the girl who married up" and every hand held out for her husband on the other side of a room, and now the edges were coming loose all at once and it was frightening, the looseness, how much room there was inside her once she let the coat go.
She dropped her coat on the chair by the door. First time in three years she had dropped that coat anywhere without folding it. The tote went on the floor.
She sat down on her own couch — her couch, bought with her own money, in her own name — and she called Marisol.
It was 10:44. Marisol picked up on the third ring.
"You okay."
"I'm okay."
"You want to tell me what happened or do you want me to guess."
"Julian smashed a full glass of merlot across my cheek in front of his mother," Odessa said. "This afternoon. In the marble foyer. And then he told me to clean his mother's apartment or he'd file for divorce, and I said Fine, and he handed me the keys, and I went there, and I opened the drawers, and I found his handwriting on the back of his mother's list. We take it. Eleven months ago."
There was a silence on the line. She could hear the lawyer's office air conditioner, even at this hour, humming behind her voice.
"Say the last part again," Marisol said.
"His handwriting. On the back of his mother's inventory. If she ever sells, we take it. Dated eleven months ago."
"Does she know he wrote that."
"She didn't sound like it."
"Does he know the apartment is no longer hers."
"I don't think so."
Marisol was quiet for a moment. Then she said the thing Odessa had been waiting to hear, in the flat, unsentimental voice lawyers use when they are telling you that something has just gotten simpler and much more dangerous at the same time.
"Okay. Then we have a decision to make in the next eight weeks."
"Tell me."
"The deed is recorded tomorrow morning at nine. When it records, the county website updates within twenty-four hours. If Bianca Ashford searches her own address — and she will, she's the kind of woman who has a folder of her own titled The Apartment — she will see that the property she believes is hers no longer belongs to her. As of tonight, she doesn't know that. As of tomorrow night, she will."
"Eight weeks," Odessa said.
"No." Marisol's voice flattened further. "Eight weeks is how long the public name on the trust stays anonymized. Eight weeks is how long Julian and Bianca cannot find out that the buyer was you. That is a different question from whether or not they find out that the apartment is no longer theirs. They will find out about that tomorrow."
"So I have one night."
"You have one night."
Odessa looked across the room at the window, and the city, and the low orange glow of a highway ramp three streets away.
"What do I do with one night," she said.
"You get up tomorrow morning and you go back to work like it was a Thursday. You do not call them. You do not answer if they call you, more than once. If Julian texts you, you answer like a wife. If Julian threatens you, you answer like a wife. You do not, under any circumstances, tell them you know what's in their heads before the public record has to tell them. And you make one decision tonight."
"Which one."
"Do you want to keep the apartment," Marisol said, "or do you want to give it back."
Odessa sat with the question for a long time, on her couch, in her own condo, with her shoes still on.
She thought about the third time. Today was the third time. She had cried twice in that house — at the dinner with Bianca's relatives and in the powder room after Julian told her to be grateful. She had taken two insults from Bianca's side and two silences from Julian's side and had spent three years counting them, quietly, the way you count the minutes in a movie you already know is going to end badly.
She thought about the hand Bianca had held out on the counter. The nails, the ring, the amber beads. The keys going into the coat pocket like a tip.
She thought about the insurance rider in the folder. Every object, itemized, with a value beside it. Bianca had spent two years deciding what the apartment was worth. She had never asked Odessa to sit in it, not once.
She thought about the small brass box in the second drawer with the masking tape that said WATCHES.
"You know what," Odessa said, slowly. "I don't think I get to pick."
"Say more."
"Either I keep it, or I let them have it. Either way, the rest of my life in that family is going to be spent in a room where they know I could have taken something and chose what I chose. If I keep it, I'm the daughter-in-law who took their mother's apartment. If I give it back, I'm the daughter-in-law who was given the chance and handed it over. Either way, they get to tell the story."
"Then what's the third option," Marisol said.
Odessa sat up straighter.
