She lived two houses down. She’d been at the party on the lawn with a drink in her hand like everybody else, and I’d been carrying that around for five days.
She said, “Dane. I’m going to say this badly.” She had a grocery bag. “I’ve been leaving food at the end of the drive for your wife since about February. She wouldn’t take it if I handed it to her. Your mother told everyone she was on drugs.”
“You were there,” I said. “On the lawn. You watched.”
“I did.” She didn’t try to get out of it. “I’ve thought about that for five days and I don’t have anything for you except that I’m sixty-eight and I was scared of your mother and that’s not a reason. I have the receipts from the food and I have three texts from Glenda telling me to stop, and if it’s any use to anybody, I’ll say all of it to whoever you want.”
She testified in the end. She’s the only one of the twenty who did.
On day six, I asked my mother if we could do a family dinner. Something nice. To celebrate.
She lit up like a church.
PART FOUR
I shaved my head that morning in the bathroom of a motel where I’d moved Marisol two days earlier.
I did it with a set of clippers from a drugstore. She sat on the edge of the tub and watched, and about halfway through she started laughing, which turned into the other thing, and then went back to laughing.
“You look like a thumb,” she said.
“I look like my wife.”
We got to the house at six. My mother had done the dining room properly, the good cloth, the candles. Tessa had bought a dress for it.
Marisol came in with me. She had no cap on.
My mother’s face when we walked in was worth some part of what it cost.
“Dane,” she said carefully, “you look ridiculous.”
“Sit down, Mom.”
Then Harlan Voss came in the front door behind us in a gray suit with a briefcase, and behind him a woman named Agent Delacourt from the Defense investigative service, and behind her, in a cardigan, Ruthann Pell from two doors down.
Tessa said, “Who the hell are all these people?”
“Sit down,” I said. “All of you.”
I stood at the end of the table I’d eaten every childhood meal at, and I put five folders down on it.
“One. There is no four hundred thousand dollars. I made it up in the back yard eleven days ago, ninety seconds after you told twenty people that my wife shaved her own head because she was crazy. Everything you’ve bought since then is on credit and it is not my problem.”
Tessa said, “You lied to us?”
I let that sit in the room a second, because it was, in its way, perfect.
“Two.” I opened the second folder. “Marisol has been covered under my family health plan for four years and one month. Not one day of gap. She was told she wasn’t covered. She was told there was a county waiting list. There is no county waiting list. Here are the enrollment packets, the annual statements, and two replacement ID cards, all of which were mailed to this address and all of which I found in a crate in the garage under the Christmas decorations.”
My mother said, “That mail comes in a hundred pieces a week, Dane, I can’t be responsible for—”
“They were rubber-banded together, Mom.”
“Three.” Third folder. “Twenty-two months ago somebody submitted a routing change on my housing allowance with my wife’s signature on the spouse line. Marisol has never seen this form. Agent Delacourt has a handwriting comparison. That’s a federal offense, and it is the reason there’s a federal agent standing in your dining room.”
My mother did not look at the folder. She looked at Voss, and then at Delacourt, and I watched her do arithmetic exactly the way she’d done it on the lawn.
