When we bought it, the house on Herring Pond was creaky and leaky, with poor insulation and the original furnace from 1952, bad windows and a roof that was growing all sorts of botany. But it was also a house with waterfront access to and full view of a kettle pond in Wellfleet. The kettle ponds, formed by melting glaciers ten thousand years ago, fell within the National Seashore protected lands. In other words, there could be no new building.
My dad’s parents, who viewed a new blanket as a ridiculous expense when the old one only had four holes, had built it on the cheap, and Dad never did anything to update it, either. When Brad, Dylan and I moved in, there was a kitchen, living room, two bedrooms and one bathroom. The cellar was damp and smelly, filled with tools and fishing gear waiting to be repaired, because Vov?, like Dad, had also been a fisherman. Knotty pine everywhere and the faint smell of mold and mustiness, a smell I loved, since it meant home, far more than our swanky apartment in Boston.
The kettle ponds were accessible only by a maze of very long, twisting dirt roads flanked by pine, maple and oak trees. I’d grown up in these woods, learned to swim in these ponds—Higgins and Gull, Herring and Horseleech. I fished, canoed, wandered through the woods my entire childhood. The first time Brad came home to meet my dad, he’d been dazzled by the quiet magic of the area, being a city boy himself.
For a year or two, Brad and I just saved our money and adored our boy. I worked just enough to keep my license, and only night shifts. My in-laws paid me to work for Fairchild Properties, redoing their rudimentary website, starting them on social media, making a new logo for their twenty-fifth year in business, so I earned a little on the side, too.
Dad came for dinner every Wednesday, and Hannah would babysit if Brad and I wanted to see a movie, which was a splurge for us back then. Mom and Beatrice would drop by if forced—they both preferred that I visit them with the baby. Mom said the house gave her PTSD, always one to pee on my parade. After all, I obviously loved the house. Her grandson lived in this house. Her marriage hadn’t been violent or hateful or dramatic. Brad would roll his eyes and analyze her for me in bed later and tell me she had narcissistic tendencies with a borderline sociopathy, and I loved him for it.
We renovated it bit by bit, pouring our hearts and souls into the house. We made a winding stone staircase down to the pond, heaving the rocks, setting them firmly in the fertile ground. We turned the cellar into a fully habitable floor with kitchen, dining area, screened-in porch. We built an addition off the kitchen for a guest room with full bath （Brad’s current hideout）。 We cut down a few trees to widen the view of the pond. A few years later, we refurbished the middle floor, adding a bathroom to our bedroom and putting in a powder room off the front hall. We knocked down the walls around the chimney so that the stones ran right up to the attic, which we insulated, Sheetrocked and made into Dylan’s room. A balcony overlooked the living room, and we made a tiny little library around the chimney, the shelves crammed with books, with room for one chair. My hidey spot, Dylan used to say.
I say we, but now, standing in the house that was a part of my soul, I realized it was me. Sure, Brad had been a solid provider all those years I worked part-time. But I was the one who saw what could be. Brad used to be proud of me for that. I put in gardens and made a courtyard, and we turned the shed into the studio apartment with the idea that we could stay there after Dylan graduated and rent the main house for some extra money. Rentals were in high demand on the Cape, especially a house with private access to a kettle pond.
I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. Our hidden little house had a purity so deep on winter nights you could practically hear God breathing. In the summer, the birds sang constantly, and the occasional fox or coyote trotted past, and always you could hear the ocean just beyond the ridge.
It was the most perfect place on earth.
How could Brad be leaving this? The home where his son had been raised, the home that held thousands and thousands of happy memories. What would he do at Christmas? We always had Christmas Eve here—Dad, Hannah and the Fairchilds, a friend or two, the night happy and crowded and full of good smells. What would we do this Christmas? Would it just be Dylan and me?
I broke out in a sweat.
I didn’t even know who this other woman was. Did I know her? How old was she? Would he have more children? I was having a panic attack, it seemed. Breathe in, hold it, exhale. I knew the drill. I taught the drill. It wasn’t working today.
I’d been a wife for nearly half my life. How could Brad just strip me of that title?