The Card My Mother In Law Carried
She loved that black card. She set it next to her plate at Sunday dinner, face up, the way some men leave their keys on the table. When I questioned a charge she looked at me over her reading glasses and said, “Sylvia, honey, if you cannot afford to be generous, you should not have married into a generous family.”
I could afford it. That was the trouble. I could afford all of it, every month, without feeling it, and so I never asked what exactly I was buying.
What I was buying was permission for them to look down on me.
The first sign was small, and I explained it away.
It was a Thursday in late August, a year ago almost to the week. Kip came home with a haircut he had not mentioned and a new cologne. He said the dealership had started a “personal presentation” policy for the sales floor. I said that sounded like something Monte had gotten out of a magazine. Monte owns the dealership and has never read a magazine in his life.
Kip laughed and kissed me on the head. “You see everything, Syl.”
I did not. That was the whole point.
Over the following months I started noticing the Thursdays. Thursday sales meetings in another county. Thursday charges on the supplemental card, not Kip’s, but Thelma’s, which struck me as odd because Thelma had never gone anywhere on a Thursday except her podiatrist.
Then a bank statement showed a jeweler’s in a mall two counties over. Six hundred and twelve dollars. A bracelet, according to the receipt in Thelma’s purse, which I found when I was returning her good umbrella. The receipt said “gift.” It did not say for whom.
I did not confront anyone. I am the daughter of a man who never picked a fight he had not first read the books on. So one Saturday I printed twelve months of statements and went through them on my father’s old desk with a ruler and a yellow highlighter. Thursday after Thursday. A rooftop restaurant. A hotel bar. A boutique in the same mall as the jeweler, over and over, never less than four hundred dollars. Always on Thelma’s card, which was clever. If I ever looked, I would see my mother-in-law’s name, and what could I say? Thelma liked nice things.
But Thelma bought for herself, loudly, where people could see. These were charges for a woman being spoiled quietly, in another town, with a mother standing guard.
That Sunday at supper Thelma was there, as she was every Sunday, and I watched the two of them across my father’s table. Kip passed her the rolls without being asked. Thelma touched his wrist, a small private gesture, a thing a woman does with a man she is conspiring with. And she looked at me, just for a second, with a satisfaction so open and so ordinary that I knew in my stomach what the statements had only suggested.
She was not ignorant of it. She had helped.
I did not say anything right then. My father taught me never to show a man your hand before you know how much he owes, and I wanted the whole shape of it before I moved, because once I moved there would be no going back.