He Put My Name on the Divorce Papers Before the Funeral
by Ava Sterling
He signed the divorce papers the day before we buried our son, and named my negligence as the grounds. His lawyer handed them to me at the wake, between the lilies and the shrimp.
My son was seven years old. They buried him on a Thursday in June. His father signed the divorce papers on Wednesday. I found out at the wake, with two hundred people eating shrimp in my dining room, when my husband's attorney handed me a blue folder and asked me not to open it there. So I opened it there. Grounds for dissolution: the Respondent's persistent inattention to the health, supervision, and safety of the minor child. Adrian had put our son's death in a court filing as my fault, and had it notarized the day before we lowered him into the ground. By that night my clothes were in eleven boxes in the hallway, Sam's room had been stripped and painted, and I was sleeping forty feet from the pool where he drowned. Then the groundsman knocked with an equipment log, a detective showed me a text message I never sent, and a trust amendment dated three weeks before my son died handed everything to a four-year-old boy with my husband's cowlick. They have every lawyer in Providence and four hundred and twelve million dollars riding on six acres of my father's boatyard. I have a pill bottle out of the trash, a pair of blue sneakers, and one recorded phone call. They should have taken that call off the server.
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