The Morning I Asked for My Rifle

The Bank

In the middle of November my surgeon finally cleared me to drive. The first place I went on my own was the bank in town, because I wanted to move some money into savings for the roof.

I had been putting money aside for a new roof for three years.

The old one has been patched more times than Ken’s work pants, and every spring there’s a new brown ring on the bedroom ceiling to tell me so.

The teller was a young woman named Kayla, who went to school with Amber’s cousin. She frowned at her screen.

“Mrs. Martens, your checking is a lot lower than I’d expect. Do you want me to print your statements so you can look?”

She printed eight months of them. I sat in the little chair by the window with a pen from the cup on the counter and went line by line, the way I used to check a food order against the invoice in the school kitchen.

The grocery charges were there every week, all right. But my lists ran about seventy dollars, and the charges ran one-twenty, one-forty, one-sixty.

Somebody had been buying a family’s worth of groceries on my card, and I didn’t have to guess whose family.

There was cash out of the Kwik Trip machine on the highway, two hundred dollars at a time, eight times.

Gas most weeks. A charge at Fleet Farm for $612 that I later learned was four new tires for his truck.

There were two airline tickets out of Green Bay to Las Vegas in September, and two nights in a hotel there.

I knew exactly what that was. Corey had turned thirty-five that month, and I’d seen the pictures go by on Facebook without thinking anything of them.

And on August 14th there was one charge of $1,849.97 at the sporting goods store in Rhinelander.

I knew what that was, too, once I sat and thought. Corey had posted a picture at the end of August from a gravel pit, Chad squinting down a new rifle with a scope on it.

The post said, “Big brother got himself a new deer rifle. Look out, bucks.”

When I added up everything that wasn’t my own groceries, it came to $9,300 and change. That was the roof.

That was most of the roof and some of what I keep for the furnace when it finally quits.

I asked to speak to the manager. He was kind about it.

He brought me a cup of coffee in a foam cup and sat with me in his little glass office and explained it slowly, the way you’d want it explained.

“Mrs. Martens, you gave him the card and you gave him the PIN,” he said. “To the bank, that’s authorized use. If you want to call it fraud and try to get any of it back through us, you’d have to file a police report naming him.”

I sat with that a long time. Through the glass I could see Kayla helping an old farmer count out quarters for his rolls, and I thought about what it would mean to put my son in law’s name on a report at the sheriff’s office.

He is the father of my two grandchildren. Owen is nine and Lily is six.

I was not going to be the reason their father had his name in the county paper, or the reason they had to watch him go to court.

I wanted my money back. I wanted my daughter to know the truth. I did not want Chad in a cell.

Those were the three things I knew for sure when I walked out of that bank.

I had them shut off the card and send me a new one.

Then I drove home very carefully, because my hands weren’t steady, and I sat in the driveway with the engine running until I could go inside.