We meet outside the bank on a mild day at the end of January. It’s the second time I’ve seen him in five months. Last night’s snow melts all around.

We sit in the lobby. I smell beer on his breath. Half an hour later, a woman comes out to tell us there are certain documents she can’t notarize, and a separation agreement is one of them.

This is the worst bank I’ve ever been to, he announces to the whole room.

We walk out. I notice a grey door across the street that reads ATTORNEY. We hop the curbs, rivulets running toward drains, and open it. A dark stairwell leads to the second floor.

From behind the counter, the lawyer is kind, doesn’t ask questions. He skims and signs all the pages. When I ask how much, he says four dollars. The first notary I called wanted to charge five times as much.

This isn’t how I thought I’d learn the ways of a place I’ve called home for years. Things happen off the books. It’s easy to get hustled. It’s good to know a guy.

I was taught to say emotionally disturbed person before I called the cops last spring. When the hospital released him the same night, he came home and said, I want a divorce. The beginning of the end.

Somewhere in the middle, on the sidewalk outside the lawyer’s office, he rolls a cigarette and I stand in wait, as in our just-married photo outside the Manhattan Marriage Bureau.

Fuuuuuuuuck, I yell over the woosh of an underground river.

A low area to carry off water. A groove to catch and direct. The most vulgar level of human life.

He says he has to go. He’s already walking away as I say okay.

Long ago we agreed we should get married because if we ever split up, it should be called a divorce.

Alone again, I wish we were getting a meal, a drink. Planting a tree or writing a song. Enacting some ceremony outside the law.

I return to my solo ritual: one foot in front of the other, piles of snow shrinking on the curbs. For seven blocks I feel shielded, signed and notarized papers tucked in my bag.

In the entryway, there’s an envelope addressed to him from a Park Avenue law firm. My shield dissolves. I take the letter upstairs, throw it in a stack. Try to unhear the rush of water echoing in my ears.