Chapter 3

We went through that box for twenty minutes. He took the left pile and I took the right and he found a receipt from the pharmacy in Aberdeen and held it up and asked if that was the kind of thing I meant.

"That's the kind of thing," I said.

"You want me to keep going?"

"I'll pull them at work. It's easier from my desk."

He stood up and put the lid back on the box and lifted it onto the shelf in the closet for me, because I'd have had to stand on the chair again. Then he went and made two grilled cheeses and brought mine to the couch and asked if I wanted to watch anything.

I had four days off approved for the surgery. Nobody at work knew I'd walked out of pre-op, and I didn't call to tell them.

He left at six thirty the next morning. I heard the truck and then I got up and made coffee and sat down at the kitchen table with the laptop.

We opened the savings account the year we got married and we called it the baby account, because we were twenty-three and we thought that was funny.

For the first three years I put a hundred and fifty dollars in every payday and checked the balance every single time, and watching that number go up was the best part of my month. Then I stopped checking. Not the depositing. Just the checking. There comes a point where a number like that sits in your house and hurts you, and you learn to go around it the way you go around a bad board on the porch.

I had to reset the password. The code came to my phone, because the number on the account is mine. I filled the card out at the branch on Main eleven years ago and he signed where I pointed.

The balance was two thousand one hundred and eighty dollars.

I refreshed the page twice.

Then I clicked back through the statements, and I kept clicking, and I went year by year until I hit the bottom.

CALDER DAY SCHOOL. Four thousand eight hundred dollars. August, then January, then August again. A scheduled transfer, set up once and never touched after that.

Two people can schedule a transfer out of that account. I have never scheduled anything out of it in my life.

I got the legal pad out of the drawer by the phone and did it by hand, because I do numbers by hand when they matter.

Fourteen payments. Sixty-seven thousand two hundred dollars. Plus two registration fees of three hundred and ten dollars each, the first year, in July.

Sixty-seven thousand eight hundred and twenty dollars. Seven years. Two children.

I sat there with the pen still in my hand.

For nine years I did the math on this table at night about what we couldn't do. I bought the store brand of everything. I picked up Saturday shifts coding for the urgent care for three years straight and gave every dollar of it to the clinic in Raleigh.

I didn't go to my cousin Renata's wedding in Savannah because the flight and the dress and the hotel came to four hundred and change and we needed it for the next round. I told her I couldn't get off work. She still brings it up at Christmas, and every year I laugh and say I know, I know, I'm awful.

Colm sat at this table with me. He looked at the same numbers. He said we'd get there.

We didn't have a baby. We had a school.

I printed all of it at the library on Bragg Street because our printer has been out of cyan since February, and it took an hour and eleven dollars in quarters.

Margo Vail's office is forty minutes away in Southern Pines, over a dance studio, and I picked her because she has never once had a beer at the Ridgeway family's table. I called at nine and she had a cancellation at two.

She read the insurance statement first. Then she read the bank statements, all of them, and then she went back and read the insurance statement again.

"Is this plan through your employer or his?"

"Mine. He doesn't offer coverage. It's six guys and a truck."

"Anybody besides the two of you have access to that savings account?"

"No."

"And how long has she been in town?"

"Eight years in October."

I answered all three without crying, which I had not expected of myself. Upstairs the music started and something heavy went across the floor over our heads, the same eight bars over and over.

Margo got up and went to the copier in the corner and stood there while it warmed up. She came back with one page and set it down and turned it around so it was facing me.

"In North Carolina," she said, "you don't only get to sue him."