Top List Best Cheating Wife Stories, Reddit Cheating Stories, Audio Book

Lady [music] Cheating Tales >> Marty Zaretsky kept a jar of butterscotch candies on his desk and a framed photo of a fishing boat he did not own. Jud Okonski had noticed both the first time they sat in that office on Harlem Avenue back in 2006 when the bungalow on North Neva cost $372,000 and everybody said Chicago real estate only went one direction. It had gone the other direction. By March of 2012, the house was worth maybe 265 on a good day and the only reason they were sitting with Marty again was a federal program with a name that sounded like a harp. HARP It let people who owed more than their houses were worth refinance anyway as long as they had paid on time and still lived there. They had paid on time and they still lived there. Marty slid the papers across one at a time and tapped the yellow flags. Initial here, both of you, and here. Owner-occupied primary residence. That's the one the lender cares about. Regina signed fast. She had always signed things fast. She used the good pen from her purse, not Marty's, and between pages she glanced at her phone and turned it over on her knee, then thought better of that and slid it into her coat pocket. "3.875," Jud said. "Only thing that's gone right since 2008." Marty laughed because that was his job. Regina didn't. "I have a 5:00," she said. "They're short a person for the banquet." "Last page," Marty said, and she signed it. And that was Tuesday. Thursday morning at 10:06, Jud backed the Calumet truck up to the dock behind Keeler's on Lincoln and found the back door already propped with a milk crate. He had serviced the place for 6 years. Keeler's on Lincoln and its sister tavern on Southport were two of the steadiest accounts on his route. Beef and fryer oil and cases of lemons, and the chef, a broad, quiet man named Tomas, usually had coffee going and something to complain about. Tomas signed the invoice without reading it. He did not look up. "You doing all right?" Jud said. "Fine." "Cooler holding? You said the gasket was going." "It's fine, man." Tomas handed back the clipboard and finally looked at him, and then looked away again at a point over Jud's shoulder. "Not my call, okay? Talk to your people." "Talk to my people about what?" But Tomas had already gone back inside, and the milk crate stayed where it was, holding the door open for nobody. Jud finished his first 11 stops with that sentence sitting in his chest. "Not my call." At a quarter to 1:00, he pulled into the yard at the Calumet warehouse in Bedford Park, a long gray box off West 65th Street that smelled like diesel and cold cardboard, and went upstairs to find Ron Pitzak. Ron had been district manager since November. He was 36 and married to the owner's daughter, and when the job came open, Jud had applied for it with 16 years and a sales record nobody in the building could touch. Ron got it anyway. Jud had shaken his hand in this same office and said congratulations, and gone home that night and not said much of anything to anybody for what turned out to be a long time. Ron was eating a sub at his desk. He wiped his hands before he spoke, which Jud took as a bad sign. "I was going to call you this afternoon," Ron said. "We're doing a little territory realignment. Keels on Lincoln and Keels on Southport go to Miles starting Monday." "Why?" "Realignment." "Ron, I've had those two for 6 They have never had one complaint, not one short case. I know. So, why? Ron looked down at the sub for a second. Keel corporate asked, specifically. They want somebody else on their north side stores. Asked for somebody else or asked for not me? Jud, which is it? It's the biggest independent account this company has, Ron said. 3.1 million a year. Keel corporate asked. I don't ask Keel why. Downstairs, Miles Sawinski was loading his own truck and saw Jud coming across the dock and knew. You could see it in how he put a case down too carefully. Miles was 33. Jud had trained him when he was a kid out of Northeastern who couldn't tell flank from skirt. And now Miles had a wife expecting in the fall and a route that was about to get two accounts heavier. "I didn't ask for them." Miles said. "I know you didn't." You want to get a beer later? I've got a 4:30 tomorrow. Yeah. Miles rubbed the back of his neck. Jud, I'll call you on anything. Thomas's gasket, all that. I'll tell them you said. Tell them whatever you want. They're yours. That came out harder than he meant it. Miles nodded like he had expected worse. Jud sat in the cab of his pickup in the Calumet lot for a while with the engine off. He took a napkin from the Dunkin bag on the passenger seat and a pen from the visor and did the math the way he did everything, slowly, carrying the ones. Two taverns, roughly what they ordered in a month and his commission on that. $1,100, give or take, every month. Gone because somebody in an office downtown had said his name in a certain way. He wrote 1,100 on the napkin and underlined it twice. Regina was home before him for once. She had flour on her forearm as usual and she was standing at the kitchen counter eating peanut butter off a spoon, which was her dinner on days when the hotel had worked her through lunch. She was the pastry sous chef at the Hotel Larchmont on North Michigan, which meant she clocked in at 4:30 every morning and made croissants for people who left most of them on the plate. She was good and always had been. She could laminate dough by feel in a hot kitchen, and for 9 years she had been talking about a place of her own. A small bakery, a counter, a case, a few tables. Her name nowhere on the sign because she thought that was tacky. Jud told her about Ron. He told it plainly. The realignment, Keel Corporate, the 1,100. She took a while to answer. She put the spoon in the sink and ran water over it. "Huh," she said. "That's it? Huh?" "What do you want me to say? It's a lousy thing." She dried her hands. "But honestly, Jud, maybe it's a sign." "A sign of what?" "That you've been on the same route for a hundred years. You could go after Ron's job again. Make some noise. You never make any noise." He stood there with his jacket still on and tried to figure out why that bothered him so much. It wasn't that she was wrong. It was how calm she was. When he lost the district manager job in November, she had been angrier than he was. She had called Ron a name he had never heard her use. Now somebody had taken money out of his pocket for no reason, and she was drying her hands and talking about signs. "I'm going to bed," she said. "I'm on at 4:30." "You're always on at 4:30." "So I'm always going to bed." She kissed his cheek on the way past, quick and dry, a relative at a funeral. Then she went down the hall to the guest room. She had been sleeping in the guest room since January, the 9th, a Monday. He remembered because the Bears were done and the house was quiet. She'd said it was his alarms. Northside days, he started around 5:00, but Tuesdays and Fridays he had early drops downtown and the alarm went off at 3:30 and she said she couldn't fall back asleep after it. "Your Tuesday and Friday 3:30's," she'd said. "I've got 4:30 every day. Something's got to give." It had sounded reasonable. A lot of things did that winter. He had moved his alarm clock to the dresser so he would have to get up to turn it off and she had stayed in the guest room anyway. He had not asked about it. That was the truth of it. He had come home from the November thing and gotten quiet and somewhere in the quiet he had stopped asking her things and she had stopped telling him and both of them had called it being tired. He thought about the night last June when he had brought her to Keel's on Southport. The tavern was having its 10th anniversary, a party on the patio with a band and a keg and the whole staff in black t-shirts. Diane Kostka, the general manager, had invited him because he'd been the Calumet guy forever and because she liked him. Jud had told Regina to bring a tray of her pastries, a thank you for Diane. Regina had baked half the night. Kouign amann, little almond things, a plum tart she cut into squares. Landen Keel had been there, the owner, 50-something, silver at the temples, in a pressed shirt with the sleeves turned back once. His wife had died the fall before and people at the party were careful with him in a way that made him look tired. He ate three of Regina's almond things standing at the tray and asked her where she worked and she told him and he said she was wasting herself on hotel banquets. Jud had been standing right there. He had said, "She wants her own place someday, Lincoln Square maybe." And then, because Landen Keel owned nine restaurants and knew everybody in the business, Jud had said, "You should pick his brain, Gina." He'd felt good about that driving home, like he'd done something for her. The next Monday, he stopped at Keel's on Southport on his regular route, and Diane met him at the back door with her arms folded. "Hey," he said, "I guess you heard. Miles is going to take you from now on." "I heard." "Do you know why?" Diane was 58 and had run kitchens since before Jud could drive. She had fed him soup on more cold mornings than he could count. She looked at him now like a delivery she hadn't ordered and didn't know how to send back. "Talk to Ron, hon," she said. "I did talk to Ron. Ron says Keel corporate asked." "Then that's what it is." "Diane, I've got a lunch to set." She went back inside. The door closed, and it locked, which it never did during deliveries. Miles bought