Chapter 14 of 18Somebody Had To

The clerk stamped the complaint at 8:41 on a Wednesday morning, and twenty-four years of marriage became a case number. Margaret Ackerman read the number off the certified copy the way she read a vendor invoice, once for the digits and once for the sense of them, and by the time she looked up, the deputy clerk was back with the order.

Two pages. Neither spouse was to sell, transfer, mortgage, encumber, hide or spend down any marital asset while the case was pending. Behind the complaint sat a schedule Margo had typed at her father's kitchen table: $13,550 out of the operating account since August; $6,200 and $1,100 and $2,500 in the week Roy took her off the signature card; eleven acres on Miller Pike; a closing set for the last business day of the year.

All of it went under the order at once. She had not moved a dollar of it herself.

The butterscotch dish was on the client side of Diane's desk.

"You know what you did this morning," Diane said.

"I filed."

"You froze him. Every account he has been walking money out of since August is inside a court order this morning, and none of that is because a judge likes you."

"Then why did he sign it?"

"Because your husband cannot stop handing people paper." Diane capped the pen. "It cuts both ways. You are under it too."

"I have not moved a dollar since the first of October."

"Keep it that way."

"And if he moves one anyway?"

"Then he tells a judge, in writing, that he read the order and moved the money anyway. Roy is good with people. He is not good with paper."

Margo pulled her gloves on. "Well."

"He will be served today or tomorrow. It will be a deputy, and it will be in front of somebody. That part is not mine to arrange."

"That part is the shop," Margo said. "I have payroll."

Miller Pike ran northeast out of town, 2.4 miles to the gravel, and the wind came down it out of the north. Eighteen degrees at half past nine and still falling. She had the heat on her feet and the fan on the seat beside her, which was the whole joke of fifty-one.

Nick's truck was not in the yard. Five of six, then. Inside, the phone on the front desk was already ringing, the parts radio was on, and Gil Ostrowski had a coffee going that had been poured before daylight.

At 10:20 a Calder County cruiser came up the gravel and parked between the parts door and Roy's truck. A young deputy got out with his hat under his arm and came in with his boots knocking on the mat.

"I'm looking for Roy Ackerman."

The packing slip went down on the counter. "He's out at the hose reel."

Gil went and came back with Roy in his coat, and the three of them stood under the Cardinal sign while the phone rang behind them.

"Roy Ackerman."

"That's me."

The deputy held out a legal-size envelope. "You have been served."

Roy looked at the envelope the way a man looks at a bill he has already paid. "With what."

"Complaint for divorce. And a restraining order that goes with it."

Nothing moved in the room except the phone. Roy opened the envelope at the counter with his gloves still on and read the first page, then the second. Gil studied the parts shelves.

"This is a mistake," Roy said.

"It's not a mistake. It's a service." The deputy set a receipt form on the counter. "Sign the bottom and I'll get out of your morning."

Roy signed. The cruiser went back down the gravel, and Roy stood there until the sound of it was gone, then walked past Gil into the front office.

The phone rang. He did not look at it. Neither did she.

"You filed."

"The clerk's open Wednesdays."

"Cute." He squared the papers on the corner of the desk with two fingers. "Real cute, Marg."

"It's Wednesday, Roy. You have four trucks out and a no-heat at the grade school. That's the day it got filed."

"Do you have any idea what this does?"

"I have a rough idea. I do the books."

He took his hand off the papers.

"The bank," he said. "In October. That was you."

"Was it?"

"Don't." He said it flat. "Don't sit there and do that."

"I'm not doing anything. I'm sitting at my desk."

"You have got nothing with your name on it," he said. "Nothing. No paycheck. No title. No deed —"

"Then why are you standing in my office?"

He looked at her half a beat past what the sentence needed. Twenty-four years, and she had never heard him raise his voice. He did not now. That was worse. He picked up the papers and went out through the parts room, and the truck started in the yard.

Gil set a coffee on her desk at noon without being asked. "Number four has a bad inducer. Nick's got it out on Twenty-Five A."

"Tell him to eat something."

"I tell him every day."

Cold like that, the phone never stopped. By four she had written nine work orders and answered eleven calls about pilot lights. Nick's truck came back at 6:40, and he walked in with grease to the wrist and asked where his dad was, and she said she did not know, which was true that time.

The three miles to Sixth Street took her seven minutes. Her father's house was cold in the corners no matter what the furnace did, and the furnace was his own work; the receipt was still taped inside the door. She heated a can of Skyline, $2.79 at Kroger, and ate it standing at the counter.

At 8:40 Deb knocked, walked in without waiting, and set a Kroger bag down.

"You look like you filed something."

"I did."

"Good for you." Deb hung her coat on their father's chair. "Chili was on sale. Two seventy-nine a can. I bought four."

"Does Nick know?"

"Nobody knows. It's on the record now, which is different." Deb looked at the accordion file. "You going to tell your son before your mother-in-law hears it from the church?"

"When it's mine to tell."

Deb went home at five past nine. At ten after nine the phone lit with Roy's name, and Margo let it ring twice before she picked it up and said nothing.

"You're not at the house," he said.

"No."

"Since Sunday, then." She did not help him with it.

"How long have you been keeping books on me."

She could hear him doing the arithmetic on his end — the complaint, and the schedule behind it, and the amounts in an order only two people alive could have put there.

"How long have you been handing me things to write down?"

The line went quiet. Behind him she could hear the shop radio, which meant he was sitting in that office on Miller Pike with the lights on.

"This is actually going to hurt you more than me, Marg."

"Well," she said, and hung up.

She set the phone face-down on the table. He knew now. Twenty-four years he had signed whatever she put in front of him, and tonight he had gone down the complaint line by line to the one fact she had never put anywhere he could find: his wife, who kept his books, had been keeping a second set on him since the first week of October.

The certified copy of the order lay on the table with the case number across the top. Anybody in Calder County could walk into that clerk's office and ask for it.

She turned out the kitchen light. Somebody had to keep the books.