On the eighth day, Jake signed the apartment lease himself. Susan refused to live there. She called it punishment, although the rooms were bright and the rent was within their combined income.
“Then choose somewhere else,” he said.
“With what money?”
“The money we earn.”
She stared at him as though he had changed the terms of their marriage.
Perhaps he had finally understood them.
Susan left that weekend with her clothes, her kitchen knives, and the conviction that everyone had betrayed her. Her parents rented a small accessible flat across town. They let her stay in their second bedroom while she made arrangements, but her father kept the lease in his own name.
The separation became permanent before winter.
Jake told Betty about it without asking her to comfort him.
“I kept blaming Susan because she said the things out loud,” he admitted. “But I liked getting what she asked for.”
They were packing books at the dining table. Betty stopped with a paperback in her hand.
“Yes,” she said.
He nodded, tears running quietly down his face.
She let them.
On Betty’s final night in the house, Jake came to collect the last of his boxes. Most of the furniture was gone. Without curtains, the front room carried every footstep twice.
The rocking chair remained beside the window.
Jake stood in front of it.
“I thought keeping quiet meant I wasn’t being cruel.”
Betty folded a piece of packing paper.
“You were quiet because cruelty was making your life easier.”
He sat on the floor, leaving the chair for her.
“I don’t know how to make that right.”
“You can’t make that afternoon unhappen.”
“I know.”
“You can decide what happens the next time someone needs you to speak.”
He nodded.
She sat, and the runners made their familiar soft complaint against the floor.
After a while, Jake asked whether he could tell her something without it becoming an excuse.
She waited.
“I was ashamed we were still living here. Every time you paid for something, I felt smaller. Instead of changing my life, I started acting like you were the reason I didn’t have one.”
Betty looked toward the bare rectangle where a family photograph had hung.
“You could have told me you were ashamed.”
“I didn’t want you disappointed in me.”
“I would rather have had an embarrassed son than an absent one standing three feet away.”
He covered his face.
Betty did not reach down immediately. When she finally touched his shoulder, it was because she wanted to, and she removed her hand when she was ready.
The next morning, the movers wrapped the rocking chair.
Betty stood on the porch while Jake checked the empty rooms. He returned carrying a single teaspoon from the back of a kitchen drawer.
She laughed unexpectedly.
“I wondered where that went.”