him lunch that Friday at a Polish place on Belmont. He paid before Jud could reach for his wallet, which was how Jud knew Miles felt bad about something besides the accounts. "Diane asked about you," Miles said. "What she ask?" "If you were okay." Miles cut a pierogi in half and didn't eat it. "Kind of a weird way to ask, like you were sick." That night, Jud set both alarms out of habit, hers on the left nightstand and his on the dresser, before he remembered she was down the hall. He turned hers off again and put it in the drawer. Elliot Dudek got engaged in February to a fourth-grade teacher named Rhea Maloney, and the party was the third Saturday in April at her parents' house in Beverly, a big brick place on a street of big brick places with Irish flags on half the porches. Regina had insisted Jud come. "Rhea's whole family's going to be there," she said, standing in the bedroom doorway while he looked for a tie. Her uncles, her grandmother, I'm not walking in there by myself. I wasn't going to make you. Good. She watched him knot the tie wrong and didn't fix it, which a year ago she would have. Bozena Dudek was already in the Malone's living room when they arrived, sitting in the best chair with a plate of cheese on her knee. She was 66 and had buried Regina's father in 2009 and had not stopped wearing black on Sundays. She stood up and held Regina by both arms, then hugged her, then held her by the arms again. Then she nodded at Judd. Judd. Bozena, you look good. I look old. Go get a drink. He went and got a beer. He had always gotten along with Bozena, more or less. She had thought Regina married beneath her, but she had thought that about the whole world, and for 13 years she had tolerated him with the same patience she used on the parish council. Lately, since around March, she had gotten cooler. He had put it down to the cold weather and her knees. Elliot found him in the kitchen. Elliot was 34 and worked for the CTA as a rail electrician, and he had the same dark eyebrows as his sister and none of her drive. He leaned against the counter and said they had found a one-bedroom condo in Edgewater, near the lake, and the closing was set for the end of June. That's great, El. It's great if we come up with 10 grand. For what? Down payment. We're short. The rate lock runs out end of June, and if it goes, the payment goes up like 150 a month. Elliot picked at the label on his beer. Ria doesn't want her parents paying. It's a pride thing with her. Banks will do 3 and 1/2% down on FHA, won't they? Condo building's not approved for FHA. Some reserve thing. Elliot shrugged. Anyway, just saying, if you hear of $10,000 lying around, if I hear of it, I'm keeping it. Elliot laughed. Then he said, "Hey, with Gina's Bakery investor, maybe she can spot me." and laughed again and drank. Jud smiled because Elliot was smiling. Later he remembered that he had not asked what investor. Bozena brought it up herself an hour after that while Ria's grandmother was telling a long story about a priest. Bozena leaned toward Regina across the coffee table and said quietly but not quietly enough, "And how is your investor? He still very serious?" "Ma." Regina said. "I'm only asking." "It's a few people from the hotel." Regina said to the room in general. "A couple of the managers want to put a little money in. It's nothing yet." Ria's grandmother kept talking about the priest. Jud looked at his wife and she looked at her glass. Around 8:00, the house got hot and loud and Jud went out the kitchen door for air. The back porch had three wooden steps down to a yard with a swing set the Maloneys had never taken down. Regina and Ria were sitting on the top step with their shoes off, close together, talking low. Ria saw him first. She was 31 with freckles and a teacher's way of sitting up straight. And when she saw him, her face went bright and careful, the way a kid's does when you walk in on them right after they've broken something. "Jud, hi. We're hiding." "Me too." Regina didn't turn around. "We're talking about the dress." she said. "I'll go back in." he said. "No, stay." Ria said too fast. "We're done. Aren't we done?" "We're done." Regina said. She stood, picked up her shoes, and went inside past him. Ria followed, still smiling, not quite meeting his eyes. He stayed on the porch. The yard smelled like cut grass and somebody's charcoal two houses down. After a minute, his wife came back out with her phone already at her ear and walked past him down the steps toward the swing set and he heard her say, low and tired, "Not yet. Mom's not ready to meet anybody." Then she saw that he was still there and turned her back and walked farther into the yard. When she came back up the steps, she said, "Work." and went inside. They left at 10:00. Regina handed him the keys at the curb without a word. She'd had three glasses of wine and he'd nursed his second beer for an hour. He drove north on Western Avenue under the streetlights, past the car lots and the bars and the closed-up storefronts with for lease signs. Somewhere around 63rd Street, she went quiet. Around 47th, he looked over and saw she had fallen asleep against the window with her coat bunched under her cheek. He turned the radio down so it wouldn't wake her and drove the rest of the way home with nothing playing at all. Diane called him the last Friday in April, a little after 8:00 at night. He was on the couch with the Cubs losing on the radio and a plate he hadn't finished. "Are you home?" she said. "Yeah." "Is she?" He looked down the hall. The guest room door was shut and dark. Regina had texted at 6:00 that the banquet was running long and she'd crash at a friend's near the hotel, which she had done four or five times since winter. "No." he said. "There's a place on Irving Park by the Kennedy, Lanterns. It's not one of ours. Can you meet me?" Lanterns was a corner bar with a golden tea machine and a bartender who looked like he'd been carved there. Diane was in a booth in the back with a vodka tonic she hadn't touched. She had taken off her work fleece and looked smaller without it. "I can't sleep." she said before he'd even sat down, "I've been not sleeping since March, so I'm going to say this and then I'm going to go home and you didn't hear it from me. Okay? I mean it, Jud. I've got a mortgage, too." I said, "Okay." She pushed the lime down into the glass with the straw. "In March, Landon came into Southport on a Wednesday. He doesn't come in much since Cecilia. He sat at the end of the bar and he said to me, 'I want Regina's ex off the property. Make sure Calumet sends somebody else.' She looked at him. And I said, 'I didn't know you two split.' And he said, 'Since last winter.' He said, 'You won't sign anything and you won't sell the house and you make her life miserable." Jud heard it the way you hear a car alarm a block away. Something going off somewhere, not yet his. "We didn't," he said. "Didn't what? Split. We didn't split. She lives in the house. I was at her brother's engagement party with her last Saturday." Diane closed her eyes for a second. "Oh, honey." Then she told him the rest, badly and out of order, like something she'd been carrying too long. Landon and Regina had been seeing each other since the fall. Everybody at the company knew, more or less. Landon had brought her to the Chop House for dinners, to a wine thing in Oak Brook, to Southport twice on Sunday afternoons when it was slow. He was happy. People said so. People were glad for him after the year he'd had. "There's a storefront," Diane said, "on Lincoln, up in Lincoln Square by the plaza. She's putting a bakery in it. Landon signed the lease with her. Personal guarantee. One of the managers saw the paperwork. Since when? February, I think. They're supposed to open in June." He sat very still. He was counting, without meaning to, the nights since January she had stayed at a friend's place near the hotel. Four. Five. The banquet that ran long the week before Easter. The Saturday in March she'd said she was helping a co-worker move. He had believed every one of them. Not because they were good stories, but because believing them was easier than asking. Across the bar, somebody hit a long drive on the Golden Tee and the machine cheered. The staff think you're Diane started and stopped. Think what? Some guy who won't let his wife go. That's what Landon told them or what they got from it. That you're making her pay for leaving. She finally drank some of the vodka tonic. I knew you six years. I told myself it wasn't my business. Then Miles came in Monday and said you'd been in that house all winter with her and I thought either Miles is wrong or somebody's lying to Landon Keel and I couldn't figure out which one I was more scared of. Miles isn't wrong. I know he isn't. I looked at your face when you walked in. She put a 20 on the table though he hadn't ordered anything. Don't say my name, please. Not to her, not to him, not to Ron. If Landon finds out I told you, I'm done at Keel's and I'm 58 years old. I won't say your name. Thank you. She stood up and put on the fleece. I'm sorry, Jud. I really am. He sat there after she left until the bartender asked if he wanted anything and he said no and left a five for the booth. He drove home on Irving Park and turned onto North Neva and slowed in front of his own house. The guest room light was on now. Regina's car was in the driveway. Whatever friend's place near the hotel she had been planning on, she had come home after all. He did not pull in. He drove to the Jewel on Harlem, parked at the far end of the lot under a light