The gin at the Chesterfield Country Club is cheap on Tuesdays because nobody is in the grill room except the men who have nothing better to do than watch the ninth green and tell lies about their handicaps. Foster sat right in that corner booth under the brass wall sconce with Wade Chapman and Dale Buford.

He had his glass of Seagram’s in his hand and his golf shoes still laced up tight when he told them that being married to me for thirty-eight years was like eating oatmeal without sugar.

He said I had let myself go, gone soft, and that there was nothing left to look at.

I heard it from Gloria Pruett at the modern touch salon on Park Avenue while the old hooded dryer was still humming above my ears. Gloria didn’t want to tell me, or at least that is what she said while her fingers patted the back of my hand with a damp cotton ball.

She leaned in close so the motor could not drown her out and told me every single word Foster had let drop into the whiskey glasses of men who had eaten at our dining room table on Thanksgiving.

I went home and I did not throw anything against the wall. I did not call him on his cell phone. I took off my good walking shoes at the back door, set my handbag on the little pine table by the kitchen calendar, and I went straight to the refrigerator.

I made his supper. Pork chops with a little brown sugar crust and applesauce from the jars I canned back when the trees in the backyard were still bearing heavy.

Foster came in at six-fifteen with that wet grass smell on his trousers and his car keys jingling in his pocket. He sat down at the head of the table and tucked his linen napkin into his collar the way his mother had taught him forty years ago. I watched him cut into the meat and chew it slow, the way he always did when he was pleased with his own day.

I looked at him across the salt cellar and I thought about the Chesterfield Street law offices where I spent twenty-two years of my life typing deeds until my cuticles stayed permanently gray from the carbon paper.

“Good chops,” Foster said, not even looking up from his plate. “Sal got the mower fixed yet?”

“Sal was out yesterday,” I told him. My voice didn’t shake. I don’t even know why my voice didn’t shake, but it stayed right there in the middle of the room, flat and cool like a stone pulled out of Horse Creek.

The thing Foster forgot is that men like him think the world is built out of whatever name is painted on the mailbox. He thought because his grandfather cleared the timber on Pine Hollow Road back in nineteen-forty that the dirt belonged to his bloodline alone. He forgot that the brick house itself, the one with the side porch where we drank iced tea through three different governors, was deeded over to my mother by her own uncle before Foster even knew how to spell Aiken.

When my mother passed in ninety-one, she left that square footage to me with two witnesses and a gold-sealed probate stamp that cost forty dollars to record at the courthouse down on Park. Foster’s name was never on the paper. I made sure of that on a rainy Tuesday in nineteen-eighty-six when he told me he wanted to invest our savings in some timber tract up near Edgefield that went belly-up six months later.

I learned early that if you want to keep a roof over your head in this county, you keep your signature in your own drawer.

By Friday afternoon, Foster had his suitcase sitting by the front door like a traveling salesman ready for the three-forty train to Atlanta. He had his little blue overnight bag and his golf blazer hung over the crook of his thumb. He looked at me with that tired, pinched look he got whenever the tax assessor sent a yellow slip in the mail.

“I filed this morning, Martha,” he said. He didn’t look me in the eye. He looked at the grandfather clock in the hall like he expected it to start chiming out of spite. “Prentiss says we can handle this quietly. You stay here through the weekend, and we will talk about the equity on Monday once the appraisal comes back from the bank.”

I was standing by the kitchen counter with a dish towel in my hand. I hadn’t packed a single pillowcase. I hadn’t even taken my silver spoons out of the drawer.

“Is that right, Foster?” I asked.

“Don’t take that tone with me,” he said, stepping over the threshold with his leather shoes clicking on the slate. “You have your social security and whatever is left in the drawer. The house goes on the market Tuesday. Prentiss already has a buyer who wants the acreage for subdivision lots.”

He closed the front door so soft it didn’t even rattle the latch.

I waited twenty minutes before I walked out to my old Buick and drove down to North Augusta to see Beatrice Holloway. Beatrice was eighty-two years old and still kept a jar of butterscotch balls on her blotter that tasted like stale dust and wintergreen. She was the one who drew up the irrevocable trust for our grandchildren, Emma and Colton, six months before Foster ever looked twice at the girl who does the arrangements at the club.

We had signed the papers while Foster was up in the mountains playing in the senior tournament at Linville. The house didn’t belong to me anymore, and it certainly didn’t belong to Foster. It belonged to two kids who were still trying to pass their algebra midterms and couldn’t sell a shingle of it even if they wanted to trade the whole place for a set of four-wheelers.

