Part Six: Moving Out
At the end of four weeks, her doctor cleared her to go home.
The cast came off. She graduated to a walking boot. She could manage stairs if she took them slowly, one at a time, holding the railing.
Lisa, her oldest, finally offered to drive her home. Now that she didn’t need any help.
On the morning she left, Elora hugged me in my front hallway.
She held on tight. Tighter than I’d ever been hugged by her. Her chin was on my shoulder, and I could feel her shaking.
“You have no idea,” she said into my ear, “what this means to me.”
I smiled. I thought she was simply grateful.
“Anytime, Elora,” I said. “You know that.”
She pulled back and held my face in both her hands. Her eyes were wet.
“You’re a good woman, Mara,” she said. “You always were. Better than any of us deserved.”
Then she kissed Ivy on the top of her head, and she walked out to Lisa’s car in her walking boot, carrying the big canvas tote bag she’d never let me touch.
Lisa didn’t get out of the car. She waved through the windshield. She didn’t look at me.
They drove away.
Part Seven: Patricia’s Shoebox
That afternoon, shortly after Elora left, my doorbell rang.
It was Patricia.
She was standing on my front porch holding an old shoebox. Brown cardboard. Nike, size eleven men’s. The corners were soft and bent. Somebody had wrapped it around twice with a rubber band.
Her face looked strange. Nervous. Pale.
“Mara,” she said. “I’m sorry. But there’s something you need to know about Elora.”
She held out the shoebox.
“And I think you need to see this,” she said.
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
Patricia looked over her shoulder at the street. Like someone might be watching.
Then she lowered her voice.
“She never wanted you to know the real reason she came to stay with you,” Patricia said.
I stared at her.
“She’d planned it all along,” Patricia said.
Part Eight: The Real Reason
I let her in.
We sat at my kitchen table. The same table where Elora had cried five years ago and said I’m ashamed of what my son did to you.
Patricia set the shoebox between us. She didn’t open it.
“Before you look inside,” she said, “I need to tell you how I know her.”
“How do you know her?” I asked. “I didn’t even know you two had met.”
Patricia folded her hands on the table.
“I worked thirty years at Hartwell, Simmons and Ruiz,” she said. “Downtown. On Monroe Avenue. I was a paralegal in family law.”
I nodded. I knew that.
“Five years ago,” Patricia said, “I worked on a divorce. A man named Shane Whitaker. My firm represented him.”
I sat very still.
“You worked on my divorce?” I said. “For Shane’s side?”
“I did,” Patricia said quietly. “I didn’t know you then. I didn’t move in next door to you by any plan. I’d lived here three years before your divorce. I only figured out who you were when I saw the name on the file.”
She looked at her hands.
“I never said anything,” she said. “It would have been a breach of confidentiality. And it wasn’t my place.”
“So what does this have to do with Elora?” I asked.
Patricia took a breath.
“In August,” she said, “Elora Whitaker came to see me. Here. At my house. She knocked on my door.”
“She’d found out I worked on the divorce,” Patricia said. “From an old letter in Shane’s files. She asked me if I remembered the financial disclosures. The paperwork Shane filed with the court.”
I didn’t understand.
“Financial disclosures?”
“In a divorce,” Patricia said, “both people have to list everything they own. Bank accounts. Retirement accounts. Business assets. Everything. Under oath.”
She looked at me.
“Do you remember what Shane listed?”
I thought back. Five years. Sitting in a lawyer’s office I could barely afford, signing papers I didn’t understand.
“He said the landscaping business was barely making money,” I said. “He said he had about four thousand dollars in savings. He said his truck and equipment were all financed. So there wasn’t anything to split except the house.”
“And what happened with the house?” Patricia asked.
“I kept it,” I said. “He let me keep it. I had to refinance in my own name and take on the whole mortgage. He said he was being generous.”
I swallowed.
“I’ve been working extra shifts for five years to pay for it,” I said. “And he pays three hundred dollars a month in child support. Because his income was so low.”
Patricia was quiet for a long moment.
Then she reached over and slid the rubber band off the shoebox.
“Elora found out he lied,” she said. “About all of it.”
Part Nine: What Was in the Box
I lifted the lid.
The shoebox was full of papers. Bank statements. Folded, yellowed, some of them with coffee stains. Old envelopes from Lake Michigan Credit Union. Printouts. A few photographs.
On top was a single sheet of lined notebook paper, folded in half.
On the outside, in Elora’s shaky cursive, it said: Mara. Please read this first.
I unfolded it.
Mara,
I’m sorry I lied to you. About why I came to stay. About why I kept asking when you’d be out. About Patricia.
I did break my leg. That part was true. But my children didn’t refuse to take me in, not the way I told you. I never asked them. I wanted to stay with you.
Because I needed to get into your attic.
I stopped reading. I looked up at Patricia.
“My attic?” I said.
Patricia nodded.
I kept reading.
When you and Shane were married, he kept a gray metal filing cabinet in his office. The room I’ve been sleeping in. When he moved out, he left it behind. He told me later he’d been in too much of a hurry.
You put it in the attic. I remember you mentioning it once, at the bakery. You said you couldn’t bring yourself to throw it away because it might have Ivy’s medical records in it.
It didn’t have Ivy’s medical records. It had Shane’s.
His real ones.
I put the letter down.
My hands were shaking.
“Patricia,” I said. “What did she find?”
Patricia reached into the shoebox. She pulled out a stack of bank statements. Held together with a paper clip.
She set them in front of me.
Lake Michigan Credit Union. Account Holder: Kenneth A. Whitaker.
“Kenny,” I said. “Shane’s brother.”
“Shane’s younger brother,” Patricia said. “Look at the deposits.”
I looked.
Six months before Shane and I separated, deposits started appearing in Kenny’s account. Big ones. Ten thousand dollars. Fifteen thousand. Twenty.
Every one of them came from the same place. Transfer from: Whitaker Lawn & Landscape LLC.
Shane’s business.
I flipped through the pages.
The deposits kept coming. Through the separation. Through the divorce. Every month. Right up until two months after the divorce was final.
Then they stopped.
At the bottom of the last page, Elora had written a number in red pen. And circled it twice.
$146,000.
“He hid it,” I whispered.
“He hid it,” Patricia said. “He moved money out of his business and into his brother’s name before he filed for divorce. So it wouldn’t show up on his financial disclosures.”
She tapped the paper.
“Then he swore under oath that he had four thousand dollars in savings,” she said. “And a business barely breaking even.”
I looked at the next page in the stack.
A printout. A real estate record. Kent County Register of Deeds. A property on Lake Bella Vista, north of Rockford. Purchased two years after our divorce.
Buyers: Shane M. Whitaker and Kayla R. Whitaker.
Purchase price: $389,000.
Down payment: $140,000.
Source of funds: Gift from Kenneth A. Whitaker, brother.
The lake house.
The one Shane said wasn’t set up for his mother with a broken leg.
Bought with the money he’d hidden from me.
The money that should have been split. Half of it mine.
Half of it Ivy’s.