with a dead bulb and sat there until after midnight with the engine running for the heat. He didn't say anything at home all weekend. That surprised him later. He had thought, sitting in the Jewel lot, that he would walk in the door and say it all. And instead, he walked in and said good night to the closed guest room door. And Saturday, she made eggs and he ate them. And Sunday, she was at the hotel and he cleaned the gutters. He was waiting to see if he was wrong. That was the honest version. He watched her text and watched her laugh at something on her phone and watched her leave for work at 4:00 in the morning on Monday. And none of it told him anything Diane hadn't. Monday, he finished his route by 2:15 and did not go back to the warehouse. He drove downtown in his Calumet Polo and work pants, parked in a garage on Wells that cost $18, and walked to Keele's Chop House on West Hubbard. It was the dead hour between lunch and dinner. The dining room was half-lit, white tablecloths, dark wood, a long bar with bottles lit from underneath like an altar. A young host in a black vest looked at his polo and started to say deliveries were in the alley. I'm here to see Landon Keele. Do you have an appointment? Tell him it's Jud Okonski. The host went away. Jud stood in the entry and looked at the photos on the wall. Landon with a Bears linebacker. Landon with the mayor before this one. Landon and a dark-haired woman at a ribbon cutting, both of them laughing, the woman holding enormous scissors. Cecilia, he guessed. Landon came out of the back in short sleeves. He recognized Jud at once. Jud could see it land. But he didn't look surprised and he didn't look angry. He had the face of a man who had been told the weather. Mr. Okonski, come sit down. He took Jud to the end of the bar. He asked if Jud wanted coffee. Jud said no. Landon nodded to the bartender anyway and a cup of coffee appeared in front of Jud and Jud left it there. "You know why I'm here?" Jud said. "I think so. Go ahead." So, Jud said it. He had practiced it in the truck and most of it came out as practiced. They weren't separated and never had been. She lived in the house and cooked in the kitchen. Seven weeks ago they had sat side by side and signed a refinance as husband and wife, owner occupants. Nine days ago they had gone to her brother's engagement party together and he had driven her home. Landon listened to all of it. He nodded in places the way a doctor does. When Jud finished, Landon was quiet a moment and then he said gently, "She told me you'd come." Jud stared at him. "She told me you'd come here, probably to this restaurant because it's the one with my name on it. She said you'd tell me you were still together. She said you'd bring up the refinance, the papers you made her sign." Landon set both hands flat on the bar. "She said you'd mention the engagement party because she goes to family things with you so her mother doesn't have a stroke. She said you'd be angry and you'd look hurt and you'd make it sound very simple. It is simple. She also told me you'd say that. Separate bedrooms," Landon went on not unkindly, "since January. She told me that before you ever walked in here." Jud heard himself breathe out through his nose. "The guest room, the 9th of January, a Monday. Your Tuesday and Friday 3:30s. You introduced us," Landon said, "that party at Southport. She said you were standing right there and you'd never even notice. She said you hadn't noticed her in two years. That's not" Jud said and his voice came out louder than he meant it to. Loud enough that the bartender stopped wiping a glass. "That's not the same thing as separated. You understand? Not noticing somebody is not the same thing as" The host appeared at the end of the bar. Landon raised one hand, a small motion, and the host stopped where he was. "I understand you're upset." Landon said. "I'd be upset. But I'm going to be honest with you because I think somebody should be. She'll have a proper lawyer by Friday. I've made sure of that. Whatever you've been holding over her, the house, the money, it's done. You can make this easy or you can make it expensive, but you can't make it stop." "I'm not holding anything over anybody. Please don't come to my restaurants again." Landon said. "Any of them. I mean that." Jud stood up and left the coffee where it was. On the way out, he passed the photograph of Landon and his late wife with the big scissors, and he didn't look at it. That evening, Regina came home at 7:00, which she never did. She put her bag down on the kitchen table and looked at him on the couch, and he knew from her face that Landon had called her within the hour. "I asked you not to make this ugly." She said. She had never asked him anything, but he let it go and said nothing at all. After a while, she went down the hall, and he heard the guest room door close, and then he heard her on the phone, low, until after he fell asleep. Thursday, a little after 1:00, Ron called him in the truck. "Starting Monday, you're on the South Side route. Archer, Brighton Park, McKinley Park, out to Midway. 3:30 starts." "Says who?" "Says me. Keel threatened to pull the whole account if you're anywhere near their people. I'm not losing $3 million over whatever this is." "Okay." Jud said, and hung up, and drove to his next stop, a sandwich place on Montrose where the owner wanted to talk about the Bulls. The South Side route paid less, a lot less. He did that math, too, that night on the back of a credit card statement. Counting the taverns he'd already lost, it came to about $1,400 a month. Bozena had Sunday dinner every week at the house in Berwyn where Regina grew up, a narrow brick bungalow with a statue of the Virgin in the front yard and plastic runners on the hallway carpet. Jud had gone most Sundays for 13 years. Regina assumed he would skip this one. He could tell from how she got ready, quickly, not asking. He put on a clean shirt and got in the car. She looked at him across the roof before she opened her door. Are you sure? It's dinner. Elliot and Ria were already there. Bozena had made pork roast and cucumbers in sour cream and the potatoes she always overcooked. The television was on in the front room with the sound off, a Sox game. Ria asked Jud about work and he said it was fine and Regina passed the cucumbers. It was Elliot who brought up the money. Jud had figured somebody would. "So, the condo," Elliot said, cutting his pork, "lender wants the full down payment documented by the 20th. We're still short the 10." "You'll find it," Ria said, in the tone of somebody who had said it many times. "Where? The couch?" Bozena put her fork down. She turned to her daughter. "Regina, you have the bakery people. Can't you help your brother a little? It's family." Regina said, "Ma, the bakery money is all committed, every dollar. We've got build-out, we've got the oven, ComEd." "She just came into some," Jud said. The table got quiet. He told himself afterward that he hadn't planned to say it, which wasn't true. He hadn't planned exactly when, but he had known since Monday at the Chophouse, since Landon said she'll have a proper lawyer by Friday, that the money existed and where it came from and what it was for. He had known all week he was going to say something and he had known it would be here. "She just came into some," he said again, calmly. He buttered a roll. "Family first, right?" Regina looked at him and Bozena looked at Regina and Jud watched Bozena understand exactly what kind of money he meant and watched her understand that she could not say so with Ria sitting at the table and that she could not take back what she had just asked for. Ria looked at her plate. "Is that true?" Elliot said. "Gina?" "It's not that simple," Regina said. "I mean, if it's sitting there," Elliot said, "I'd pay it back, with interest even. Ria, wouldn't we?" "We would," Ria said quietly, still looking at her plate. "Kochanie," Bozena said to Regina, softly, in the voice she used on the parish council when a vote was already decided. "Your brother." Regina put her napkin on the table and smoothed it with both hands. "Fine," she said, "I'll help." "We'll talk about it tomorrow, El." "Seriously? Gina, thank you." "Tomorrow." Nobody said much after that. Bozena cut the poppy seed cake in pieces too big. Elliot shook Jud's hand at the door and the handshake was a little cold because Elliot wasn't stupid. He just liked money more than he liked knowing things. In the car, Regina drove and didn't speak and he let her. At home, she went into the kitchen and didn't take off her coat. She stood by the sink with her arms crossed and he stood in the doorway and for a minute, it was like any of a thousand nights. "That was a hell of a thing to do," she said. "You want to talk about things people do?" "Don't." She shook her head. "Don't do the wounded thing. You've been doing the wounded thing since November." "Somebody told me," he said, "a week ago Friday. Then I heard the rest from him." "I know you went to him. He told me. He said you were very upset." Her mouth moved like she wanted to laugh and couldn't. "God, Jud. I told him you'd do exactly that. I could have written it down for him. I basically did." "Why'd you tell him we were separated?" "Because we are." "We're not." "We are in every way that counts." She uncrossed her arms and then crossed them again. "You moved out of this marriage 2 years ago. You just forgot to take your stuff. You come home, you eat, you watch the game, you go to bed. When's the last time you asked me a question and waited for the