"The third option is I don't tell them anything," she said. "Let the record tell them. Let the county tell them. Let them find out that the apartment changed hands and let them spend the next eight weeks trying to figure out who bought it, and then let them walk into my lawyer's office when the trust name comes off, and sit down, and find out it was me. In your office. In chairs. With you there. And let them learn, in a room I control the furniture of, that the woman they used to make cry in the powder room owns the thing they were counting on."
Marisol did not answer for a moment.
"You know that means you'll be alone in that family for eight more weeks," she said. "Worse than before. They'll be looking for the buyer and they'll take it out on you."
"I've had three years of practice."
"And you'll have to sit at their table in the meantime. Thanksgiving is in nine days."
"Ten. But yes."
"And you'll have to sit there and eat and smile and let Bianca put the turkey in front of you and Julian pour the wine and neither of them know that you are the buyer."
"Yes."
"You realize every dinner from tonight until the door opens is you performing."
Odessa looked out the window at the highway ramp. The orange glow flickered the way ramp lights do, blink, blink, blink.
"Marisol," she said. "I've been performing for three years. This is the first time I'm being paid."
She heard Marisol laugh, low, professional, but a laugh. Then the lawyer cleared her throat.
"Okay," she said. "Then we have a plan. Tomorrow morning the deed records. I'll email you the copy. You do not respond to their calls tonight. If Julian comes to your door tonight, you do not open it, and if he won't leave, you call the police and you give them my number and you say nothing else. Do you understand."
"Yes."
"And Odessa," Marisol said. "One more thing."
"Tell me."
"Tonight, before you go to sleep, write down exactly what he said to you. Word for word. The glass and the cheek and the apartment. Not for a lawsuit. For you. Because in eight weeks, if you decide to keep the apartment, you are going to have to sit in a room with both of them and remember why it was ever yours."
"Okay."
"Eight weeks."
"Eight weeks."
She hung up, and she took her shoes off, and she walked to the small desk by the front window and she found a legal pad and a pen with a chewed cap, and she sat down and she wrote it all out — the glass, the CRACK, the wine on marble, the pointing finger, the ultimatum, Fine. Give me the keys to her apartment. That's more like it. Be there by seven. Take your shoes off at the door, she just had the floors redone.
She read it back once, and she did not cry, and she folded the legal pad in half and put it in the second drawer of her desk, under a stack of old tax returns, in the way you hide a thing you intend to find again.
Then she went to bed.
At 11:58 she heard the elevator in the hallway and her phone lit up on the nightstand with Julian's name, and she watched it ring three times, and she put her hand over the screen and looked at the ceiling and let it ring out.
At 12:04 a text came in.
Where are you.
At 12:11 a second one.
You left the keys with my mother. I had to drive her home.
At 12:19 a third one.
Fine. Sleep it off.
She looked at the third one for a long time. Sleep it off. Three years of marriage in three words. She turned the phone face down on the nightstand and stared at the ceiling until the buttons went dark under her palm, and the last thought she had before she fell asleep was that in eight weeks Julian Ashford was going to sit in a chair in Marisol Vega's office and find out that while he had been telling her to sleep it off, she had been going to sleep as the owner of the apartment he had just driven his mother home in.
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All 8 chapters
- 1The silence came too fast.
- 2The lawyer's name was Marisol Vega, and she had a voice that did not enjoy delivering good news in increments.
- 3The knock came at 9:20.
- 4She took a cab home because her hands were unreliable and she did not want to be in a car by herself on the harbor road with the water on one side and the lights on the other. The cab driver had a small brass Buddha on the dash and a pack
- 5The deed recorded at 9:00 a.m. on a Wednesday.
- 6Thanksgiving at the villa was set for one o'clock, and Odessa arrived at 12:48 in the ivory crepe dress — the same dress, because that was its own statement and she had decided to make it — with a green bean casserole she had not made her
- 7The first call came at 7:04 in the morning.
- 8The eight weeks passed like weather.