…”touched a penny of what she worked for.”
My mother was a retired court stenographer. She noticed everything. Six months before she died, she’d noticed my husband’s car outside a restaurant across town on a night he told me he was working late. So she hired a private investigator, an old friend from the courthouse, and she never said a word to me.
The photograph in the envelope was from that night. It showed my husband outside the restaurant, kissing a woman.
It wasn’t the woman sitting in the second row at the funeral.
That’s why his mistress started crying. She’d been with him for a year. She was five months pregnant. She’d believed every word he told her about leaving me. And she’d just found out, at my mother’s funeral, that she wasn’t the only one he’d been lying to.
The handwritten note was short. It was in my mother’s careful, tiny handwriting. “Robert, I’ve left my estate in a trust for my daughter, and only my daughter. You will never manage, borrow, inherit or benefit from a dollar of it. I wanted you to hear that from me. — Ellen.”
My husband had been counting on that money. I found out later that he’d already told a friend he’d “be set” after my mother passed. He’d been borrowing against it in his head for years.
I didn’t stay at the reception much longer. My cousin drove me home. The next morning, I called my mother’s lawyer, who had been expecting my call, and then a divorce lawyer, who my mother had also picked out for me, and left in the same envelope. Of course she had.
His mistress called me two weeks later. I almost didn’t answer. She apologized. She said she was keeping the baby and moving back to her parents’ house in Ohio, and that she wanted me to know she’d stopped talking to him. “Your mom was something,” she said. “I wish I’d met her.”
The divorce was final in March. After twenty-six years, it took eleven minutes in front of a judge.
I used some of my mother’s money to take a trip she always wanted to take and never did, to see the fjords in Norway. I brought her photograph with me and set it on the railing of the boat. It was the first time in a long time I felt like the two of us were exactly where we were supposed to be.