answer? When's the last time you asked me anything?" He opened his mouth and didn't have a date. "Right," she said. "That's not the same thing as lying to a man about whether you're married." "I didn't lie about whether I'm married. I told him what it's like." "You told him I won't sign. You told him I'm holding the house over you." "You would have if I'd come to you in January and said, 'I want out and I want the bakery.' What would you have said?" "We're underwater, Gina. Wait till the market comes back, Gina. Wait." "I've been waiting since 2003." She looked at the ceiling. "I'm going to be 40 in October." "So you were going to tell me when?" "After the opening. When it was real and you couldn't talk me out of it." He didn't believe her, but he couldn't have said why yet. "Stay away from him," she said. "I'm serious. He's a good man, but he can do a lot more than move your root." "They already moved my root." "Then you know." He went into the bedroom and got the gym bag from the closet and put in a week of underwear and his work pants and the shaving kit. She stood in the hallway and watched him do it and didn't try to stop him and didn't help either. "Where are you going to go?" she said. "Paula's." "Of course." On Tuesday afternoon, according to the transfer she texted Elliot a picture of, $10,000 left an account Jud had never seen and landed in her brother's. On Tuesday evening, Jud carried a laundry basket of shirts down the basement stairs of his sister's house in Elmwood Park, past the water heater and the Christmas boxes, to a pull-out couch with a quilt their mother had made. Paula stood at the top of the stairs with her arms folded, still in her scrubs from the ER. "You know you're paying for the extra water," she said. "I know." "And you're doing your own dishes. Rich isn't your mother." "Okay." She came down two steps and looked at him a while. "You want to tell me about it?" "Not tonight." "Okay," Paula said. "Tomorrow, then." "I'm going to want to hear the part where you were an idiot, too. There's always one." The South Side route started at a loading door in Bedford Park at 3:30 in the morning and ran east on Archer Avenue into neighborhoods Jud had driven through his whole life and never once stopped in. Brighton Park, McKinley Park, a stretch of Pulaski near Midway with three taquerias on one block, a bakery on 47th that bought flour by the pallet, a Polish deli in Archer Heights where the owner's mother sat on a folding chair by the register and watched him as if he might steal the kielbasa. None of them knew him and that was the first thing. On the North Side, he had walked into kitchens and people yelled his name. Here, he was a stranger in a Calumet Polo who had replaced somebody named Rudy and they missed Rudy. At Taqueria Ortega on Archer, the owner, Hector, signed the first Monday without a word. He was maybe 50, short and thick through the shoulders, with a gray mustache and a faded Sox cap he never took off indoors. Jud asked where he wanted the onions. Hector pointed. Jud asked if the walk-in ran cold or warm. Hector shrugged. On Wednesday, Jud brought the wrong case count on the limes, and Hector looked at the invoice, then at Jud, then back at the invoice, and said, "Rudy never did that. I'll fix it tomorrow. Rudy never had to fix." He got home to Paula's around 1:30 in the afternoon, slept until 6:00, ate whatever Rich had cooked, and lay on the pull-out couch until he could sleep again. The basement had one window at the top of the wall at ground level, and in the morning before he left, he could see the legs of people walking their dogs. Miles called on Thursday, the 10th. "I'm not supposed to tell you this," Miles said. "Then don't." "Ron told some of us at the meeting. Keel threatened to move the whole account, not just Lincoln and Southport, everything. Nine stores to Midway Provisions," Ron told me. "He didn't tell you Keel said it twice. Second time was after you went downtown." Miles hesitated. "Jud, I don't know what's going on, and I'm not asking, but Ron's scared of this one, like actually scared. I'd be careful." "I'm on the south side at 3:30 in the morning, Miles. How much more careful can I get?" On Friday the 18th, when he came in off the route, the woman at the will-call counter waved him over. "There's somebody waiting for you in the driver's room. She's been here an hour." She was sitting at the driver's table, which was sticky, under the bulletin board covered in safety notices and a flyer about somebody's lost dog. She was late 20s, in a navy blazer and good boots, with a leather folder squared in front of her. She had Landon's eyes, and she did not stand up. "Mr. Okonski, I'm Bethany Keel. I run operations for my father's company." She pushed the folder an inch toward him. "I've been asked to bring you two things, a draft separation agreement from your wife's attorney, and an offer." "What offer?" "My father will pay you $25,000 to sign it. For your trouble," he said. She said for your trouble the way you'd repeat a phrase in a foreign language. "The money doesn't come from Keel Hospitality. It's personal. He wanted that clear." Judd didn't sit down. "Your father doesn't owe me anything." "I agree," Bethany said. "That's not what I'm here about." She looked at him for a while. He had the feeling of being inspected like a case of produce, turned over so somebody could look at the bottom. "Can I tell you something I'm not supposed to say?" she said. "Everybody's telling me things they're not supposed to say this week." "My mother died a year and a half ago. My father didn't get out of bed some days for 6 months. Then your wife came along and he started getting up early again, and I was grateful. I was. I'm not a monster." She tapped the folder once. "But I see the checks. That's my job. First it was the lawyer because you were going to fight. Then the bakery because you might go after the bakery. Now this because you won't sign." She sat back. "Every time my father writes a check, Mr. Okonski, it's because of you. You're the most expensive man I've never met." He let that sit between them. She stood up and left the folder on the table. "My number's inside if you have an answer," she said. "Please don't call him. Call me." He read the agreement that night on the pull-out couch with the basement light on, a single bulb in a cage. Most of it was what he expected. She'd take the bakery and whatever debts went with it. He'd keep the house and the Harp loan and every dollar of the hole in it. Neither one would ask the other for support. The first paragraph was the part he read four times. Whereas the parties have lived separate and apart since on or about January 2011. January 2011. Not January of this year when she moved into the guest room, but a whole year before that. The year they'd gone to Door County for their anniversary. The year she'd made him a birthday cake shaped like a Calumet truck with a little fondant Judd at the wheel. If he signed this, that year would become a year they had been apart in a piece of paper filed with the state of Illinois. He lay on his back, looked at the bulb, and thought it through slowly carrying the ones. She had told Landon he wouldn't sign. So Landon paid for a lawyer. She had told Landon he might come after the bakery. So Landon guaranteed the lease and wrote a note. He had gone to the chop house and said exactly what she'd said he would say, and Landon had wired her lawyer money that same night and moved his route by Thursday. Now Landon was paying him to go away. Every dollar went through him and he was the reason for all of it. She didn't need him to leave. She needed him to fight. A husband who fought kept the checks coming. A husband who took $25,000 and signed a paper saying they'd been apart since 2011 made every word she'd told Landon true. After the opening, she'd said, when it was real. He understood now why he hadn't believed her. She was never going to tell him anything after the opening. She was going to need somebody to blame until she didn't need anybody at all. If he fought, he was the man she'd described. If he took the money, he was the man she'd described. The only thing he could do that she hadn't already explained to Landon was nothing. He got up and found a pencil in the jar on Rich's workbench. He crossed out January 2011 on the first page and wrote in small block letters above it, May 8th, 2012, the day he carried the laundry basket down Paula's stairs. Then he put the agreement in the drawer under the pullout with his socks and turned off the light. That weekend, the NATO summit came to Chicago and the city closed half of downtown to keep the world leaders in and the protesters out. On Saturday, the news showed police on bicycles in long lines on Michigan Avenue and young people in bandannas marching past the hotels. Jud watched it on Paula's TV with a bowl of cereal. Somewhere behind those barricades, the Hotel Larchmont was feeding a delegation from somewhere and Regina was probably on her third double in a row. He knew her schedule the way he knew his own route. He caught himself on Sunday with his phone in his hand and her name on the screen about to text her to eat something. He put the phone back in his pocket and went upstairs to help Rich with the storm door. Paula found the folder Monday night. She was looking for an extension cord. "25,000 dollars," she said, holding the cover letter. "Yeah." "And you're not taking it." "No." She sat down on the other end of the pullout still in her scrubs. Rich was upstairs watching a hockey game yelling at a power