Part Six: The Kitchen
She sat at my kitchen table — the table where I had made tea on the night of the knock, where the boys had eaten breakfast every morning for twelve years, where Hugo did his homework and where Luc had once, at age nine, conducted what he called a scientific experiment involving vinegar and baking soda that had required significant cleaning — and she looked around the kitchen with the assessing quality she had brought to the house and the garden.
The lawyer had remained outside. His choice, or hers; it was a choice that was meant to communicate something about the conversation’s nature, and I noted it.
“Transfer 51% of the company to me,” she said.
She said it the way she had said I’m not made for this life of poverty twelve years ago — in the practical tone of someone stating the terms of a transaction. No preamble. No pretense that this was about the boys, which the custody papers nominally were. The custody papers were the instrument; this was the point.
“In exchange,” she continued, “I’ll withdraw the filing. You keep the boys. We don’t need to involve a judge.”
I looked at her. I thought about Théo, who had loved this woman and who had not had the opportunity to stop loving her. I thought about two small boys in blue pajamas on a doorstep. I thought about twelve years of school lunches and school plays and ear infections at three in the morning and the first time Hugo read a whole book by himself and the time Luc broke his arm at the summer camp and I drove four hours each way and sat with him through the setting and drove home with him asleep in the back seat. I thought about the tea business, which had grown from a card table and a handwritten sign because I needed to pay for school uniforms.
“No,” I said.
She looked at me for a moment. Then: “I’ll take them, Claudette. You’re seventy. A judge will see it my way.”
“We’ll let the judge decide,” I said.
She stood up. She straightened her jacket. She walked to the door, and the quality of her walk told me she believed this was the opening of a negotiation that she expected to eventually conclude in her favor.
I sat at the kitchen table and made tea.
Then I called my lawyer.
