A Woman's Place: A Novel by Barbara Delinsky

out. He could have told me he was seeing an attorney. Boy, did I miss that one. They put together a whole case against me without my knowing a thing." A new thought came. I pushed it away, but it slid back with dawning force. "If I wanted to be cynical, I could say he set me up." I expected her to tell me I was paranoid. Instead, she said, "You could."
    "My God."
    "What makes you suggest it?" she asked.
    "Little things," suddenly making sense. Oh, yes, the evidence was Page 45
    Barbara Delinsky - A Woman's Place
    circumstantial. But if circumstantial evidence had been good enough for a judge, it was good enough for me. "Like the smell in the kitchen the morning I left for Cleveland. He made a big deal about it, then produced a rotting half-onion from the wrong cabinet, like he knew where to look. And the mix-up with my ride to Logan. I arranged for it. Someone canceled it," something else struck me then, "and he conveniently couldn't take us to the airport, knowing that Brody would, so he could hold that against us, too. And as for the mess-up with Johnny and Kikit's return from Cleveland"--I was on a roll-"Dennis says I gave him the wrong information. Maybe I gave it to him right and he got it wrong. And then there's the fact that he wasn't as bad as he usually is when I'm getting ready to leave. Usually he picks fights--about the kids, the house, whatever, and he pushes and pushes until he knows I'm upset. Only he didn't this time. Like maybe he was looking forward to my being away. Like maybe he knew what he had planned and was looking forward to that. Like maybe there was no business meeting in the Berkshires, just a weekend away with some buddy or other. Like maybe he could have come with us to see my mother after all and just didn't want to." I ran out of breath and venom at much the same time. I hated Dennis just then, not because he might have done any of what I was thinking, but because he was making me think it. I had been agreeable for fifteen years. Suddenly he was reducing me to a shrew.
    All that, even before I analyzed Kikit's allergy attack. Carmen's pen scratched across the paper for several more minutes. Then it, too, stopped.
    I was close to tears. "I want my kids back. This is a total, total nightmare. My life was fine. Our lives were fine. Dennis was never a full-time father. He never wanted to be one. So why is he doing this now?"
    "Probably for money," Carmen said.
    I gawked. "He has plenty of money."
    "He does, or you do?"
    "We do. Our savings are in joint accounts. He has access to it all."
    "Who earns the most?"
    "Me."
    "By how much?"
    I was about to say twice as much. Then I thought about the figures we had reported to the IRS the April before. I hadn't paid much heed to them then, rarely did when it came to comparisons. Dennis was thin-skinned. If I looked at him the wrong way at tax time, he bristled. Thinking about those figures now, though, I realized that saying I earned twice what he did was an understatement. "I earned four times what he did last year."
    "Will it be the same this year?" "No. The discrepancy will be greater. He's working less."
    "By choice?"
    "Partly. He doesn't have to work. Wicker Wise brings in more than enough Page 46
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    for us to live well on."
    "What's the other part?"
    I hesitated. Dennis was my husband. Badmouthing him to a stranger seemed wrong.
    Then I realized the absurdity of that, given what he was doing to me.
    "He isn't very good at what he does," I stated. "He had a few breaks early in his career, but those breaks stopped coming when the economy soured. He tries, now that the market is improving, but he can't make things work the way he used to. The more desperate he gets, the worse his judgment becomes."
    "And ego?"
    I blew out a breath that said it all.
    "So," Carmen said, "I repeat. It could be that he wants money. That's what often happens in cases like this. The father uses custody of the kids as a bargaining chip. He