The Bank Card He Called Severance

I am sixty-five years old. I got divorced five years ago. On the day it was final, my husband of thirty-seven years pressed a bank card into my hand and told me there was three thousand dollars on it and that it should keep me going for a few months. I never used it. Not once. Five years later, when I finally walked into the bank to take the money out, the teller stopped smiling, and the manager came out of her office holding a sealed envelope with my full name written across the front. That was the morning I learned the money had never been the real secret at all.

The hallway

His name is Roy. Roy Sutter. For thirty-seven years I was Nadine Sutter, and for most of those years I thought I knew exactly who I was and exactly where I stood.

We got divorced in the county courthouse in Hollis, Indiana, which is a small town in the flat middle of the state where the corn comes right up to the edge of the parking lots and the water tower has our name painted on it in letters you can read from the highway. The courthouse is old brick with a clock in the tower that runs four minutes slow, and the hallway on the second floor smelled that morning like burnt coffee, wet coats, and the copier toner from the clerk’s office. The lights up there buzz. They make everybody look tired and gray, even the young lawyers in their good shoes.

Roy did not look tired. Roy looked like a man who had finished a chore. He had that same expression he used to get when he backed the truck out of the driveway after loading it, satisfied, already thinking about the next thing.

He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and he took out a plain bank card, the kind with no name embossed on it, and he pressed it into my palm the way you would hand a stranger a receipt.

“Here,” he said. His voice was calm, calm as a man paying for gas. “There’s about three thousand on that. Should keep you going a few months while you figure things out.”

Thirty-seven years. That is what he handed me for thirty-seven years. A few months while I figured things out.

I did not cry in that hallway. I want you to know that. I closed my fingers around the card until the little raised bank logo pressed a mark into my skin, and I watched him walk toward the stairs without turning around. The divorce papers in my purse were still warm from the clerk’s printer. Next to them I had a folded county bus schedule and one thin piece of plastic that he thought was a kindness and I knew was an insult.

I stood there until the clock in the tower ticked over, and then I went down the stairs on the far side so I would not have to ride down next to him.