The Baptism Bill She Refused To Pay

The Call From Glenda

Glenda has worked the teller window at the parish credit union for eleven years, which happens to be exactly as long as I have been married. She started the year Sheldon and I did, and she used to joke that she watched half the parish’s marriages from behind that counter, one deposit slip at a time, long before anybody filed for anything.

She called me on a Tuesday. I remember the weather because it was the kind of gray, close Louisiana heat that sits on your shoulders before a storm, the air thick enough that you could feel it through the car’s air conditioning.

“Charmaine,” she said, careful, the way she talks when she is choosing every word on purpose, “did you and Sheldon open a second account with us? Just the two of you, separate from the joint one?”

I told her we had not. We had one account. We had always had one account.

She was quiet for a second longer than felt natural.

Then she told me, in the flattest voice I had ever heard her use, what she had been watching build for a little over a year. A second account, opened the spring before, with Sheldon’s name on it and only his. Deposits that came in steady, never large, the kind of amounts a person moves specifically so nobody looking at the joint account statement would ever notice a gap.

A little over eight thousand dollars, all told, by the week she called me.

I sat in the church parking lot with the engine running and did the math out loud, alone, the way you do when a number needs saying more than once before it becomes real. Eight thousand one hundred and some change. Not built in a single reckless month. Built slowly, on purpose, the same months I had been covering the light bill and the truck note and telling myself my husband was careful, not careless with me.

“I probably shouldn’t have called you,” Glenda said, after I had been silent too long.

“You should have called me a year ago,” I told her, and I meant it kindly. She was not the one who owed me an explanation.