play. "Jud, I love you," she said. "You're an idiot. That house is 70,000 dollars underwater, give or take, and you're going to end up holding all of it. Take the man's money." "It's not his money I've got a problem with." "Then what?" "If I take it, I'm what she told him I am, a guy who was holding out for a check." "Who cares what some rich guy thinks you are? I do, apparently. Paula didn't answer right away. Can I say the other thing? The part where you were an idiot, too? You've been waiting 2 weeks. After November, you were gone. You were in the house, but you were gone. I came over for Gina's birthday and you sat in the recliner the whole time like somebody had unplugged you. She folded the letter back into the folder. I'm not saying she gets to do what she did. I'm saying she didn't make up all of it. I know she didn't. Okay, good. Just so we're clear. She stood up. Still take the money. Miles thought he should sue. The guy moved your route, Jud. That's got to be something. Tortious something. Interference. See? You know the word. I'm not suing a man for believing my wife. Miles shook his head like Jud had been hit on the head. He also had a baby due in September and wouldn't say a word against Ron. Not even on the phone. Not even as a joke. Jud didn't blame him for that. The route itself, he learned as he'd learned the north side 20 years before, one back door at a time. Which owners wanted to be called the night before and which ones hated the phone. Which kitchens took delivery through the alley and which ones made you come through the dining room past the customers with a hand truck full of chicken. The deli in Archer Heights paid cash on Fridays and counted it twice in front of him. The bakery on 47th wanted its flour stacked a certain way, label side out, and the owner's nephew restacked it anyway after Jud left. By the end of May, he could drive the whole thing without looking at the sheet. And he found, a little to his surprise, that he didn't mind the dark mornings as much as he'd thought he would. Nobody on Archer Avenue knew anything about him except whether the order was right. On Saturday the 26th, he called the number in the folder and met Bethany Kale at a Starbucks on Archer Avenue near a car wash. She came in the same navy blazer and ordered tea and didn't drink it. "I won't take the money," he said. "Please thank your father. I'm not going to meet with him and I'm not going to call him. I'll sign an agreement if it's fair. It has to have the right date on it, May 8th this year. That's the day I moved out. I'll keep paying the mortgage, all of it, so nobody's credit gets wrecked." Bethany looked at him over the tea. "That's not what she said you'd say," she said. "I know." "She said you'd ask for more. She said you'd make the house a whole thing." "I'm not making anything a whole thing." Bethany put the lid back on the tea. She didn't thank him and didn't say goodbye with any warmth, but she took the folder he brought back with May 8th, 2012 penciled on the first page and she looked at it and put it in her bag instead of handing it back. He kept his word on the mortgage. $1,712 came out of his checking account on the 1st of June and the account that night had less in it than he had seen since he was 26. The next Tuesday at a quarter after 4:00 in the morning, he wheeled the dolly into Taqueria Ortega with the right number of limes. Hector looked at the invoice and checked it twice. "What's your name?" Hector said. "Jud." "Jud?" Hector tried it out. "Like the Judds, the singers, the mother and the daughter?" "Sort of." "My wife likes them." Hector signed. "The limes are good, Jud." The walk-in cooler was supposed to arrive the 21st of May. It arrived the 4th of June and the installer took one look at the wall where the electrician had run the line and said it wasn't the right amperage. The electrician said ComEd hadn't upgraded the service to the building yet. ComEd said 3 to 5 weeks. Regina stood on the plywood floor of the storefront on Lincoln Avenue with paper taped over the front windows and did the math in her head. The opening was June 16th. It was not going to be June 16th. Maybe July 7th if ComEd came when they said and the city inspector came when he said and nothing else broke. Three weeks of rent with no sales, the oven payment, the espresso machine payment, the two bakers she had hired away from a place in Andersonville who had already given notice. She'd budgeted carefully because she was good at budgets. She had known all along there would be overruns and she had planned for $10,000 of overruns and she had already given $10,000 to her brother at her mother's kitchen table. She was about 30,000 short. She wrote it on the back of the electrician's invoice with the electrician's pen. Landon brought it up at dinner that Thursday at his condo on East Elm, a 14th floor place with a view of the lake that he still hadn't hung pictures in. He cooked for her. He was a decent cook, careful, a man who'd paid other people to do it for 30 years and was learning late. "Bethany told me Jud turned down the money." He said. "I heard." "And he moved out." He set a plate in front of her, salmon and asparagus. "You told me he'd never leave the house, that he'd make you drag him out." "I know what I told you." "I'm only asking." "He's making himself look reasonable." She said. "For the judge. That's what this is. He moves out, he takes no money, he pays the mortgage and in 6 months he walks into court and says, 'Look how fair I've been.' And he asks for half the bakery." She cut the salmon into small pieces. "It's marital property. I opened it while we were married. He'd be entitled." Landon was quiet first. He always was. She had learned that about him in the fall, that he thought before he spoke, which was the opposite of her father and the opposite of Judd, who didn't speak at all. "What would it take?" he said. She had not planned to say a number. She heard herself say one. "30,000. That's what his lawyer said for his interest." "Then let me pay him." "No, Landon. You've done too much already." "Let me handle it," he said. And the way he said it, kindly, completely sure, frightened her more than if he had shouted. "I'll handle it," she said. "Let me talk to my lawyer." Her mother called the next day while she was at the hotel, during the afternoon lull, when Regina was piping meringue onto 200 tartlets for a wedding. "Ria's been funny with me," Bozena said. "Funny how?" "She doesn't call. Elliot says she's busy with school. It's June. The school is over. What did you say to her?" Regina stopped piping. She remembered the porch steps in Beverly in April, warm, her shoes off, the third glass of wine, Ria asking how she was really doing, and Regina telling her because Ria was going to be family, and Regina had wanted, just for a minute, one person in that family who was on her side. "There's someone. He's wonderful. Judd doesn't know anything, and he can't know until the bakery's open. Promise me." Ria had promised. Then Judd had walked out onto the porch. "Nothing," Regina said. "She's a teacher, Ma. She's tired. She'll come around." She told herself it was true. Ria was the kind of girl who kept her word. Ria was the kind of girl who corrected children's spelling with a green pen instead of a red one, so they wouldn't feel bad. She'd keep her mouth shut. That night Regina sat at the counter in the empty storefront with a work light clamped to a ladder and thought about Landon. She was fond of him. She was. He had been kind to her at a time when nobody else was kind. And he listened to her talk about lamination and fermentation and butter temperature like it mattered. And he had looked at the bakery plans and said, "This is going to work." Nobody had said that to her in 9 years. But she had not lied to herself about which one she loved more. She had stood in this room in February with the keys in her hand and cried for 10 minutes. And it wasn't about him. She thought about Judd, too. She couldn't help it. The recliner. The game on with the sound low. Two years of asking how his day was and hearing fine. Two years of eating dinner across from a man who looked at his plate as if he were waiting for it to tell him something. She had not invented that. Whatever else she had told whoever else, she had not invented that. At 1:00 in the morning, she frosted a test batch of the cinnamon knots she wanted for the opening. The butter in the glaze had gone too warm under the work light. And the glaze slid off them in sheets. She threw half of them away and ate one standing up. And it was still good. And she hated that it was still good. And she went home. On Saturday, the 9th of June, there was a black Mercedes in the little lot beside Taqueria Ortega, parked across two spaces next to Judd's truck. A Mercedes like that did not park on Archer Avenue by accident. Two kids on bikes had stopped on the sidewalk to look at it. Landon Keel got out when he saw Judd coming with the empty dolly. He was in a golf shirt and khakis, Saturday clothes. And he looked older in daylight than he had in his dining room. "I asked Bethany where you'd be," he said. "I hope that's all right. You're here." "I am." Landon put his hands in his pockets, then took them out. "I'll be quick. I I you turned down the money. I respect that. I understand you want a different date on the agreement. My lawyer says that's between you and Regina's lawyer, and I'm staying out of it. Okay, but there's the bakery. Landon took a folded check out of his shirt pocket. Jud could see it was a cashier's check. Regina says