Chapter 2: Bonus Miles
I didn’t wake anyone. I didn’t call Derek. I sat on the bed in the dark until the house went quiet, and then I went down to the kitchen and opened the laptop.
The card statement went back twelve months. I printed all of it, because I think better with paper, and spread it across my mother’s kitchen table with a yellow highlighter.
Most of it looked like a man who builds patios. Lumber. Diesel. Lunch at a Waffle House off I-65, which at least was on the way to Nashville.
Then, in March, a jewelry store in Georgetown. $3,900.
In June, a baby furniture store in Georgetown. A crib, if the $689 line labeled CONVERTIBLE 4-IN-1 meant what I thought it meant.
July, August, September, October: Bluegrass Birth & Maternity Center. Again and again. Co-pays, I figured. Once, $1,240.
I had paid every one of those balances in full, on time, from my own checking account. I’d been proud of that. I’d been proud of the miles.
At 11:48 my phone buzzed on the table.
Hey babe. Sorry about Mom. Long day on site. Love you. Wire Friday?
The truck came next. Derek’s work truck is in my name, because his credit was a mess when we bought it and mine wasn’t. I pay the insurance, so I have the app. I’d only ever opened it once, to find the truck in a Kroger parking lot.
I opened the location history.
Right then, at 11:52 on a Sunday night, while my husband was “on site in Nashville,” his truck was parked in the driveway of a little gray house on Clayton Avenue in Georgetown.
I scrolled back. Every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday night for a year, the truck slept on Clayton Avenue. It left at seven every morning. It came home to me on Fridays.
I made a cup of tea and didn’t drink it.
Here’s what you need to know about the woman at that kitchen table. I had spent twenty years being reasonable. When Derek’s first company failed, I paid off the debt. When his mother needed a place to recover, I gave her my mother’s sewing room. When Tammy showed up with Mason and a U-Haul, I said, Of course. I’m a person who reads the label twice. I count the pills.
And I hadn’t counted any of this.
At two in the morning, I did one more thing. I opened the doorbell camera app.
Derek put that camera in after a package went missing. It records motion. It records sound. I’d turned off the notifications a year ago, because Tammy’s friends came and went so often my phone never stopped buzzing.
I scrolled back through weeks of my own front porch. Delivery driver. Delivery driver. Mason with his scooter. Tammy, smoking on the swing, which she swears she doesn’t do.
Then October 9th, 4:52 p.m. I remember that afternoon because I was at work late, covering for a tech with the flu.
Tammy came out the front door with her phone to her ear and sat on the porch swing. Gloria came out behind her, holding a foil-covered dish. My mother’s blue casserole dish.
“Tell her I’m bringing the chicken spaghetti,” Gloria said.
Tammy rolled her eyes and spoke into the phone. “Mom’s bringing the chicken spaghetti. No, she’s at work. She’s always at work. Ashley, relax.”
A pause. She pushed the swing with one foot.
“Because I know her. She doesn’t suspect a thing.”
I didn’t know an Ashley. I said the name out loud in my empty kitchen, just to hear how it sounded.
On the screen, Gloria leaned over her daughter’s shoulder and spoke loud and clear, straight into my porch camera:
“Tell Ashley to keep the baby off Facebook till Claire signs the loan.”
