There are too many plates and forks and spoons for Maisie and me.
“Oh, no, honey,” I say, “Daddy won’t be home tonight,” as I grievously remove Nick’s plate from the head of the dining room table with shaking hands. With just Maisie’s and my plates set it looks sad, and so I lift those, too, and bring them to the breakfast nook, which is narrow and more compact, the vacant space not so obvious without the extra room. I make baked macaroni and cheese for dinner. Maisie’s favorite. I haven’t made dinner since Nick has been gone, but tonight I’m trying as a way to offset my stunt at Melinda Grey’s this afternoon. I pluck a treat for Harriet from the kitchen cabinet, an apology for scolding her as I scrubbed dry urine from the living room floor.
“Daddy won’t be home for dinner tonight,” I say, followed by, “He has to work,” as always feeling thankful when Maisie doesn’t press me, wondering when Daddy will be done with work.
“Daddy always works,” she says, and I sense an ire settling in, an annoyance with Daddy’s relentless work schedule. But Maisie doesn’t ask more of me, demanding to know just when exactly Daddy will be home.
While dinner cooks, I pull up the Chase website one more time, deciding to have another go at accessing my father’s account. If he’s in financial distress, I need to know. The first password I attempt is denied. The password guidelines are bewildering, requiring numbers and letters, special characters, no consecutive or repetitive digits. It’s not a simple birth date or name. When my second attempt is rejected, I give up, again not wanting my father to be notified that three unsuccessful attempts have been made to gain access to the system. He’d be insulted if he knew I was checking up on him, doubting his mental capacity and financial standing. My father has done so much for me. He’s nearly all I have left. I can’t lose him now.
Neither Maisie nor I eat much, and Harriet is entrusted with the leftovers, too. I send Maisie to the next room to turn on the TV, feeling somehow more at ease with the daffy voice of SpongeBob and his friend Patrick joining us in the room. It’s not often that I let Maisie watch SpongeBob, but tonight she deserves this special treat. I let Harriet outside, allowing her to roam within the pickets of a red cedar fence before the wind ushers in a summer storm, and then return inside to move the dishes from the table and set them in the sink. All day long, the weathermen have been telling us about this imminent storm to come. The day itself has been bipolar, sun and then clouds, sun and then clouds, as if it couldn’t quite make up its mind. An electrical storm has been forewarned, with a bounty of thunder and lightning, the possibility of flash floods and hail. It isn’t here quite yet, but it’s on its way.
I find my phone and my laptop again and get down to work.
The first phone call I make is to the life insurance company.
I don’t know how it works. Do I call them or do they call me in the case of a policyholder’s death? Does a claim need to be filed, or do they simply know that Nick is dead? Do they read the obituaries? I wonder, knowing how daft that sounds, and yet I wonder it nonetheless. When Maisie was born, Nick took out a whole-life policy for himself, leaving me as the primary beneficiary and my father as the secondary one. My father was also to be given our children should Nick and I both die. Nick took out the life insurance because he wanted to be sure I was okay if something ever happened to him, a policy that was secondary to the one the dental lender required of him. They were two different policies, so that there would be no red tape should I ever need to access the funds.
And so I find the paperwork, and the toll-free number embedded on the documents—desperately in need of that life insurance money to cover the accruing bills, replace the inoperable air conditioner and more—and place a call to the insurance company. A woman answers, and I tell her how my husband has died, and I need access to his life insurance funds. It sounds so cold as I say it, and I immediately know why spouses are the first to be questioned for murder when life insurance is involved. How easy it would be to kill one’s other half and then cash in for the rewards. I’m sure I sound like a money-grubber to this woman on the phone. I wish to tell her about the air conditioner and how it’s not working, the interest that’s quickly accruing on my credit card for Nick’s funeral expenses. I want to tell her about my family, my children, four-year-old Maisie and Felix, the newborn, so that she’ll see I’m not as avaricious as I sound over the phone. I have children, I want to tell her, a family to support.
But I’m guessing she doesn’t care.
“You need to file a death claim and submit a certified copy of the death certificate,” she tells me, her words mechanical and unemotional. She doesn’t say she’s sorry for my loss; she doesn’t offer an ounce of sympathy, and so I ask, “How long until I get the money?” and she tells me the insurance company has thirty days to review the claim, and then, if all checks out, they’ll issue a check.
“What do you mean if all checks out?” I ask. Do individuals submit paperwork of someone who isn’t dead in the hopes of a great cash reward?
“Assuming there isn’t any reason to deny the claim,” she says to me.
“Such as?” I ask. Why in the world would they ever deny a beneficiary their due funds? Seems a ruthless and cruel thing to do to someone who’s just lost a loved one.
“Suicide, for example,” she explains. “Our policies have a suicide clause where we’ll deny payment if the policyholder commits suicide in the first two years of coverage,” she says, but I tell her Nick has had the policy for more than two years, which is neither here nor there because there’s no way in the world Nick intentionally drove the car into a tree with our child strapped in the back seat.