Mack tore open the envelope and withdrew the papers inside. At the top of the first sheet, it read
Commonwealth of Massachusetts
The Trial Court
Probate and Family Court Department
COMPLAINT FOR DIVORCE
Under that was the line Mack knew was coming, but still made him want to smash his fist down on his desk and break something.
Samantha Zamyatin-Roarke, Plaintiff, v. Malcolm Peter Roarke, Defendant
Since when is she Zamyatin-Roarke?
“Tough break, man,” Rob said. “I’ll give you the number of the guy who did my brother’s, if you want it. He’s good. Saved him from getting taken to the—”
“Robert,” Beth scolded. “Leave him alone.”
Mack looked up from the paper and said, “Thanks, Rob, but I’m not getting a divorce.”
Rob smirked and said, “Looks like you are, pal.” Mack’s stare made him back away from the desk, holding up his hands. “Whatever you say.”
Beth leaned in closer. “I am so sorry. That girl never appreciated you, Mack. You deserve better than her.” She turned and walked away, dragging Rob along with her before Mack could retort.
He read the paper again, scanning over each line where Samantha’s assertions had been typed. He paused in the middle of the page at a paragraph marked Item 5.
On several occasions during the parties’ marriage, the defendant at Ripton, Massachusetts, engaged in acts of adultery as part of an ongoing sexual relationship with Siobhan McKinley, a friend of the plaintiff. The defendant has also been cruel and abusive to the plaintiff on numerous other dates and occasions.
Yes, he’d slept with Siobhan, but she’d seduced him, not the other way around. He’d fucked her because she was begging for it and was sticking her tits and ass out every time she saw him, and he was a man, god damn it. What did Sam expect? She’d gained weight after they got married, so if his eye wandered a little, it wasn’t like she was without blame. When she wasn’t in a classroom, Sam was either in the car looking for yard sales or sitting in the basement all weekend painting the junk furniture she bought and snacking. She barely stood up, let alone did any exercise. She spent her days either on her ass or her knees. Siobhan, on the other hand, was a ServiceFit instructor. She was fit as hell and always wore those yoga pants. She called them leggings, but they were tights. The way she wore them, they were a single step away from nothing at all. And she came to him wanting some attention. She talked to him. Laughed at his jokes and understood his frustrations. Siobhan got him.
He was only human.
So, he’d fucked her. He’d counted on her friendship with Sam being important enough to keep their secret. But she was a crazy bitch, and she must have ratted him out to his wife, burning both of them.
From across the office, Mack heard Rob whisper to Gerry, “I can’t believe she had him served at work.”
Mack leapt out of his chair and threw the first thing he could reach at Rob. The stapler bounced off the wall next to Rob’s head, and he barked in surprise. Mack screamed, “I am not getting a divorce!” He tried to shove his desk out of the way. It screeched a half foot across the tile floor and stopped. He banged his thighs into it, bounced off, and shouted, “FUCK! YOU!” at the object. He pushed around the table and stormed toward the door. Gerry broke away from the wall with his arms held out.
“Mack. Calm down. It’ll be okay. Take the rest of the day, and—”
“Keep your fucking hands off of me,” he shouted as he shoved Gerry out of the way.
The supervisor staggered and fell over a rolling chair, landing on his back. Rob and Beth ran to help him. Gerry sat up, brushing away his co-workers’ hands, his face bright red. “Take the day off, Roarke. Go home and use the time to write your fucking resignation letter.”
“Fire me, you chickenshit.” Mack stormed out of the office, slamming the low gate behind him. Rob and Beth watched him go, mouths agape.
The crumpled divorce complaint and summons remained on his desk where he’d thrown them.
41
FOUR MONTHS BEFORE DAY ZERO
The clerk stamped the form with a red seal below the judge’s signature. She took the papers over to a photocopier and made duplicates. When she returned to the bar separating her work area from the public, she slid the photocopies under the gap in the bulletproof plastic shield between them. Mack had to strain to hear what she said to him as he took the papers from the tray.
