The Caviar In Her Grocery Cart

The little takings

It started small, the way these things do.

Sharon would come for Sunday dinner and leave with the good leftovers, “so they won’t go to waste, dear.” Then it was the guest room, which became her overflow closet, racks of dresses I was told not to move. Then it was the Saturdays, when Wade would disappear to fix something at her house on Third Street, a house that had a perfectly good handyman two doors down but a free son twenty minutes away.

Then it was money.

I did not see the money for a long time, because Wade handled what he called “the accounts.” I ran the household out of my own checking, which I had kept separate the way Vera taught me, God rest her, and Wade ran what he called “our side.” I trusted him. That was my mistake and I will own it in front of the whole internet if I have to. I trusted a man to be honest with money the way he was honest with people’s kids’ names, and those are not the same honesty.

The first crack came at Christmas. Sharon showed up in a coat that cost more than my truck payment and said Wade had “helped her out a little.” I laughed it off. A son buys his mother a coat. Fine.

The second crack came in March, when the man from the propane company called the house and asked to speak to Wade about “the balance on the second account.” I did not know we had a second account. Wade took the phone into the garage and came back and said it was nothing, a mix-up, the co-op crossed a wire. He was so calm about it that I believed him, and I hate that I believed him, but he was very, very good at calm.

The third crack was the one that split the whole thing open.