I turned seventy-four in March, and my daughter-in-law sent a card that said "Thinking of you during this difficult time," like I'd been diagnosed with something. I wasn't sick. I was divorced. There's a difference, though nobody in Cedar Falls, Iowa, seemed to want to learn it.
Forty-one years I was married to Walt Brennan. Forty-one years of folding his undershirts a particular way, of not buying the good coffee because he said it was a waste of money, of asking permission with my eyebrows before I spoke at dinner parties. Then he left me for a hygienist from his dentist's office, a woman younger than our son, and everyone in my Presbyterian choir looked at me like I was the one who'd done something shameful.
For about a year I let them look at me that way. I wore the same three cardigans on rotation. I went to the Hy-Vee at 7 a.m. so I wouldn't run into anyone who knew me, wouldn't have to watch their faces arrange themselves into that particular pity. My son Danny called every Sunday at six and asked if I was "doing okay," in the voice you use for someone standing near a ledge.
Then last spring I drove myself to the Coral Ridge Mall in Coralville, alone, for no reason except that I wanted to, and I found a blouse with peonies printed all over it, a size too fitted for what I usually bought, forty-eight dollars. I stood in the fluorescent light of the dressing room and looked at a version of myself I hadn't seen in decades. Not because it was flattering. Because it looked like it belonged to a woman who still had opinions.
I bought it. I wore it to the grocery store on a Tuesday for absolutely no occasion, and Carol Anders from two doors down stopped her cart and said, "Well, don't you look like you're up to something." I told her I was up to buying myself a rotisserie chicken and minding my own business, and I smiled the whole way to the checkout.
That was the beginning of it, though I didn't call it anything at the time. I started doing small things purely because I wanted to. I bought the good coffee — Kalona SuperNatural, six dollars a bag, organic, from the dairy an hour south — and made a full pot just for myself on a Wednesday morning, and drank it slow at the kitchen table while the radiator ticked and the cat, Mabel, sat in the one patch of sun on the linoleum like she owned the deed to the house.
Danny didn't like any of it. He came by in June, still in his work polo from the John Deere dealership, and stood in my kitchen looking at the peonies blouse hanging on the back of a chair like it was evidence of something.
"Mom. You seem different."
"I am different."
"Different how? Are you—" He stopped himself, started again. "Dad says you're spending a lot."
That was the sentence that did it. Not the divorce papers, not the hygienist, not the year of cardigans. It was Walt, gone eighteen months, still somehow getting a report on my checking account through our son like he had shares in me.
"Your father," I said, "doesn't get a statement on my life anymore."
Danny didn't understand, and I didn't expect him to right away. What he didn't know — what nobody in that family knew, because Walt had made sure of it for four decades — was that there had been a joint investment account since 1987, seventy-three thousand dollars sitting mostly untouched, money my mother left me when she passed, money Walt had folded into "our" accounts and quietly treated as his to manage, his to decide when I could "afford" a new coat or a trip to see my sister in Tucson.
I called a lawyer in Iowa City in July. Her name was Priya Raghunathan, third floor of a building on Clinton Street with a parking meter that ate quarters like it was starving. I brought every statement I could find in a cardboard banker's box that used to hold Walt's tax documents. Priya went through eleven years of records with a yellow legal pad and told me, flatly, that the account had never been touched without both signatures, that it was mine as much as his, and that the divorce decree — which Walt's own lawyer had rushed me to sign quickly, "to keep things simple" — had somehow left that account off the schedule of assets entirely.
"Simple for who," Priya said, not really asking.
It took three months and a motion to reopen the financial disclosure. In October, I sat in a beige conference room in the Johnson County courthouse and watched Walt's face when the judge asked him, plainly, why a seventy-three-thousand-dollar account funded by my late mother's estate wasn't listed anywhere in the original filing. He didn't have a good answer. Nobody ever does when the answer is "because I assumed she wouldn't check."
I split the account fifty-fifty with the court's approval, though by rights and by law it should have gone entirely to me — I settled for half because Priya said the appeal would cost more in time than it was worth, and because, honestly, I wanted it finished before Thanksgiving. Thirty-six thousand dollars landed in an account with my name only on it, first week of November, the same week the maples on Dubuque Street finally let go of their leaves all at once.
Walt called me on a Sunday, the way Danny used to. I let it ring twice and answered anyway.
"You didn't have to make this so public," he said. Meaning the courthouse. Meaning Priya. Meaning the fact that people at the dealership had started asking Danny questions.
"I didn't make it public. I made it mine."
He didn't have anything to say to that, and for once, neither did I feel the need to fill the silence with an apology I didn't owe him.
I used four thousand of it on a trip to see my sister Ruthann in Tucson that December, first-class seat both ways, something I'd never once let myself book in forty-one years of flying coach beside a man who complained about legroom he refused to pay extra for. I bought myself a leopard-print scarf at a shop on Fourth Avenue that the saleswoman, maybe thirty, told me was "a statement piece," and I told her that at seventy-four, everything I wear is a statement, I've just started making better ones.
Carol Anders still watches me from her porch some mornings when I walk to the mailbox in my peonies blouse and my sunglasses, cloudy Iowa sky or not. I don't explain the blouse to her anymore. I don't explain the coffee, or the trips, or the thirty-six thousand dollars sitting quietly in an account that has exactly one name on it.
Danny came around eventually — slower than I'd have liked, but he came. Last month he sat at my kitchen table, drank a cup of the good coffee without complaint, and said, "You look happy, Mom," like it surprised him to say it out loud.
"I am," I told him, and poured him a second cup because I felt like it, not because anyone was waiting on me to.
