The Don's Wife Has Thirty Days to Disappear
by Nadia Voss
On the day of his funeral, my husband's brother handed me a one-way ticket and thirty days to use it. He didn't choose the number — he read it off the court order that holds my sister.
They buried my husband on a Thursday, and by four that afternoon his brother had set a one-way ticket on the desk in front of me. Coach. Seat 31C. Departing the eighteenth of December at six fifteen in the morning. Thirty days. Nobody threatened me. Nobody has laid a hand on me yet — that is not how it is done in this family. They cancel the card at eight in the morning. They inventory the house you slept in for six years and put your wedding ring in a plastic bag with a paper tag on it, and they hold the door for you eleven times while they do it. The man who has worked that gate for eleven years stops saying your name. I cannot leave. My sister has been in a bed out on Delphi Road for two years and she cannot fly, and the court order that made me her conservator says thirty consecutive days outside this county and I lose her — and the successor named on page fourteen is the man who bought me the ticket. He did not pick thirty. He read it. There are twelve days left. And I have just found out my husband bought that ticket himself, nine days before he died, and that the booking had two passengers on it. Somebody cancelled his seat the night before he was killed. Somebody updated mine this morning at 7:41.
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