My husband and my mother spent twenty-seven years barely tolerating each other. At her funeral I heard him say through a half-open door that he had kept their secret and that it would stay under the red maple in her yard forever. That night I went back to her house with a shovel.
PART 1 — THE RED MAPLE
Gethin and my mother took against each other almost immediately.
For nearly thirty years every holiday in that family ran the same way. Polite smiles, short answers, long silences, and then one or other of them remembering somewhere else they had to be.
She never once called him her son-in-law in a warm sentence. She said your husband.
He told me in about 2011 that he would rather work a Christmas morning than sit at her table again, and he was not joking and I laughed anyway.
I asked both of them what it was, for years.
"We're very different people."
"We've never understood each other."
"We come from different worlds."
I accepted it. My mother built a business out of a two-man millwork shop and was the most self-contained person I have ever met, and Gethin grew up with nothing and is proud of everything he has ever earned, and a clash like that is not hard to believe in.
But there was one night, after an argument in her kitchen about something that was not the thing, when I heard my mother say:
"You know exactly what you did."
And Gethin did not get angry. He did not defend himself.
He went completely silent, which in that man is not a thing I have seen more than four times in twenty-nine years.
I asked them both afterward. She changed the subject. He said it was nothing.
Eventually I stopped asking, because I had a daughter and a job and because whatever it was had clearly stopped mattering.
My mother died in the March at seventy-eight.
At the reception I realised Gethin was not in the room.
I went looking, and I found him at the far end of the corridor outside the small room where the coffin had been.
The door was about six inches open.
I was going to push it when I heard him.
"I kept it, Rowena."
I stopped.
He had one hand on the edge of that coffin.
"Nobody ever found out. Not once, in twenty-seven years."
Then his voice came down.
"And it'll stay under that red maple in your yard forever."
I got away from that door before he turned round.
The red maple.
She planted it behind that house the year my daughter was born. Twenty-seven years.
Which is exactly as long as those two had been unable to be in a room together.
And then everything about that tree arrived at once.
She would not let a gardener near the roots. Not once in twenty-seven years; she did the mulching herself into her seventies.
When the roots lifted the walkway in 2014 she paid eleven hundred dollars to relay the concrete rather than take out a tree.
And once, when Nessa was about four, she started digging by the trunk with a plastic spade, and my mother crossed that lawn and spoke to her in a voice that made my daughter cry, and then would not discuss it.
I went back to that house at about ten that night after the last of them had gone.
It was completely silent. The porch light put a thin grey light across the lawn and that maple was enormous and black at the end of it.
I stood there for about ten minutes telling myself I was being ridiculous.
Then I went into the garage and got a shovel.
For twenty minutes I found nothing but roots and stones and wet soil, and I was starting to feel foolish in a way that was almost a relief.
Then the shovel hit something and rang.
Two feet down, under a mat of old root, there was a metal box wrapped in about four layers of plastic that had gone brittle.
I got it out and carried it up to the porch and sat with it on my knees for a long time before I opened it.
Inside were papers from 1998.
A share transfer. A missing person notice with a photograph on it.
And a notarised affidavit, dated the eleventh of November 1998, with my husband's name typed on it and my husband's signature at the bottom.
I read that page three times on a porch in the dark with a shovel lying on the grass eleven feet away.
I did not understand what it was. I want to be honest about that. I am not a lawyer and it is a page of formal sentences, and it took me about four minutes to work out that the words in my presence were the entire document.
What I did understand straight away was the missing person notice, because it has a photograph on it.
I knew that face. Not from a poster. From the wall of my mother's front room, in a photograph from 1991 of two people standing in front of a rented unit with a roller door, one of whom is my mother at forty-four and one of whom is a man I was told was called Corbin and who had gone.
I sat on that porch until about half past one. At some point it started raining lightly and I did not move, which is how the plastic on the outside of that box came apart in my hands.
I did not ring my husband.
I rang the non-emergency line at twenty to two in the morning and was on hold for nine minutes, and when a woman answered I could not get the first sentence out and had to start it three times.
What I said in the end was: "I've found some documents buried in my mother's garden and one of them is a missing person notice from 1999."
She said, "Is anybody in danger?"
I said no. She said somebody would ring me in the morning, and somebody did, at ten past nine.
Then I sat in my car outside my mother's house until it got light, because I could not go home.