“These are your copies of the abuse prevention order and the notice regarding the same. Read the notice carefully. It will explain what you need to know. This is a final order, by the way, and is in force for a year, as the judge already told you. During that time, you are not to have any contact with the plaintiff whatsoever. You may not contact her in any way personally or through someone else, unless authorized by the court. You must remain away from the plaintiff’s residence and her workplace, even if she’s not there. While this is a civil order, failure to conform to these conditions is a criminal offense and will result in your arrest and prosecution.” Her brow furrowed as she glanced at her paperwork. She looked up at him and said, “I remind you that if you have any firearms, you need to surrender them to the police along with your FID card, immediately.”
“I already told you people, my gun was . . . stolen.”
The woman stared at him, her face screwed up with displeasure but not surprise, as if she’d heard that same line many times before. Perhaps she had. It didn’t change the fact that he was telling the truth. His entire experience at the court had been one of swimming upstream against the tide of the presumption against him. The judge barely looked up from the bench when he tried to defend himself in the hearing. When she did, it was to announce that unless Ms. Zamyatin—the divorce wasn’t even final and she was calling Sam by her maiden name—had anything to say, she was going to extend the restraining order for an entire year. Mack wanted to shout that it wasn’t right, but he knew better than to raise his voice in court. Especially in front of a lady judge. He looked around the courtroom and saw the female clerk, stenographer, and even a lady sheriff’s deputy. These bitches are all looking out for each other. This whole thing is a setup from soup to nuts.
The clerk behind the glass partition brought him back to the present. “You need to discuss the status of your firearms with the police. If you haven’t surrendered them, you’re in violation of the order.”
He rolled his eyes. “Fine.” He hadn’t spoken to the police and had no intention to, now or later. He wasn’t supposed to have a gun, and he didn’t. So what was the point of talking? He could tell the truth, that his soon-to-be-ex-wife took it, and cops would still be cops. All of them, from the judge to the court clerk and the bailiffs, were automatically on her side. He had to work to prove himself innocent every step of the way. If he told them she had it and didn’t have a license for it, they’d probably just think he was lying to retaliate and get her in trouble and then he’d end up in an even worse situation. No. He couldn’t see an upside to saying anything at all. Let her get busted with his piece and no license. Knowing her, she probably threw it away or gave it to her father or something. He thought about dropping by the old man’s place to ask about it, but the guy had never liked him. Last thing he needed was to get popped for trespassing. Or worse, a violation of this order if she happened to be visiting him. Which brought up another thing.
He pointed to the no contact provision of the order. “How am I supposed to talk to her about selling the house when—”
“Sir, you have the forms. If you have any questions about them, you need to consult with your attorney. I can’t advise you.”
“But you just went through . . .”
The woman turned away from the glass, leaving Mack standing at the window, staring at her. She seemed unaffected by his gaze as she took her seat at a desk in the middle of the office.
He looked at the heavy bolts holding the thick shield in place. To the right o
f the window was a solid door with a sturdy-looking metal keypad above the knob. He’d seen a couple of people enter through it while he was waiting for the clerk to process his paperwork. They were careful to both block the code from view when they entered it and to linger in the threshold, pulling the door shut behind them before moving on. They were cautious. But they couldn’t stay behind a barrier all the time. They all drove to work, and there wasn’t a fuckin’ bulletproof shield in the parking lot.
He took another good look at the woman. She was talking on the phone and smiling. The bitch didn’t care that she’d just delivered the written form of his railroad job.
All in on it together.
Out in the hallway, he paused to read the papers in his hands. They weren’t any different than ones he’d received when this whole thing got started, except for the dates, and that this one was marked Final instead of Temporary. Everything else was the same bullshit lies and exaggerations concocted by Sam and her new boyfriend to punish him.
Boyfriend. That didn’t take long.
