Imani heard the name Patrice from her mother that night and said, “He has a wife.” Lorraine said yes. Imani said, “I knew he had a life.” Lorraine said, “Now the life knows you.” Imani said she did not want to come to a table. Lorraine said nobody was inviting her to a fight. They ate late. The hospital shift was in the morning. The money order would still come on the first. Knowing did not stop a dentist. Lorraine said that. Imani said good. Good was thin in Dayton too. They used it.
Derrick came home Sunday and stood on the mat. Patrice let him in as far as the mat. “You will tell me the number and the years. You will not tell me it was for my own good.” He told her. Two hundred a month, then three, school fees in a lump the year Imani was fourteen, a phone he had paid and Lorraine had put in her own name. No second house. No holiday. A graduation he had left early because Patrice had been in the car around the corner, told it was a work thing. The around the corner was the sentence that cost the most. Patrice said, “I was in the car.” He said, “Yes.” She said, “Then we are not cutting a pie over that.” He slept at Vanessa’s another night. Vanessa said, “I did not do it for a couch.” He said, “I know.”
The family group text tried to become a jury. June shut it. Patrice shut it. Vanessa wrote one line: the chair was the truth. Then she stopped. Stopping was a skill she used late. Patrice was grateful for the late. Grateful was becoming a crowded word.
On Monday Patrice drove to work and did not tell the office. Offices were not tables. At lunch she looked at Dayton on a map and did not start the car. Starting the car would have been a scene. Lorraine had asked for no scene. Patrice could do no scene. She could do a ledger. She asked Derrick for the carbons. He brought them. She read them at the table where the chair had been. The chair was back in the basement stack. The absence was louder. She read every first of the month for seventeen years. The reading was a marriage she had not been in. She put the carbons in a folder. The folder went in the drawer with the taxes. Taxes and daughters, neighbors. She could live with neighbors if they were labeled.