your attorney has asked for 30,000 for your interest in the business. She doesn't want me involved. I'm involving myself anyway. I'd like this to be over for her before she opens. Jud looked at the check and didn't take it. I never asked for anything, he said. Landon waited for more. I don't have an attorney, Jud said. I had one consultation in May with a woman on Harlem who charged me $200 to tell me the house is underwater. That's it. Nobody's asked anybody for $30,000 on my behalf. She said you'd say that, too. Jud laughed, which surprised both of them. It was a tired laugh, and it went on a second too long, and one of the kids on the bikes looked over. I bet she did, Jud said. Mr. Okonski, no, look, I'm not going to tell you anything about her. He leaned the dolly against the truck. You've got a list of what I'd say. She gave it to you. Every time I open my mouth, I'm reading off it. So, I'm done talking about her. You want to know something? You're a grown man. You've got your own eyes. Landon's jaw moved. He looked at the cashier's check in his hand as if it had become heavier. There's one thing I'll ask you for, Jud said. Not money. My route. I had the north side for 16 years. I never did anything to your restaurants. Your people liked me. Diane liked me. Tomas liked me. I'd like it back. I can't do that, Landon said. Jud had expected anger or another speech about making things easy or expensive. He got neither. Landon stood with the check in his fingers and looked, for the first time, like a man who wasn't sure which side of the counter he was on. He said it right away. But before he said it, there was a pause. Not long. About as long as it takes to look at a number on an invoice and see that it doesn't match the count on the dock. Jud had spent 16 years watching chefs check invoices. He knew that pause. "Okay," Jud said. "I'm sorry. Not now." "I said okay." Landon put the check back in his shirt pocket. He opened the car door and stood there with one hand on top of it. "For what it's worth," he said, "I don't think you're a bad man." "That's not worth much, Mr. Keel, but thanks." The Mercedes backed out slowly and carefully, a rich man's car in a neighborhood where he thought something might happen to it, and turned east on Archer. Hector came out the back door, wiping his hands on a towel. "Who was that?" "Guy I used to deliver to." "He looks like the guy on TV, the steak place. They do the commercial with the bears." "That's him." Hector looked down Archer where the car had gone, then back at Jud. "What's he want with you?" "He thinks I owe him something." "Do you?" "No." Hector thought about it. "Then good," he said, and went back inside, and Jud loaded two cases of avocados he was already late with onto the dolly and followed him. Paula turned 46 on Tuesday the 12th, and she wanted Thai food from a place on Lincoln Avenue she'd liked since nursing school. Rich drove. Jud sat in the back of their minivan like a teenager. Paula got a little drunk on one Singha and told the waiter it was her 30th birthday, and he believed her, or pretended to, and she tipped him 25% for it. Jud drove himself home after because he'd come from a stop up north and left his pickup on Lincoln. Paula made him promise to go straight back. He meant to. But Lincoln Avenue ran north, and four blocks north was the plaza in Lincoln Square, and he knew which storefront it was because Diane had told him, and because it was the only one with paper over the windows. He didn't plan it. He was in the left lane, and then he was in the right lane, and then he was going past at about 15 miles an hour. The paper on the glass had a printed sign taped to the middle. Second Rise Bake House, opening soon. In a typeface he recognized from a hundred napkin sketches on their kitchen table. Behind the paper there was light. Her car was parked out front, the gray Civic with the dent in the back bumper from the Jewel lot. He didn't stop or honk. He went through the light at Leland and took Lawrence west and was in Paula's basement by 10. Thursday evening there was a man on Paula's front porch. Rich answered the door. Jud heard the voice from the basement stairs, polite, deep. He came up and found a big man in a Cubs hoodie and jeans standing in the doorway, maybe 40, with a cop's haircut and a cop's way of standing, weight back, hands visible. Jud Okonski? Yeah. Dan Lasowski. I do security work for Keel Hospitality, off duty. I'm also CPD, 16th District. I'm not here as police. He said this as if it were a courtesy. I just wanted to have a conversation. Paula came out of the kitchen with a dish towel over her shoulder. About what? Jud said. About staying away from the bakery on Lincoln and from Keel properties. There's a concern you've been driving by at night. I drove by once, Tuesday, after my sister's birthday dinner. There's a concern it's been more than once. There's a concern, Paula said. Whose concern? Ma'am, I'm not here to You're not here as police, you said. So, you're a guy in a sweatshirt standing on my porch at 7:00 at night telling my brother where he can drive. Paula's voice had gone flat, the voice she used on drunks in the ER who tried to grab her. You got a court order? No, ma'am. Then you're done. Go home. Lisowski looked at Judd. He didn't look angry. If anything, he looked a little embarrassed. A man sent to do something he'd thought would be simpler. Just keep away, he said. Make it easy on everybody. When he was gone, Paula slammed the door hard enough to rattle the picture of their parents in the hall. Then she turned on Judd. You drove by her bakery? Once. Judd. I know. What were you going to do? Look at it? I don't know. Yes, I looked at it. She threw the dish towel at him. It hit his chest and fell. You're the one telling me you're not going to be what she says you are, and then you go do the one thing that makes you exactly what she says you are. I know, Paula. Stop saying you know. Friday morning, Ron called him into the office after his route. He had a form on the desk already filled out. "Keel Corporate reports a Calumet employee loitering near Keel's on Lincoln on Tuesday night," Ron said, reading. "They identified the vehicle." I wasn't near Keel's on Lincoln. It's two blocks from that bakery. I wasn't at the bakery, either. I drove past it on a public street. That's a 3-day suspension, unpaid, for conduct affecting a customer relationship. Ron slid the form over. Sign that you received it. You don't have to agree with it. Judd signed. That was 3 days of commission, plus the hit on the record. The one that would be there the next time a district job came up, if one ever did. He called Diane that afternoon from Paula's back steps. He didn't know what he wanted from her. Maybe for one person from before all this to say, "I know you didn't." It rang five times and went to voicemail. He didn't leave a message. She didn't call back that night or the next day, and he stopped expecting her to. That night, he sat at Richard's workbench in the basement with a legal pad and wrote Landon Keel a letter. He wrote it for 2 hours. He put in everything. Door County, the truck cake, the reef finance, lanterns on Irving Park, the guest room, and the 9th of January, the engagement party, and the porch steps, and Mom's not ready to meet anybody. He wrote it in the small, careful hand he used for everything, and when he finished, it was nine pages long, and every word of it was true. He read it over once. He could hear Landon's voice reading it back to him. She said you'd write something like this. She said it would be very long. He tore the pages in half, top to bottom, and then in half again. He started toward the trash can by the stairs, then turned around and put the pieces in Paula's blue recycling bin instead, because she'd yell if he didn't. Elliot called on Monday the 18th at 2:40 in the afternoon. Judd was asleep. He let it go to voicemail. Elliot called again at 2:43 and again at 2:50, and on the fourth call, Judd picked up. "I need to see you," Elliot said. "Now. Where are you?" He came to Paula's in his CTA jacket, still in his work boots, and stood in the driveway because Judd didn't invite him in. He had a printout folded in his hand, an email from somebody named Kim Bracken at the lender, and he shoved it at Judd. "Read that." Judd read it. It was polite and very clear. The $10,000 Elliot had deposited needed to be documented. The lender had Regina's gift letter and Regina's bank statement. The statement showed a large incoming wire on April 30th, $15,000 from L Keel with a memo line, "Attorney retainer." ROA deposit described as a retainer could indicate an obligation. Before the loan could close, the lender required a signed statement from the originator of the wire confirming the funds were a gift to Ms. Okonski with no expectation of repayment. Alternatively, the borrowers could document $10,000 in their own seasoned funds. Closing was scheduled for June 29th. "Attorney retainer," Jud said. "I don't care what it says." Elliot's face was red. "I care that our rate lock dies on the 29th. Ria's freaking out. I'm freaking out. Gina asked him to sign it, the guy, Landon, and he won't. He says he won't sign anything for people he's never met. Has he met you?" "No. 9 months. He's never met any of us. Gina's kept him in a closet." Elliot wiped his face. "So, listen, you call him." "And say what?" "Say you made her do it at Ma's, that you forced her to give me the money to screw up her lawyer, which, okay, is kind of what you did. Tell him that and he'll just sign it. He'll feel sorry for her