“Thirty this spring.”
“Names.”
“Christine. Matthew. Josh.”
“Does she think you are divorced.”
Frank’s face answered before his mouth did.
“She knows I am married. She thinks we have an arrangement.”
“We do not have an arrangement.”
“I know.”
“Does Patrick have brothers he should have been allowed to hate or love on purpose.”
“Yes.”
Margaret drank coffee that was too hot.
“You will write it. All of it. Dates. Money. The weekends. You will not talk while I read. Then you will leave this house for a week. I do not care if you go to a hotel or to Dayton. I will call a lawyer. I will call my sister. If you call Christine before I have read the paper I will have Patrick bring the whole box inside.”
Frank wrote at the dining table where the cake had been. Margaret had put the cake in the trash at dawn, gold letters down in coffee grounds, the same trick another woman in another house had used on a banner. Cake in the trash is a kind of language.
He wrote ten pages in a handwriting the HVAC invoices knew.
He left them on the table and packed a bag.
He did not go to Dayton the first night. He went to a Hampton Inn off the interstate and sat on a bed and called no one.
Margaret read the pages twice. She called her sister Louise in Columbus. Louise said she would come. Margaret said not today. Louise said then tomorrow. Margaret said tomorrow.