Chapter 5 - The Geography of the Trap
The house on Mill Street in Cedarburg was three miles from the woolen mill, tucked behind a screen of weeping willows that dipped their yellowing leaves into the brown water of the creek.
I knew the house.
We had stopped there two years ago during the wine festival. Kayla had stood on the stone bridge with a paper cup of Riesling, pointing at the green shutters and the Dutch door with its brass knocker shaped like a fox's head.
"That’s where you go when you’re done with the world," she had said that afternoon, her shoulder leaning against mine while Ryan waited in line for the bratwurst. "A woman could sit on that stone porch with three cats and never have to listen to a man explain a spreadsheet again."
Now, sitting in Diane’s kitchen while the sun went down behind the silo, the memory felt like a photographic plate that had been left in the acid too long, the faces dissolving into dark, silver-grey stains.
Ryan was sitting in the corner by the mudroom door, his elbows on his knees, his face buried in his hands. He hadn't spoken since Diane had read the lease receipt. The bluster had evaporated, leaving behind that sullen, petulant exhaustion that had characterized him at seventeen when he had failed his driver’s test twice for refusing to look in the rearview mirror before backing out of the stall.
"Who else knows?" Diane asked him.
He didn't move.
"Ryan," she said, her voice dropping an octave into that dry, terrifying gravel. "I am asking you a direct question. Does Mark know?"
"Mark’s in Chicago," he mumbled through his fingers. "He doesn't care. They’ve been sleeping in separate rooms since March. He told her if she wasn't out of the apartment by Thanksgiving, he was changing the locks."
"So you were her rescue," I said.
He lifted his head. His eyes were red-rimmed, the skin beneath them dark and pouchy in the fluorescent light.
"You don't understand," he said, his voice flat, dead, devoid of even the pretense of shame. "You haven't understood for two years, Hannah. Everything in our house is about the baby. The temperature of the nursery. The organic wool for the mattress. The classes where they teach you how to breathe like a dog while four other couples watch. I was becoming an extra in my own life."
"You bought a forty-foot fifth-wheel trailer in April, Ryan," I said. "You spent twelve thousand dollars on an outboard motor you’ve used twice. You have never been an extra in any room you’ve ever walked into."
"It wasn't about the things!" he shouted, his hands clenching into fists against his thighs. "It was about... she listened to me. When I told her about the pressure at the plant—about the fact that the German parent company is looking at the margins in Waukesha and thinking about moving the whole assembly line to Monterrey—she didn't tell me to take an antacid and go to sleep. She sat with me on the porch. She knew what it was like to be terrified that you aren't enough."
"And so you gave her my father’s money," I said.
"I was going to pay it back!"
"With what?" Diane asked.
He looked at his mother, his mouth working silently, like a carp in a dry bucket.
"With what, Ryan?" she repeated. "You have thirty-two thousand dollars on the home equity line. You have eleven thousand on the Visa you took out through the credit union in June—the one you told me was for the new furnace, which I happen to know was installed under warranty by the builder."
She picked up the wallet from the table, took out the driver’s license, and dropped the leather into the trash can beside the sink.
"You are a liar," Diane said. "You were born a liar, and your father was too soft to beat it out of you when you were small enough to learn the lesson. But you are not going to leave this girl with an empty account and an eighty-acre debt on her head."
She turned to me.
"Call Melissa."
"Why?"
"Because Melissa has the wagon. And Melissa’s husband has the key to the warehouse where they keep the office records for the family trust."
"Mom," Ryan said, standing up, his hands out, his face suddenly white. "You don't need to involve Uncle Arthur’s people. We can handle this internally. We can settle the bond transfer tomorrow morning at the bank. I’ll sign the re-assignment. I’ll surrender the lease on Mill Street."
Diane walked over to the kitchen desk—the small, cherry drop-leaf table where she kept the address book and the church offering envelopes. She picked up the black telephone handset with its long, coiled cord.
She didn't look at the book. She dialed seven digits from memory—the digits of the house on the lake where Arthur Vance had lived since nineteen-seventy-one.
"Arthur?" she said into the receiver. Her voice was as calm and sweet as if she were asking after his gout. "It’s Diane. I need you to put on your boots and come down to the house."
She listened for four seconds.
"No," she said. "Not a medical emergency. A business emergency. My son has stolen ninety thousand dollars from his daughter’s trust, and I need you to bring the deed for the Elm Grove property before he finds a way to forge my name on the mortgage."
She hung up the receiver with a clean, dry click.
May you like
She looked at Ryan.
"Sit down," she said. "The water is boiling for tea. We have forty minutes before Arthur gets here, and you are going to write down every dollar you have moved since the first of January, or you will spend the night in the county jail in West Bend."