and he'll sign." Jud folded the email and handed it back. "No," he said. "Jud, come on. I'm done being the reason, L." "What does that even mean?" "It means I'm not going to call a man I've been told to stay away from and tell him a story about me so that everybody else's story keeps working." Jud put his hands in his pockets. "You want the money? Give it back to her and find 10 grand somewhere else. Or tell the lender the truth." "The truth is you're a vindictive son of a bitch," Elliot said. "That's the truth. Ma was right about you." Probably. Elliot got in his car and backed out of the driveway too fast and clipped the edge of Paula's lawn. Paula, watching from the front window, would have something to say about that later. Regina texted him Wednesday night. The first text from her since he'd moved out that wasn't about the mortgage or the mail. Did you talk to Landon? He read it twice on the pullout couch. Then he wrote back. No. He's asking questions about April, about my family. I haven't talked to him since the lot on Archer. What lot on Archer? He set the phone on the quilt beside him and didn't answer. A minute later she wrote, Jud. And then nothing else. And he lay there looking at her name until the screen went dark on its own. It occurred to him that she hadn't known. Landon had come to Archer Avenue with $30,000 of her story in his shirt pocket, and he had gone home and not told her how it went. For 9 months she had controlled every word that passed between Landon and anybody who knew her. And now there was a conversation she hadn't been in. Landon called on Thursday at 20 to 8:00 in the evening. Jud had saved the number under Keel only because Bethany had written it inside the folder. It's Landon Keel. I know. Regina has agreed to let me meet her family. Sunday, 11:00 at the Chophouse. Her mother, her brother, his fiance. A pause. I'd like you there. Why? Because I'd like to hear you all in one room. I've been hearing about you for 9 months from one person. Another pause. If I've been wrong about something, I'd like to know. And if I have been, I'll make it right. Does she know you're asking me? No. Jud stood in Paula's kitchen and looked at the calendar on the refrigerator, which had a picture of a lighthouse for June. Sunday the 24th was blank. I'll come, he said. I'm not going to talk unless somebody asks me something straight." "That's fair." "And Mr. Keel, I'm not coming to win anything." "I understand." He didn't think Landon did, but it didn't matter. Saturday night he ironed his good shirt, the blue one he'd worn to Elliot's engagement party, on top of Paula's dryer because she didn't own an ironing board. Paula came downstairs with a basket of towels and watched him do it. She opened her mouth, then closed it, and folded towels on the other end of the dryer, and for once she didn't say anything at all. Keel's Chop House did a Sunday brunch that cost $42 a person, and the private room was off the main dining room behind a pair of frosted glass doors. Jud got there at 5:05 because he'd circled the block twice looking for parking he could afford, and then gave up and paid the $18 on Wells again. The host in the black vest was the same one from April. He recognized Jud, and his face did something complicated, and then he said, "Mr. Keel's expecting you," and walked him back. They were all already seated at a round table with a white cloth and a low arrangement of white flowers. Bozena in her good navy dress, with her purse on her lap like she was in church. Elliot in a sport coat that was too tight across the back. Rhea in a yellow sundress, sitting very straight. Landon at the far side with his back to the window. Regina beside him. Regina saw Jud come through the frosted doors and set her coffee cup down so hard it rang on the saucer. She didn't stand up. Her hand stayed on the cup. "You invited him," she said to Landon, not loud. "I did. Mr. Okonski, please sit down." There was an empty chair between Rhea and Bozena. Jud took it. Bozena moved her purse to her other knee, away from him. Landon was a good host, and that was what struck Jud most, then and afterward. He made the room work. He asked Bozena about her parish, and remembered the name of her church from somewhere. He asked Elliot about the CTA, and whether the red line was really as bad as people said, and laughed at Elliot's answer. He asked Rhea what grade she taught, and said his late wife had been a teacher for 2 years before she gave it up for the restaurants, and that she used to say fourth graders were the last ones who still liked you. A waiter brought eggs Benedict and a tower of pastries nobody touched. Regina said almost nothing. She cut her eggs into small squares. When the plates had been cleared, Landon folded his hands on the tablecloth. "I want to thank you all," he said, "for being so good to Regina this year. I know it's been hard. I know she's been carrying a lot. Her mother and her brother, you've been there for her the whole time, and I'm grateful." Bozena nodded, pleased, as if she had been there for her the whole time. "Elliot, about the letter for your lender." Landon turned to him. "I want to understand it before I sign anything. Regina tells me that money was for her attorney, and that it ended up with you. Can you tell me how that happened?" Elliot had been coached. Jud could see it in how he sat up and put his hands on the table. "It was at my mother's," Elliot said. "Sunday dinner. Jud forced her into it, in front of everybody. He knew it was her lawyer money, and he wanted to screw that up for her. So, he made a big thing about it, and she couldn't say no with Ma sitting there." "He forced her," Landon said. "Basically." "That's not," Rhea said, and stopped. Everybody looked at her. She went pink up her neck. "I'm sorry," Rhea said. "I don't It's just he didn't force anything. Jud he just said she came into some money. That's all he said. Elliot asked her and your mom asked her. She nodded at Bozena and she said yes. Nobody even knew it was from Ria, Elliot said. I'm just saying what happened. Landon looked at Ria with real kindness. He seemed to have decided she was the one person at the table who might be in over her head, which was true. Of course, he said. It must have been an awful dinner. You've known about Regina and me since the spring? Since the engagement party, Ria said, in April. She glanced at Regina and away. She told me on the porch. She made me promise not to say anything because Jud didn't know anything and he couldn't find out till the bakery opened. So I didn't. I didn't say anything. I wanted to a couple times, but I didn't. The room was quiet. Outside the frosted glass, a waiter dropped a fork and somebody laughed in the main dining room. Landon didn't move for a moment. He came to my restaurant, he said slowly, at the end of April. He sat at my bar. Then how did he Ria started. Ria, Elliot said again, sharper. This is not the place, Bozena said. This is a lovely lunch and this is not the place. Landon turned in his chair for the first time since Jud had sat down and looked straight at him across the white flowers. When did you find out? He said. Jud had told him he wouldn't talk unless somebody told him something straight. This was straight. April 27th, he said, a Friday. That was all. He didn't say from whom. He didn't say the rest of it. The guest room, the refinance, the Jewel parking lot. He sat with his hands in his lap and let the date sit on the table. He watched Landon do the arithmetic. He could almost see the bar again in Landon's face. The half-lit dining room. A man in a Calumet polo saying we were never separated in a voice that kept going up at the ends. Landon had read that voice as a performance because he'd been told it would be one. Three days. The man at the bar had known for three days. Landon turned to Regina and said nothing. He didn't have to. Regina put her fork down. For 1 second, she looked like a girl caught with something and then she didn't. She sat up and smoothed the napkin in her lap with both hands, the same motion Jud had seen at her mother's table. "Everybody needed something different from me," she said. "My mother needed me to have a good man. My brother needed money. You needed somebody to take care of." She looked at Landon. "I gave people what they needed. I'm not going to apologize for wanting out. I've wanted out for 2 years." It was the most honest thing she had said in 9 months, Jud thought later. It was also the thing that ended it because it was the first time Landon had heard her say a sentence that wasn't about Jud. Landon nodded once, slowly. The glass doors opened and Bethany came in in the same navy blazer with her phone in her hand. She'd been waiting outside. Landon didn't look surprised to see her. "Bethany," he said. "Monday morning, have our attorney draft the gift statement for the lender." He looked at Rhea, not at Elliot. "For Rhea, she'll have it by noon." "Thank you," Rhea whispered. She looked like she might cry. "Regina." Landon's voice didn't rise. It never rose. "The note on the bakery stays on its schedule. The guarantee on the lease runs through the first year and it won't be renewed." He put his napkin on the table and stood. "Please stay and have dessert. It's already ordered." He walked out through the frosted doors. Bethany looked once around the table at each of them with the same flat attention she'd given Jud in the driver's room and followed him. The dessert came anyway. Three waiters carried it in, a chocolate thing and a lemon thing and a plate of the little almond