He suspected that she’d been seeing him before they split. That would fit. While Mack slept with her friend, that didn’t mean anything. He always came home to his wife. He didn’t love Siobhan. Sam was the one who was unfaithful. She’d lost faith. And filing for cause was another way of hurting him when she could have gone with a no-fault divorce and not dragged his name through shit.
He considered balling up the papers and throwing them away, but there wasn’t a trash can he could see in the courthouse hallway. It was as if they were afraid that people angry about being abused and picked apart by bitch judges might start a fire or hide a bomb in one. An image of a trash can exploding and forcing the employees to come streaming out from behind their locked doors and protective glass walls flashed in his mind. He watched their gossamer shades run through the hallways in a panic while he calmly walked behind them, the weight in his hand kicking as he—
A woman stepped into the hall with her lawyer and gasped, snapping him out of his fantasy. He looked around to see what had startled her. There was no one in the hall but the three of them and another couple of empty suits way over by the staircase. And she wasn’t reacting to them.
Can’t be me. I was just thinking.
It dawned on him that he’d begun scowling, his lips pulling away from his teeth while he was lost in his fantasy. He tried to find a suitably neutral expression for a setting as austere as the Middlesex County Probate and Family Court. His face didn’t feel like it was cooperating, though. He tried smiling; the muscles around his mouth and eyes twitched. Her look went from concern to fear, which made him feel just fine. The woman’s attorney grabbed her by the elbow and led her away. She tottered ahead of him on high heels that clacked on the marble floors. Another slut. Mack watched them go, wondering where the sucker they’d just screwed over was. Somewhere in the building was a guy just like him, standing with a restraining order in one hand and his dick in the other.
This whole place was making him feel less stable; he was sinking in quicksand. He needed a beer. It’d help settle both his stomach and his nerves. He remembered seeing a bar around the corner; it had some stupid generic name the hipster faggots liked, like Pub or Drinks. He’d passed it on his walk from the parking lot to the courthouse. He tried to gather his composure a little more and walked out the door to find a place to sit for a while and have a couple before he headed home to a house full of half-empty boxes he needed to finish packing. Sam’s fucking lawyer had gotten the judge to order that he agree to sell the house if he couldn’t buy her out. Of course he couldn’t afford to do that. She’d made the down payment from her trust fund, and he didn’t have some rich grandfather who’d left him a bundle like she did. They hadn’t owned it long enough to have any equity to split—not with all the money they’d borrowed to finance the remodel. She wouldn’t agree to a payment plan either, so they had to make . . . What had the lawyer called it? “A quick and equitable distribution of property.” There was nothing “equitable” about it, he thought. She was getting paid money she didn’t earn, and he was getting screwed out of a house he’d invested years of sweat and labor in.
He walked around the block, stomping through the dingy rain puddles pooling in the uneven sidewalks and found the place right where he remembered seeing it. The sign swinging in the breeze outside of the pub read THE BAR. Beside the name of the place was painted a white wig sitting on a table next to a mug of beer. He got it now. The Bar. He thought of Daffy Duck. Ha ha. It is to laugh.
He stepped inside and immediately regretted it. Everyone inside except him and the staff was wearing a suit. It was a liquor oasis for lawyers working the courthouse. It was early, and the place wasn’t busy, but still it was clear who was welcome and who wasn’t. He wanted a drink, though, and he wasn’t going to go pay to get his car out of the garage to find another watering hole. Not when there was a perfectly good row of bar stools and taps right there.
He took a seat at the bar. The bartender approached him and asked if he wanted a lunch menu. “No. Just a drink.”
“What can I get you?” she asked.
He shook off his coat and draped it over the stool next to him. “ ’Gansett.”
“Which one? We have the Temple Sticke Altbier and the lager.”
“What the hell is a sticky alt beer?”