PART 2 — THE ANNIVERSARY DINNER
My mother's business is Oyen Aske Millwork.
Two names. I grew up with that on a sign and on invoices and on the side of a truck and I never once thought about it, the way you do not think about your own address.
Corbin Aske started that shop with her in 1986. Two men's worth of tools in a rented unit in Draymoor.
The story I was raised on is that Corbin and my mother fell out badly in 1998, that he took what he was owed and went, and that nobody heard from him again.
She kept the name on the sign. Everybody always said that was very decent of her.
The thirtieth anniversary dinner was in 2016. Forty people in a function room at the Pell County golf club. Staff, suppliers, my mother's accountant, two of her oldest customers.
Gethin had been a foreman there since 2004. He had been at that company for twelve years at that point and had brought in the contract that carried it through 2009.
He stood up after the meal with a card in his hand. Four lines, he told me afterward, that he had written in the car.
My mother came round the table.
She took that card out of his hand — he did not let go straight away and it came free after a second — and she folded it once and put it under her own bread plate.
And she said, to forty people:
"Give me that. You don't speak for this company, Gethin. You never have, and you know exactly why. Now sit down."
The room went silent.
Forty people. Her accountant four feet away. Two men who had worked in that shop for twenty years.
Nobody said one word.
And my husband said, "All right, Rowena," and sat down, and ate his dessert, and drove us home.
I asked him in the car. He said, "She's had a long day."
I was forty-three years old and I let that answer stand, and it is the single thing in this entire account that I would go back and change, because I had been given the same sentence twice by then.
You know exactly what you did.
You know exactly why.
Two sentences, eleven years apart, and both times my husband agreed with her.
PART 3 — NOVEMBER 1998
Here is what was in that box and what it means, and it took a detective and an attorney about four months to put it in an order I could follow.
The share transfer moves forty percent of Oyen Aske Millwork from Corbin Aske to Rowena Oyen for a stated consideration of one dollar. It is dated the eleventh of November 1998.
It is not Corbin Aske's signature. Two examiners have said so and nobody has argued.
The affidavit underneath it is a witness attestation. It says that the signature above was made in the presence of the person signing below.
The person signing below is Gethin Keller. He was twenty-seven. He had been married to me for four years and I was seven months pregnant with Nessa.
The missing person notice is from the January of 1999 and it was filed by Corbin Aske's sister, and it was closed in the March of that year as a voluntary absence, because a grown man is allowed to leave.
And at the bottom of that box, under everything, was a letter.
Handwritten, four pages, dated the second of June 2003, from Corbin Aske to my mother.
It is not threatening. That is the thing about it. It is a man of fifty-nine writing to a woman he built a business with, asking her to tell him what she told people, because his sister had stopped speaking to him and he did not know what she had been told.
There is no reply in that box and I do not believe one was sent.
My mother buried all of it under a tree in 1998 and added the letter to it in 2003, which means she dug that hole twice.
She could have burned any of it at any point in twenty-seven years.
I have thought about that more than almost anything else in this and I have arrived somewhere I do not entirely like, which is that she wanted it to exist.
Not to be found. To exist.
And she planted a maple on top of it and would not let a gardener near the roots and shouted at a four-year-old with a plastic spade.
PART 4 — WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED
Corbin Aske is alive.
He is eighty-one. He lives two states away in a town called Hensfield and he has been there since 2000.
It took Detective Ilsa Rourke eleven days to find him, which tells you exactly how hard anybody had looked in 1999.
I have met him twice.
What happened in 1998 is this, and I have it from him and from my husband and the two accounts agree in every material respect, which I did not expect.
Corbin Aske took money out of that business. Somewhere around ninety thousand dollars over four years, out of a job costing system he had designed himself, and he has never once denied it and did not deny it to me at a kitchen table in Hensfield.
My mother found it in the October of 1998.
She did not go to the police. She went to Corbin and she offered him an arrangement, which was that he sign over his forty percent and go, and that nothing would ever be said.
He refused. For three weeks he refused, because his name was on the sign and because he had built that shop with his own hands, and because he had already paid about thirty thousand of it back.
And at one in the morning on the eleventh of November 1998 my mother rang my husband at our house and asked him to come down to the unit.
Gethin got out of a bed next to a woman who was seven months pregnant and drove four miles.
