Chapter 8 - The Price of a Name
Six weeks after the decree was stamped in Room 204, the temperature in Columbus dropped to fourteen degrees. A dry, bitter wind blew down from Canada, scouring the cornfields along Route 315 and freezing the slush in the gutters into ridges of gray, jagged ice that cracked like bones under the wheels of the city buses.
Grant Bennett sat in the passenger seat of his mother’s sedan, parked three hundred feet from the driveway of the house on Elmwood.
The house was dark.
A plywood sheet had been nailed over the lower half of the sunroom door where the glass had been broken in October, and a real estate sign was frozen into the lawn at a forty-five-degree angle, its white vinyl post splattered with dried mud from the street sweepers. The sign had a red sticker across the top that read PRICE REDUCED - MOTIVATED SELLER.
"The bank called again this morning, Grant," Carol said from behind the steering wheel. She had lost nine pounds since September; her beige knit suit hung loosely from her narrow shoulders, and the pearls around her neck looked too heavy for the thin, crepey skin of her throat. "They won't extend the bridge loan past December fifteenth. If the house doesn't close by then, they’re going to list it as a short sale on the courthouse steps."
"I know, Mom," Grant said. His voice was hoarse. He had spent the last three weeks working the night shift at an auto parts warehouse in Grove City—the only place that didn't run a background check that included the pending civil judgments from Arthur Sterling’s unpaid legal bills.
"Your father’s pension only covers the facility in Dublin," Carol continued, her fingers tapping a frantic, irregular rhythm on the padded steering wheel. "The physical therapy alone is twelve hundred a week. And the club... we had to resign our membership on Tuesday, Grant. After thirty-four years. Mrs. Henderson looked right through me in the grocery store yesterday. Right through me, as if I were a woman who cleaned the bathrooms."
Grant looked at the upstairs window—the one with the small triangular transom where Ellie’s room had been.
He remembered the day they moved in. It had been eighty-five degrees, the humidity so thick the paint wouldn't dry on the window frames. Nora had carried Maddie in a cloth sling against her ribs while she carried two five-gallon buckets of drywall compound up those narrow, turning stairs because he had thrown his back out trying to lift the cast-iron radiator onto the porch.
Keep the girls, Nora. There’s a son on the way.
The words came back to him every night around three in the morning, when the warehouse conveyors shut down for the thirty-minute maintenance sweep and the only sound was the cold wind rattling the corrugated metal siding of the loading dock.
He had said them like a man tossing an old pair of work boots into the trunk of a car.
He hadn't even looked at Maddie’s shoes. He didn't know what size she wore. When the state child support enforcement agency had sent the verification form to his condo three weeks ago, there was a box that asked for the children's primary care physician, their school district, and their current shoe sizes for the winter clothing allowance calculation.
He had left all three boxes blank. He had sat at his kitchen table with a blue ballpoint pen in his hand for twenty minutes, trying to remember if Maddie was in preschool or if she was still going to that woman on Maple who had the daycare in her basement.
"Grant," Carol said, her voice rising into that familiar, grating whine that made his jaw ache. "Did you call the investigator?"
"The investigator said the same thing Brenda Vance said, Mom," Grant replied without looking at her. "They’re in Ireland. They’re legal. Nora has full legal custody. She doesn't have to provide an address. She doesn't have to provide a phone number. All I have is the account number for the state disbursement unit where the forty percent gets deducted from my check every Friday."
"Forty percent?" Carol gasped, her hand flying to her pearls. "They can't take forty percent! That’s usury! You have living expenses! You have your car payment!"
"They took the car on Monday, Mom," Grant said softly. "The repo guy was waiting by the dumpster when I came off the four-to-midnight shift. The German sedan is gone. I’m driving April’s old Civic with the rusted fender."
"April is an ungrateful child," Carol spat out, her eyes narrowing as she glared at the dark windows of the Elmwood house. "She hasn't been to see your father since the operation. She spends all her time at that animal shelter in Delaware, cleaning cages for minimum wage like a common laborer. She could have asked the Vance family for a loan, you know. Marcus Vance has money. He’s Kenneth’s nephew. He has plenty of money."
Grant turned his head slowly, looking at his mother’s profile—the sharp, narrow nose, the thin lips that were painted with an old, dried layer of coral lipstick that had settled into the vertical cracks around her mouth.
"Marcus Vance is the father, Mom," Grant said.
Carol didn't flinch. She didn't look at him. She stared straight ahead through the frosted windshield at the PRICE REDUCED sign.
"I don't care who the father is," she whispered, her voice cold as the ice in the gutter. "Arthur Bennett was our name. It was the only name that mattered in this county for fifty years. And now... now people are saying that Richard Bennett’s son is working in a warehouse and his grandchildren are living like gypsies in an Irish bog."
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"They’re not gypsies, Mom," Grant said. He reached for the door handle of the sedan, his hand trembling slightly in the unheated air. "They’re Nora’s girls. They were always Nora’s girls. I just didn't notice until she took them away."
He stepped out into the bitter wind. He didn't wait for his mother to turn the car around. He pulled his thin jacket tight across his chest, tucked his chin into his collar, and began walking the four miles back to his sister’s condo through the gathering dark.
