Chapter 17 — The Terms

The divorce terms, once the shouting was over and the lawyers took charge, were straightforward, because the facts were straightforward, and clean facts make for clean divorces.

We put the suburban house up for sale and split the net equity according to the title as it had always legally stood: sixty percent to me, forty to Jason.

He could not afford to buy out my sixty percent share, and so he could not keep the house, and he was forced to move into a modest two-bedroom rental apartment near his dealership — a place with beige carpet and a small kitchen, the kind of apartment a single man on a real income actually affords, once there is no longer a wife quietly covering the gap between his lifestyle and his means.

And Evelyn was forced, for the first time in many years, to face her own arithmetic.

Without Jason’s inflated subsidies — the dinners, the gifts, the little envelopes of cash he had been passing to his mother for years — she could no longer afford the social routine she had built her identity around, and she had to cut her spending drastically and publicly, which for a woman like Evelyn was its own particular circle of suffering.