What he found was Corbin Aske at a bench with his coat on and my mother with a folder, and the argument had been going for about two hours, and Corbin had put his coat on eleven times and not left.
Gethin was twenty-seven. He was a foreman on thirty-eight thousand a year at his mother-in-law's company with a baby coming in eight weeks.
My mother put a page in front of him and told him to sign the bottom of it.
He asked whether Corbin had signed the top. My mother said yes.
Corbin Aske was sitting eleven feet away at that bench and did not say anything, because by that point he had worked out that the alternative was a criminal referral, and he had two children in college.
My husband signed a witness attestation for a signature he had not seen made.
He has never claimed he did not know. He told Detective Rourke that in an interview and he told me the same thing at a kitchen table, which is the only reason I am still in this house.
He said, "I knew. I was twenty-seven and I was frightened of her and I knew."
That conversation was on the Thursday, four days after the funeral, at our own kitchen table, and it started at about seven in the evening and finished at about two.
I had the box on the table between us. I had not let anybody take it yet.
I asked him one question at the start and then did not speak for about forty minutes, which is the only time in twenty-nine years I have managed that.
The question was: "Did you ever try to undo it?"
He said yes. Three times.
In 2001 he wrote to Corbin Aske at the last address anybody had and it came back. In 2009, after his own father died, he told my mother he was going to tell me, and she told him to think about what that would do to me and to Nessa, and he thought about it and did not.
And in 2016, he wrote four lines on a card in a car park and stood up at an anniversary dinner in front of forty people.
I did not know that until that Thursday.
He was not going to make a speech about millwork. He had decided, at forty-five, after two drinks, that he was going to say Corbin Aske's name out loud in a room with her accountant and two men who had worked in that shop since 1989 in it.
And my mother came round that table and took the card out of his hand and folded it under her bread plate and told him to sit down, and he sat down.
He said, "I've been glad she stopped me every day since and I've hated her for it every day since, and both of those are true, Roisin."
Then he said the thing I have not been able to put anywhere.
He said, "I was going to tell you in 2016. That's what the card was. I'd have got about nine words out."
PART 5 — FORTY PERCENT
Nothing happened to anybody criminally.
The limitations period on all of it ran out sometime around 2005 and Detective Rourke told me that on day nine and did not pretend otherwise.
What was left was civil, and what was left was mine, because my mother left me that company in 2015 and I have run it for ten years.
Forty percent of Oyen Aske Millwork was never hers to leave me.
Bram Oduya, who is my attorney and who has been extremely patient, set out four options over about two hours in the April and I picked the one he thought was the worst.
I gave it back.
Not the shares themselves; Corbin Aske is eighty-one and did not want them and said so. A settlement, negotiated, paid over eleven years out of the business, to him and to his sister's estate and to his two children.
It is not what forty percent of that company is worth. It is what that company can pay and survive, and it took four months of accountants and everybody in that room knowing it.
We are smaller. We laid nobody off but we have not replaced three people, and the second unit went in the autumn.
The sign says Oyen Aske Millwork and it always did.
Corbin Aske has been to Draymoor once, in the September, and stood in the shop for about forty minutes and did not say very much and touched a bench he built in 1989.
His sister died in 2011 believing he had walked out on her.
That is the thing that cannot be paid for and everybody at that table knew it and nobody said it.
Gethin and I are still married.
Twenty months and a great deal of talking and neither of us is certain, and Nessa is twenty-seven and has an opinion about it that she is entitled to and that I am not going to write down.
He left the company in the June. That was his decision and I did not argue with it.
The maple is still there. I have been asked eleven times whether I took it out.
I did not, because it is a thirty-foot tree and because taking it out would be a thing I did for myself, and I have had about enough of things done for the sake of how they look.
You don't speak for this company. You never have, and you know exactly why.
My mother said that in a function room to my husband in front of forty people, with four lines he had written in a car folded under her bread plate.
She was not insulting him. I understood that about eleven days after I opened that box and I have not been able to put it down since.
She was reminding him.
Every holiday for twenty-seven years, every short answer and every long silence and every time one of them suddenly remembered somewhere else to be — that was not two people who disliked each other.
That was two people who could not be in a room without both of them thinking about one o'clock in the morning on the eleventh of November 1998.
May you like
And I sat between them at every one of those tables for twenty-seven years and thought it was about where they came from.
THE END
