“Here’s what I’d like,” I said. “An even split of the marital assets, exactly as they stood on the day he filed. The house, which I’ve now paid off with my own money, stays mine. He can have credit for half the equity we had in it on that Monday. The truck and the bass boat, he keeps. The retirement account, we split right down the middle.”
I picked the plate back up.
“And the lottery ticket was bought with my money, in my name, and signed by me. It’s mine alone.”
“That seems, well, I can certainly advise my client that it’s reasonable.”
“I’m sure you can.”
“May I ask, Mrs. Dunn? Why are you being so generous?”
I thought about it.
Out the kitchen window, my tomatoes were glowing red in the late afternoon sun.
“Because just once,” I said, “I’d like to be the one who was fair.”
It took four months.
The final decree came down in November. A plain stack of papers in a manila envelope from the Ottawa County courthouse.
Gary got half of what we’d had together. Which was a lot less than he’d imagined.
And nothing of what he’d tried to take.
He moved into a little one-bedroom apartment over a hardware store in Tulsa.
Denise, I’m told, lasted three weeks.
He called me once. In January.
I almost didn’t pick up.
I was in the kitchen with a pot of chili on the stove. A woman named Dolores Fenwick was sitting at my kitchen table. A retired nurse from our church. In the months since all of it, she’d become my closest friend.
My phone buzzed on the counter.
Gary.
“Go on,” Dolores said. “Take it.”
So I did.
“Patty.”
“Hello, Gary.”
A long, uneven breath on the other end of the line.
His voice was different. Smaller. Scraped raw.
“I want to say something,” he said. “I don’t expect you to listen.”
“I’m listening.”
“I’m sorry.”
I leaned back against the kitchen counter.
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.