Nora sat on the floor of the back room with the letters fanned out around her like a losing hand of cards, and the baby monitor on her belt hissed and crackled, and somewhere downstairs the furnace kicked on with a long, tired groan.
She waited up for him that night.
He came in at seven-forty, smelling of sawdust and cold air, and he saw the letters stacked on the kitchen table, and he stopped in the doorway with his keys still in his hand. She watched his face go through several things very quickly. Surprise. Fear. Something that was almost relief. And then, settling over all of them like a tarp over a woodpile, anger.
"You went through my desk."
"I was looking for her birth certificate. Daniel, sit down."
"You had no right—"
"Sit down."
He sat. He put his keys on the table very carefully, as though they might go off.
"Talk to me," she said.
It came out in pieces, the way such things always come out. The Lakeside job, the big one, the one that was supposed to carry them through the winter: a whole-house restoration on a lake-view Victorian for a couple from the Twin Cities who had paid the first draw, and then the second, and then stopped paying, and then sued, claiming the work was defective, and kept suing, because they had more money for lawyers than he did. He had laid off two of his guys. The Congdon porch had fallen through. The church on Fourth had paid late, and not enough. He had been paying his remaining crew out of the mortgage money. He had told himself he would catch up in December. Then Tessa had gone into the hospital, and then it was January, and the medical bills started coming too, the deductibles and the out-of-network charges and the residential program, which insurance covered only partly and which he had put on a credit card because he could not bear to be the man who pulled his wife out of treatment for money.
"I didn't tell anybody," he said. "I couldn't. My mother thinks the business is fine. Erik thinks it's fine. Everybody at church thinks it's fine. I've got a guy at the lumber yard who asks me every week how it's going and I tell him busy, so busy, can't keep up." He laughed without any humor. "I'm thirty-seven years old and I've been lying to the guy at the lumber yard."
"What about Tessa?"
He looked at her then, and his eyes were red. "Tessa's name is on the loan," he said. "If it forecloses, it's on her credit for seven years. She's in there trying to—she's trying to get well, Nora. You want me to call her up on Sunday and say, by the way, honey, we're losing the house, and also you're getting sued, more or less, and also your credit's shot? You want that to be the thing that sends her back to the hospital?"