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

Chapter 3: Schedule B

They came for the house on Monday, which was day five, and they were so polite about it that it took me until the afternoon to understand I was being put out.

Two men and a lawyer and a printed inventory in a black binder. Nobody raised their voice. Nobody carried anything roughly. One of them held the door for me eleven separate times.

I keep trying to explain this part to people and it doesn't land. There was no scene. That was the whole horror of it. A scene would have meant there was something to argue with.

* * *

Howard Pell came at nine with his coat still on.

"Alma." He took both my hands, which he has done since my wedding. "I hate this. I want you to know I hate this."

"Hate what, Howard."

He let go of my hands.

The binder came out of a canvas bag and went on the kitchen island, and he turned it around to face me the way Rade had turned the envelope, and I have thought since that they both learned it from the same man.

The house on Ardmore is titled to Danek Reclamation Holdings. It has been since 2009, six years before I ever set foot in it. The contents are on the company's insurance schedule because that is how you insure contents in a house that is on a commercial policy.

"So it's an asset," Pell said. "And the estate's in probate, and until there's an inventory nobody's allowed to move an asset. Including me. Including Rade."

"I'm not an asset."

"No," he said. "You're a resident."

Then he opened to a tab that said SCHEDULE B and turned the binder around one more inch.

* * *

Schedule B was forty-one pages.

Everything in that house had a line and a line had a number. The piano. The rugs that had been rolled back for the funeral. The kettle. The good pans, the ones I bought myself at an outlet in Toledo and hauled home in the back of a car, listed as cookware, assorted, kitchen with a 2016 appraisal on it.

I was permitted my clothing. I was permitted personal effects not appearing on Schedule B.

I stood at that island and read forty-one pages the way I read the bottom of the ticket, and I found, on page nineteen, under jewelry, insured:

Ring, ladies, platinum, 1.9ct round brilliant, four claw. App. 2016. $34,000.

"Howard."

"I know."

"It's my wedding ring."

"I know what it is." He wouldn't look up from the binder. "It's insured on the company policy, Alma. He put it on the policy the month he bought it. He did that to protect it."

There is a small plastic bag with a paper tag and a wire tie, and there is a way the tag rattles inside the bag, and I did not know either of those things before that Monday.

I put it in myself. Nobody asked me to hurry.

* * *

At two o'clock one of the men, the older one, asked if I would like help with the closet, and I said no, and he waited in the hall for four hours anyway with his hands folded in front of him, because his job was to be in the hall.

I filled two suitcases and three boxes.

Clothes. A shoebox of my mother's papers. Ivy's yearbook, junior year, which she is in twice, once for chorus and once for a picture of the parking lot where she is in the corner of it laughing at something out of frame.

I took the white jar of lotion out of my bag and put it back in. It was mine. I'd bought it Friday with the twenty-two dollars in my coat and it was the only thing in that house I could prove.

* * *

The apartment is on Kestrel Street, over the laundromat, second floor, two rooms and a bathroom with a window painted shut.

Company-owned. They own eight or nine like it around the yards for men who need somewhere for a while.

Pell called it interim. He used that word four times on the drive over, as if repetition would make it a place with a lease.

I want to put down what happened in my chest when we turned onto Kestrel, because it happened before I had any thoughts about it.

Ivy went down on the floor of a rental on Kestrel Street. Number 1120, ground floor, back unit, on the ninth of January two years ago, and I was the one who found her, and I have not driven down that street since.

The building they gave me is 1104.

Eight doors up. Same side.

I asked Pell, in the car, in a completely normal voice, who picked it.

"Facilities," he said. "It's whatever's empty, hon."

Maybe that's true. I have decided not to decide about it. But I noticed that he answered fast, and Howard Pell has never once in his life answered anything fast.

* * *

At the door the older man gave me a receipt for the inventory and a pen.

Two hundred and sixteen items surrendered, one set of keys surrendered, one vehicle surrendered — the car was on the schedule too, of course it was — and a line at the bottom for the resident's signature.

I put the pen down on the paper and my hand started to make the D.

Six years. You sign your name four thousand times in six years. It is the most automatic thing a body does.

You don't put our name on any paper after today.

I lifted the pen and I wrote Alma M. Teague, and it looked like a stranger's handwriting, and the man read it and folded the yellow copy and gave it to me and said, "Ma'am," and went down the stairs.

Day five. Twenty-five days left.

* * *

Tuesday I walked to the courthouse annex on Ninth because I no longer had a car.

It is forty minutes on foot from Kestrel and I got there at 8:50 and stood in a line under a sign about firearms and I was the youngest person in it by twenty years.

Here is what I went for.

If I had to leave — and by Tuesday I had already stopped saying if in my head, I want to be honest about that, by Tuesday I was pricing it — then Ivy came with me. That was the whole of my plan. It was not a plan. It was a sentence I kept saying.

And to move my sister across a state line I needed the order. The order that made me her conservator, filed when she was twenty and I was twenty-six and Milos paid a lawyer eight thousand dollars to make it go quickly because I couldn't sign a single thing for her without it.

I had never read it.

That is the sentence I would take back. Two years of signing consent forms and care plans on the authority of a piece of paper I had held for about ninety seconds in a hallway.

The clerk's name was Roberta. Certified copies, nine dollars, twenty-two pages, and she asked me if I wanted them in an envelope and I said yes and it was fifty cents more.

Two hundred and two dollars and fifty cents left.

* * *

I didn't read it Tuesday. I want to be honest about that too.

I got back to Kestrel at one in the afternoon and the laundromat vents into the stairwell, so the whole building smells like other people's clean towels, and I lay on a bare mattress in a room with a painted-shut window and I slept until Wednesday morning like something switched off.

Day seven. I read it at the kitchen table with the envelope torn along the top.

It's twenty-two pages and most of it is nothing. Findings. Recitals. Language about the ward.

Paragraph 9 is Duties and Restrictions of the Conservator, and 9(c) is four lines long.

The Conservator shall maintain her principal residence within the County. The Conservator shall not absent herself from the jurisdiction for a period exceeding thirty (30) consecutive days without prior leave of this Court. Failure shall constitute grounds for removal upon the Court's own motion.

Thirty.

I read it maybe nine times. I said it out loud in a room over a laundromat.

Rade hadn't picked thirty days. Rade hadn't sat down with a calendar and been generous or cruel about a number.

Thirty had been lying in a filing cabinet on Ninth Street for two years, waiting, and all he had done was buy a ticket that landed on it.

Get on that plane and I am out of the county. Out of the county past thirty days and the court takes my sister off me on its own motion, which means nobody even has to file anything, which means nobody's name is on it.

I turned to paragraph 14.

In the event of the removal, resignation, incapacity or death of the Conservator, the following shall serve as Successor Conservator of the Person and Estate of the ward, without further bond:

And then a name, typed, in a box, in the same font as the rest of it, sitting there for two years like a nail in a board.

RADOMIR P. DANEK.

I sat very still for a while.

Then I went back to the front, to the caption page, because there was something I'd read past at eight in the morning without it going in.

ORDER APPOINTING CONSERVATOR — AS AMENDED.

Amended. Stamped and dated the eleventh of September.

Eleven weeks ago. My husband had been alive on the eleventh of September. He'd been alive and downstairs and complaining about the barge schedule.

I turned to the last page for the signature block.

There were three names under the judge's.

I knew all three of them.