“Gotcha,” she said, and walked off to pour his drink. A couple of women in suits in the corner were looking at him and appeared to be holding back laughter. He tried to ignore them and checked his phone for e-mails. He’d had to silence it when he went into the hearing and had forgotten about it until he was sitting there with nothing else to do. His inbox was empty. Sam was constantly on her cell, checking in with her social media garbage. He had a smartphone so he could look things up on Google and get e-mails from work while he was out on the job. And since he’d been fired, he didn’t have work e-mails anymore. When he got home, it went on the table by the sofa, and he didn’t look at it again until morning unless someone called. No one ever called. The kind of time she wasted on her phone was staggering. She’d sit through an entire ball game, never once looking up at the television, playing some game or typing with someone on Fakebook. Instead of talking to him or even just reading a damn magazine, she had long conversations with people she’d never actually stood in a room with and wouldn’t ever meet, living a fantasy life while their marriage withered. Whether or not she realized it, she’d forced him to go looking for someone who would pay attention to him. Someone who really got him. And her “good friend” Siobhan had been there.
He downloaded the Facebook app onto his phone. While it installed, the bartender came back with his beer. She set it down and left without asking if he wanted anything else, which suited him just fine. After another minute, the app opened and he was prompted to log in. He clicked CREATE NEW ACCOUNT. It asked him for a name and a password. He entered his grandfather’s name, Jack DeLuca, and created a profile with a fake birthdate and hometown. He declined searching his contacts list for “friends,” and eventually was released from the setup and could go looking around. He touched the search bar at the top of the screen and entered Sam Roarke. No result. There were plenty of other Roarkes listed—his sister in New Hampshire and his asshole cousin in Boston at the top of the list—but no Sam. He tried again with the hyphenated last name she’d put on the original divorce complaint. Samantha Zamyatin came up in the results instead.
Shoulda known.
He clicked the link and started scrolling down his wife’s page. Pictures of the antique shit she restored were mixed with videos of his fucking dog, Maxim, and other cloyingly cute images with inspirational garbage typed on top of them.
TO BE BETTER THAN YOU’VE EVER BEEN
YOU HAVE TO DO SOMETHING YOU’VE NEVER DONE
He held down his gorge and scrolled to the pictures she’d posted of their home restoration and the fire pit that he’d risked heat stroke to build last summer so she could use
it when the weather got chilly. She made exactly two fires in the goddamned thing before it was “too cold to sit out.” He’d said, “I thought that was the point of a fire pit.” She didn’t argue. She just typed something into her phone and ignored him. He hated the way she did that and felt angry sitting there in the Bar just thinking about it. She always dismissed what he said like he was a stupid child.
The women in the corner laughed again, and he looked up from his phone at them. He caught them looking and they turned away quickly, one of them holding a hand up to her face like a blinder, as if blocking her view of him meant he couldn’t see her. They chittered again like loud insects rubbing their legs together, looking for a male to decapitate and consume.
He went back to the top of Sam’s page and clicked on the link for her pictures. There was one of her and the skinny guy she’d run off with. The guy’s name was under the picture. James. Not Jim or Jimmy. He touched it and the screen changed to the man’s feed. And right there at the top was a selfie of him and Sam at Walden Pond. Fucking Walden Pond. Like she ever read a book, let alone that one. Mack hadn’t read it either, but he figured her cuck boyfriend, James, probably had. He had his arm around her, and her head rested on his shoulder in the picture. They were smiling like they were on their honeymoon. Faggot, he thought. He clicked the word ABOUT on the page and looked at the guy’s profile. He lived in Worcester. He taught at a fancy private school. An Academy.
He wouldn’t be hard to track down.
The bartender came back and asked if he wanted another beer. She looked impatient. Mack hadn’t realized that his glass was empty. He’d drunk it on autopilot. He looked at his watch. Almost an hour had passed without him noticing, and the bar was starting to get busier with the lunch crowd. He smiled and said he’d like to settle up. She left a slip on the bar and walked off without another word. Eight bucks for a ’Gansett. Fucking rip-off. He pulled out his wallet and dug out a ten. The bartender took it and came back a minute later with two singles. She dropped his change on the bar, expecting him to get up and leave it there. He pocketed it. She was pretty, but stuck up. No smile for him meant no tip for her. Another bitch.
Closing Costs Page 19