The winter months went by slow and quiet. The frost stayed heavy on the red clay out back, and the smoke from the chimney stayed low because I didn’t see any sense in burning extra oak just for one person.

Foster stayed over at the town condos near Whiskey Road where the floral girl, a thin thing named Sandra with dyed hair the color of a wet cardboard box, kept her geraniums on the balcony. He came by twice to pick up his winter golf clubs from the garage, and both times he walked with that little bounce in his step men get when they think they have successfully traded an old dog for a pup.

“You’re making a mistake dragging this out, Martha,” he told me the second time while he loaded his bag into the trunk of his Buick. “Prentiss says the judge will order the sale by April. You might as well start looking at that brick apartment complex behind the Piggly Wiggly.”

“You tell Prentiss hello for me,” I said.

He laughed. It was that dry little cough he used whenever he thought he had won an argument at the board meeting.

The letter from Prentiss arrived on a Thursday morning in a heavy cream envelope with the return address embossed in blue ink. It said the partition suit for Pine Hollow Road was set for a preliminary hearing on the twelfth of the month and that my refusal to vacate the premises was bordering on contempt of court.

I didn’t call Beatrice. I didn’t call the court. I made a pot of black coffee and sat on the screened porch while the morning mist burned off the boxwoods.

Then came Sunday morning.

Foster was over at Sandra’s condo eating his store-bought blueberry muffins and telling her how Prentiss was going to have the title cleared by noon so they could start picking out wallpaper for the master bedroom. He had his shirt off and his golf shoes by the door, ready for a nine-to-one tee time with Wade and Dale.

There was a knock at Sandra’s door. Three sharp raps that sounded like an officer of the peace or a county tax man.

Foster opened it in his undershirt, expecting the delivery man with the Sunday paper or maybe the boy from the dry cleaners. Instead, there was a man in a gray polo shirt with a clipboard tucked under his arm.

“Foster Lee Calhoun?” the man asked.

“Depends who’s asking,” Foster said, stepping back half an inch.

The man didn’t answer with words. He just reached into his leather folder, pulled out a thick packet tied with a yellow rubber band, and pressed it right against Foster’s bare chest until Foster had to grab it with both hands to keep it from hitting the linoleum.

“You’ve been served,” the man said, and turned around before Foster could even clear his throat.

It wasn’t from me. And it didn’t have a single thing to do with the house on Pine Hollow Road.

The envelope came from the Chesterfield Country Club board of directors, signed by the club president and backed by three separate affidavits from the men who sat across from him every Tuesday.

They had voted him out of membership by a unanimous margin for conduct unbecoming a property owner, effective immediately, which meant his lifetime locker and his Saturday morning tee times were gone forever.

That wasn’t even the part that made his knees go weak on Sandra’s front porch.

Stapled behind the club notice was a five-page summons from the commercial division of the state court in Columbia, filed by his own business partner, Wade Chapman, who finally pulled the corporate ledgers after Foster bragged about buying Sandra a new Mercedes with company distribution funds.

Wade was suing him for every dollar of the equipment loan Foster had secretly shifted into his personal account back in November to pay off the back taxes on his golf cart lease.

Foster stood there in the doorway of that rented condo with the cold wind coming off the parking lot and his name ruined in three different zip codes before the church bells even started ringing down on Richland Avenue.

He called me at two in the afternoon. His voice sounded thin, like dry corn husks rubbing together in a November gale.

“Martha,” he said. He didn’t say anything else for a long time. I could hear Sandra in the background crying about her carpet or her lease or something that didn’t concern me in the least. “Martha, Prentiss says the house… Prentiss says the house is in a trust.”

“It’s been in a trust since October, Foster,” I told him, and I didn’t raise my voice an inch. “Emma and Colton send their best. They’re going to use the back acreage for their horses when they turn eighteen.”

He stayed quiet for a long time. I could hear the refrigerator humming in his little kitchen down there on Whiskey Road, working hard to keep things cold that nobody wanted anymore.

“You knew,” he finally whispered.

“I typed twenty-two years of deeds, Foster,” I said. “You should have remembered that before you started talking about oatmeal in front of Wade Chapman.”

I set the receiver back on the cradle, walked into the kitchen, and turned the latch on the back door so the breeze could come through the screen without any help from the outside.