Let Love Go to the Evening Wind

The envelope was still on the kitchen table when the light came through the shutters and laid pale stripes across the wood. It was letter-size, thick, cream-colored, with my name written in his slanted hand. Bennett. Not my first name. He had never called me by my first name when he was being careful with me. He used it only when he was already halfway out the door. I did not touch it. I poured coffee into the same chipped mug I had used since graduate school, the one with the hairline c***k down the side that I refused to replace, and I stood at the counter while the rest of the house held its breath. The bay was white with fog, the kind that burned off by nine in the morning in Sand Harbor, and the gulls were fighting over something on the seawall. I could hear them through the open window because I had opened it at five, the way I always did when I could not sleep. The letter sat there through my first cup. Through my second. Through the phone call from my lawyer, who wanted to know if I had signed the last page of the trust amendment and whether Bennett had signed his. I said I had. I said he had. I said nothing about the envelope. "You sound strange," Elaine said on the other end. "Are you sick?" "I'm fine," I said. "Rain check on lunch. I have to be at the foundation at ten." "You always have to be at the foundation at ten." "That is the nature of a foundation." She laughed and hung up, and I set the phone face down on the counter and looked at the envelope again. The stamp was old. One of the commemorative ones his mother used to buy in sheets and leave in the drawer of the upstairs desk. He had been here. He had come into this house while I was asleep or while I was running the seawall path and left this on my table, and he had not knocked. That was a violation and a confession at the same time. Bennett did not knock on doors he believed belonged to him. I did not open it. Instead I stacked the unread mail on top of it, the electric bill, a catalog from a nursery, a card from my aunt in Sacramento, and I carried the whole pile to the drawer by the phone and slid it shut. Then I got dressed, brushed my teeth, put on the gray blazer that made me look like the person the board expected me to be, and drove to the harbor district with the radio off. At a red light on Cannery Row I cried for one full minute. Not for him. For the house. For the way the downstairs hallway smelled like lemon oil on Sundays, for the sound of my grandmother's rings clicking against the banister when she came down for breakfast, for the fact that a vote would be taken in three weeks and there was nothing left in the trust documents to stop it. Then the light changed and I wiped my face with the back of my wrist and drove on. The foundation occupied the second floor of a brick building that had once been a cannery office. The windows were tall and salt-scoured, and from my desk I could see the fishing boats coming in with their nets heavy and their decks crowded with men who did not care that a family could be erased by a piece of paper. Marta had already put the agenda on my chair. Two new grant applications from the maritime school. A letter from the county about the pier inspection. A memo from the board chair, Greer Whitlock, that said, in effect, that he wanted to move the vote up. I read it twice and then called his office. "Greer," I said. "Three weeks was the date we agreed on." "The date was never firm, Vivienne." "It is firm when I write it into the minutes." He made a sound that was almost a laugh. "Your grandmother's minutes were always firm. That is half the reason we are here." "That is not half the reason for anything." "Come to dinner Thursday," he said. "Bring whoever you are bringing these days. We can talk like adults." "I will not be available Thursday." "You will be available eventually. Everyone is available eventually." He hung up first. He always did. That was his only real power, and he used it the way a smaller animal uses teeth. I sat at my desk and did my work. I approved the pier letter, I reviewed the two grants, I answered a dozen emails from donors who wanted their names on a wing or a scholarship or a brass plaque, and at four o'clock I drove to the house on Harborview Lane that my grandmother had designed herself, with a porch and a widow's walk and a garden she had planted with her own hands when she was twenty-six and newly married and certain the world was long. Bennett's car was not in the driveway. I had known it would not be. I parked anyway and went inside and stood in the front hall and listened to the house the way you listen to a person after an argument, for the small sounds that mean they are still alive. The house was alive. It was not well. The roof line on the north side had begun to sag, a thing the inspector had flagged twice and the trust had ignored twice, and there was a damp smell in the dining room that no amount of open windows could cure. My grandmother had left it to the family trust with a codicil that said the property could be sold only with a unanimous vote of the trustees. There were five trustees. Three of them were Whitlocks. One of them was Bennett. One of them was me. At the beginning, when we were still married, I had thought the codicil was a gift. A safeguard. Even after the separation I had thought so. I had believed that Bennett would never vote against the house, because he had loved it once, or because I had loved it, or because some part of him still wanted to be the kind of man who would not take a thing from someone he had promised to keep. That belief had lasted until spring. In April a developer had approached the trust with an offer for the land. In May Bennett had stopped returning my calls. In June he had filed the paperwork that put the sale on the agenda, and the paperwork had been prepared by Greer's firm, which meant the three Whitlock votes were already gone and only Bennett's was left to decide whether the house stood or fell. And now there was a letter on my kitchen table. I sat on the bottom step of the staircase and looked up at the landing, at the photograph that hung there, my grandmother at forty with her hair pinned and her hand on the railing, and I said out loud, because no one was there to hear it, "I am not going to let them take you." The house did not answer. Houses do not answer. But I felt the words settle somewhere behind my ribs, and I knew I meant them, and I knew that meaning them was not the same as being able to do anything about it. That night I came home and made soup and ate it standing at the counter, and when I turned to rinse the bowl my eye caught the drawer by the phone, closed, ordinary, holding the letter I had not read. I looked at it for a long moment. Then I went upstairs and slept, and I did not dream, and in the morning I made coffee and stood at the table and put my hand on the envelope, and I still did not open it. I put it in my bag instead and took it to work, because I did not want it in the house.