pastries and set it in the middle of the table and nobody touched it. When Jud stood up, Bozena said something to him in Polish that he didn't understand and didn't need to. Elliot wouldn't look at him. Regina was looking at the almond pastries. He walked out through the main dining room, past the photograph of Landon and his wife with the big scissors and on to Hubbard Street. It was past noon and already hot, the kind of heat that comes up off the sidewalk. He was halfway to Wells when he heard someone running in sandals behind him. "Jud, Jud, wait." Rhea caught up, out of breath. Her face was blotchy. "I'm so sorry," she said. "I should have said something. In April, when you came out on the porch, I knew and I just sat there and smiled at you. You didn't owe me anything, Rhea. I did though, kind of. You'd been in the family about 5 minutes." He shook his head. "You kept a promise. That's not nothing." She looked back toward the restaurant. "Elliot's going to be so mad at me." "Elliot's going to get his condo because of you," Jud said. "Give him a week." She laughed once, wetly, pushed her hair off her face and went back. On Monday, the 2nd of July, Ron called him into the office after his route and closed the door. Ron had a Manila folder on the desk. He didn't open it. "Landon Keel called Walt on Friday," Ron said. Walt was Walt Grabowski, who owned Calumet and was Ron's father-in-law and who in 16 years had spoken to Jud perhaps four times. He told Walt the complaint about you was based on information that turned out to be wrong. He asked that it be withdrawn, and he took back the other thing, the request about keeping you away from their people. There's nothing on file from Keel about you anymore. Ron said it the way a man reads a recall notice. "So, the write-up's gone," Ron went on. "Walt's paying you the 3 days. He asked me to tell you that personally." He tapped the folder without opening it. "Keel didn't ask for anything else. I want you to know that. He didn't say put him back. He didn't say anything about Roots. He just cleaned it up and hung up." Jud thought about that. He had spent 2 months waiting for Landon Keel's next phone call to land on him. It had landed, and all it had done was take something away that shouldn't have been there. "Okay," he said. "North Side bids open again in the spring if you want to put in." "I'm good on Archer for now. Hector Ortega's opening a second place in Cicero in the fall. He wants me on both." Ron didn't push. He wrote something on a sticky note and stuck it on the folder, and he didn't apologize, which Jud hadn't expected him to. Downstairs, Miles was waiting at the bottom of the stairs pretending to look at the safety board. "Well?" "Write-up's gone." Miles let out a breath that seemed to go on a long time. "Thank God. Ron's been acting like he swallowed a fork since Friday." He hesitated. "You want Lincoln and Southport back? I'll give them back. I mean it." "Keep them. Diane likes you better anyway." "She doesn't." "She does now." Second Rise Bakehouse opened on Saturday, July 7th in a heat wave. It was over a hundred by mid-afternoon, and the TV said stay inside, and people stood in line on Lincoln Avenue anyway with iced coffees for cinnamon knots and almond croissants. Paula saw it on Facebook. She showed Jud a picture somebody had posted. The line out the door, the paper gone from the windows, Regina behind the counter in a white apron with her hair tied back. "You going to go?" Paula said. "No." "Good." Bozena left a voicemail on Sunday, in English and then in Polish. In English, she said he'd humiliated her daughter in front of a very important man and she hoped he was happy. He didn't listen to the Polish part. On Tuesday the 17th, Regina came to the house on North Neva for her equipment. Regina had taken a one-bedroom over a dry cleaner on Leland the week after the brunch and Jud had moved back into the bungalow since he was the one paying for it. She came at 3:00 in the afternoon in a rented van with one of her bakers, a skinny kid with a ponytail who waited outside and smoked. She carried out the stand mixer first, then the sheet pans, then the boxes of molds and cutters from the cabinet over the refrigerator. She knew where everything was. She'd put all of it there. When the van was full, she came back in and sat down at the kitchen table without being asked. She put a folder on it. He sat down across from her. The agreement was the same as the one Bethany had brought. Almost. She'd take the bakery and its debt. He'd keep the house and its debt. Neither would ask for support. They'd both sign the paper waving the two-year wait so the divorce could go through after 6 months. The first paragraph said May 8th, 2012. He read it twice to be sure. Then he looked up and she was crying. She wasn't making any noise about it. She was just sitting there with her hands flat on the folder and tears going down. She looked angry about them, the way she used to look when a souffle fell. "I had it," she said. "I had every piece where it was supposed to go. The lease, the oven, the bankers, him. I had the dates lined up. I had all of it." She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. "And it's open, and it's good, and it's going to be fine, probably, and I'm going to be paying that man back for 6 years out of a cash register." He let her finish. "I'm sorry I lied to him," she said. "I am. He didn't deserve it. He was kind to me." She looked at Jud straight. "I'm not sorry I left. I'd leave you again. I'd just do it right." "I know." "Do you?" "After November I stopped showing up," he said, "in here. I know I did. You weren't wrong about that part." She stared at him like he'd said something in a foreign language. Then she laughed, short, and it turned into something else, and she put her face in her hands for a second. "Two years," she said through her fingers. "Two years I waited for you to say one thing like that." "I know." "Stop saying you know." "Paula says that, too." She took her hands down, and they signed both copies. She put hers in the folder and stood up. At the door, she took the house key off her ring and set it on the little table where they'd kept the mail for 13 years. Then she picked up the spare from the hook beside it, the one with the green rubber cap, by mistake, and put it in her pocket with the van keys. Neither of them noticed until long after. The teachers' strike was in its third day on Wednesday, the 12th of September. At 4:30 in the morning, the radio in the truck had a reporter at a picket line outside a school on the northwest side, and Jud thought of Rhea in Albany Park in a red T-shirt holding a sign, probably correcting the spelling on someone else's. Elliot had texted him exactly once all summer, in August. Closed. Thanks. Nothing else. It was more than Jud had expected. He'd been back in the bungalow on North Nieva since July. The guest room was a guest room again, with a box of her cookbooks in it she kept saying she'd come for. He slept in his own bed and set one alarm. The divorce papers were filed in August with the waiver, and the earliest the court could finish it was sometime after November, which the lawyer on Harlem said meant January if the judge was in a good mood. Both their names were still on the Harp loan. They would stay there until he could refinance a loan, and the woman on Harlem had looked at his income and said, kindly, not this year. He paid it on the first of every month and didn't think about it on the other days. He pulled into the lot beside Taqueria Ortega at a quarter after five. The sky over the railyards was turning gray. There was a black Mercedes parked across two spaces, alone, with its engine off. Landon got out. He was in a windbreaker and he hadn't shaved and the skin under his eyes was gray. "I'm sorry to ambush you," he said. "Bethany wouldn't give me your number. She said you'd asked her not to. So, I asked Ron which stop you did first." "Ron told you." "Ron tells me most things." Jud put the brake on the dolly. Landon stood with his hands in his windbreaker pockets. "I owe you an apology," he said. "I've been trying to figure out how to give it for two months and I don't think I'm going to do it well, so I'll just say it. I did a lot of damage to a man I'd never met on one person's word because I wanted to believe her and because I could." "I'm sorry." "Okay," Jud said. Landon waited and when nothing else came, he nodded. "That's all I came to say. I didn't want to say it on the phone. Down Archer, a bus went by, empty and lit up inside. Landon watched it go. Then he looked at the back door of the taqueria where a light had come on. "Is it any good?" Landon said, "The bakery." "I haven't been." "Neither have I." "I heard there's a line on Saturdays." "I heard that, too." Landon almost smiled. He started to take a hand out of his pocket, then left it there. And Judd kept his on the dolly. He got back into the Mercedes and backed out carefully and turned east on Archer toward the city. The back door opened. Hector came out in his socks cap with a cup of coffee in each hand. He looked down the street at the tail lights. "The steak guy again," he said. "Yeah." "He want something?" "He wanted to say he was sorry." "He say it?" "Yeah." "Then good." Hector handed him one of the coffees. "You're late, Judd." "15 minutes." "I know." "The onions," Hector said, and went back inside. And Judd drank half the coffee standing in the lot. Then he set the cup on the dashboard, took the brake off the dolly, and wheeled the first load in through the back door.