The Don's Wife Has Thirty Days to Disappear · Nadia Voss

Chapter 1: Thirty Days

They put my husband in the ground on a Thursday, and by four that afternoon his brother had set a plane ticket on the desk in front of me and told me how long I had.

I want to be exact about the day, because every day after it was measured against it. Thursday, the nineteenth of November. Rain that couldn't decide to be sleet.

Day one.

Nobody called it that. I started counting on my own, that night, on the back of the itinerary, and I have not stopped counting since.

* * *

There were sixty-one cars at Holy Rood.

I counted them from the second row of the tent while a priest who had never met Milos said his name with the accent on the wrong part of it. Sixty-one, plus the hearse, plus two county cars parked up on Delphi with their engines running and nobody pretending otherwise.

The tent held about forty chairs. I was in the front row, on the aisle, which is where the wife sits.

I want to be fair about that. They gave me the chair. Nobody moved me.

It was everything around the chair.

At the funeral home the program said Milos Andrija Danek, 1981–, and under the family flowers it said from the Danek family, and my name was not in it. Not a slight anyone would say out loud. Just a card printed by somebody who made a decision about who the family was.

At the graveside, when the priest finished, Emil Sarno stepped forward and took Rade's elbow, and then took his mother's elbow, and walked them to the first car.

I stood in the wet grass in shoes I'd bought for a wedding in Cleveland four years ago and waited for somebody to take my elbow.

Zoran drove me. Third car.

He is a decent man. He held the door and he said, "Ma'am."

Six years I had been in that family, and every one of them had called me Mrs. Danek, in the kitchen, on the phone, at the gate, in front of their wives.

Ma'am.

* * *

The house on Ardmore filled up by two.

Seventy-some people, most of them men, all of them eating off the trays Vida had been cooking since Monday. The rugs were rolled back. Somebody had put an ashtray on the piano.

I went into my own kitchen to see about the coffee and Vida put her hand flat on the counter between us, not unkindly, and said, "It's handled, Alma."

Not Mrs. Danek. Not ma'am, either.

Alma. Twenty years she'd worked in that house and she had never once used my first name in it.

Then the doorbell went and I turned toward the hall out of six years of habit, and Sarno was already there, already opening it, already saying who's this, already saying come in.

I stood in the hall with a coffee pot in my hand and understood that I had nothing left to do in that house.

* * *

At three I went upstairs and called Cranmore, because Thursday is Ivy's day, and I had missed it.

My sister is twenty-two. Two years ago in January her heart stopped for nineteen minutes on the floor of a rental on Kestrel Street, and the part of her that answered to her name did not come back with the rest of her.

She's awake. That's the thing people don't understand. Her eyes go to the window when a truck goes by. She's just not in there in any way that answers.

Cranmore House keeps her clean and turned and fed through a tube in her stomach, and it costs eleven thousand four hundred dollars a month, and I had never once in two years seen that money leave anywhere. It went out of an account I wasn't on, as a vendor line, from a company I didn't work for.

Denise picked up on the fourth ring. She's the charge nurse on the two-to-ten.

"I know, honey," she said. "You go on and bury your husband. She's fine. I did her hair."

"French braid or the one side?"

"One side. She likes it better."

She doesn't like anything. We both said it anyway, every week, because it's the last thing that was ever true about her.

"Alma. I'm sorry about your husband."

"Thank you."

"Sunday?"

"Sunday," I said.

That was the last easy sentence anybody said to me for a month.

* * *

Rade came for me at ten to four.

He knocked on the door of my own bedroom, which was correct of him, and he waited until I said come in, which was also correct, and that is the thing about Radomir Danek that nobody who hasn't sat across from him understands.

He does everything correctly. He is never once rude to you. And then the thing happens anyway.

He's thirty-nine. Smaller than Milos was, and quieter, and grey coming in on the left side only, which used to make me think of a man who slept on one side of a bed.

"Come down to the study," he said.

* * *

The study was Milos's.

Rade was sitting in Milos's chair when I got there, which took him about ninety seconds to arrange, and he'd poured two glasses out of Milos's decanter and put one on the far side of the desk. For me.

He'd never poured me a drink in six years.

"Sit down, Alma."

I sat.

"I want to say three things," he said, "and then I want to give you something, and then we're going to be finished with this part."

"All right."

"You don't go out to the yard on Nine Mile. Not for anything. Not to pick up his coat."

"All right."

"You don't talk to anybody who worked for my brother. Not the drivers, not Vida, not the office. If they call you, you hang up, and it's not personal, and you don't have to be nice about it."

I said all right again. That's the part I go over.

Twice by then I had said all right to a man in my own house, in my husband's chair, four hours after the burial, and I hadn't asked a single question.

"And you don't put our name on any paper after today," Rade said. "Not a form, not a lease, not a bank card. Nothing that says Danek."

"That's my name."

He looked at me for a second longer than he needed to.

"It's on loan," he said.

* * *

Then he took an envelope out of his inside pocket and put it on the desk and turned it around with two fingers so it faced me.

It wasn't sealed.

Inside was one sheet of paper, printed off a screen, and a boarding document folded in thirds.

One passenger. One way. Coach.

TEAGUE/ALMA M. Departing the eighteenth of December, six fifteen in the morning, connecting through Newark, terminating Porto, Portugal.

Seat 31C.

I read it twice. I remember thinking, very clearly and very stupidly, I don't know anyone in Portugal.

"That's thirty days," Rade said.

"Thirty days."

"The eighteenth is thirty days from today, near enough. I had them count it." He turned his glass a quarter turn on the desk. "I'd like you on that plane."

"And if I'm not?"

That's the only brave thing I said the whole day, and I said it in the voice I use for the gas company.

Rade didn't answer it. He drank about a third of his drink and set it down and looked at the wall over my shoulder, at the picture of the barge terminal that Milos loved and I hated.

"On the nineteenth," he said, "you're not a problem anymore. One way or the other. I don't want to be involved in which."

Then he got up, and put his hand on my shoulder on the way past, twice, the way you'd do to a person you were sorry for.

The door clicked.

I sat in my husband's study with a drink I didn't touch and a plane ticket in front of me, and here is what I did.

I said thank you.

Out loud. To the empty room. Because he'd handed it to me politely and my mouth went where it always goes.

* * *

I went upstairs at eleven, after the last car, and I sat on the edge of the bathtub with the itinerary because it was the only room with a lock in it.

I read the whole thing that time. All of it, down through the fare rules and the baggage table and the small grey print at the bottom, because I have always been the one in my family who reads the bottom of the page.

There was a line down there under the record locator.

TICKET ISSUED: 06 NOV.

I put my thumb over it and took my thumb off it and it still said the sixth.

My husband died on the fifteenth of November.

Somebody had bought me a one-way ticket out of the country nine days before there was any reason to.