Chapter 3: The House on Cedar Street

I didn’t sleep that night.

Jim slept in our bed.

I slept in the guest room with the quilt my mother had made.

At four in the morning, I got up and opened the dresser drawer where we kept old documents.

There were mortgage papers.

Tax records.

Insurance policies.

Receipts from the farm equipment we had purchased together.

And photographs.

Forty-one years of photographs.

Jim and me standing in front of the farmhouse when we first bought it.

Our wedding picture.

Our three children as babies.

A family vacation at the lake.

Jim holding our youngest daughter on his shoulders.

I stared at the photograph for a long time.

Then I thought about Tully.

A little boy with my husband’s chin.

I thought about the eleven-year-old girl whose profile I had been too afraid to open.

I wondered whether she had Jim’s eyes.

Whether she laughed like him.

Whether he had taught her to ride a bicycle.

Whether he had attended her school events.

Whether he had ever held her hand when she was frightened.

And I wondered how many times he had stood in our kitchen telling me he was going to the lodge when he was actually going to Cedar Street.

The rental house.

The house my mother-in-law had owned for thirty years.

The house Jim and I had painted blue one summer when our children were small.

I remembered him holding the ladder while I painted the porch.

“Somebody’ll need a little place like this someday,” he had said.

Apparently, he had known exactly who would.

At seven o’clock, I called the lawyer.

“It’s Muriel,” I said.

“Good morning,” she replied. “How are you holding up?”

I looked at the farmhouse window.

“I’m not sure.”

She told me to bring every financial document I could find.

She told me not to confront Jim again until we had reviewed our assets.

She told me not to move money without legal guidance.

And then she said something that made me feel a little less helpless.

“Muriel, you don’t have to decide the rest of your life today. You only have to protect yourself today.”

I wrote that sentence down.

Then I called my sister.

She arrived an hour later with coffee and a bag of groceries.

She found me sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by paperwork.

“You look terrible,” she said.

“Thank you.”

She sat down.

“Are you going to leave him?”

I stared at the documents.

“I don’t know.”

She reached across the table.

“Whatever you decide, don’t let him make you feel like you’re the one who ruined this family.”

I nodded.

Then I began crying.

Because that was exactly what I was afraid he would do.

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