And then I read the account history, and the whole evening turned over.
He did not freeze those cards because I have a spending problem.
He froze them because there was nothing left in the joint account.
There was four hundred and eleven dollars in it. I have seen the screen. He had moved everything else out on the Monday to meet a wage run on the Friday, and the card declined at a till on the Wednesday because of arithmetic and not because of a decision about me at all.
That company has been failing since the summer. He has been covering payroll out of our own money for four months — Eleven transfers, over four months. Every one of them described as something else — a van, a deposit, a tax thing.
None of them large enough on its own to show up anywhere I would have looked.
And I would not have looked. That is the honest part. I have not looked at that account properly since Juno was born and I could not have told you the balance within four thousand dollars.
One hundred and fourteen dollars was not a lesson about what a dollar represents.
It was what was left.
Not a budget. Not a position. The actual remainder, in a joint account, on a Wednesday afternoon in a marriage with a baby in it.
PART 5
And his mother knew.
She has been selling things. Quietly, since about the September, through a dealer two towns over — Her mother's rings. A pair of paintings off the landing. The dining set, which went in the October and about which she told the family she had wanted something more modern.
I ate at that dining set about forty times.
She put her own house up as security in the September.
The house she has lived in since 1991. The house with the landing where the paintings were.
She did it on a Thursday, at a solicitor's, on her own, and she has told nobody, and the only reason I know is that it appeared in a document a bank sent me in the second week.
She called me a useless leech in a supermarket while standing four feet from a trolley, eleven weeks after she put her house behind her son's company, and I did not find any of it out for nine days.
I am not going to tell you she was right. She was not.
