Part 3 — Patricias Wednesday Secret
The receipt on top of the pile was from a Houston hospital, billed to my name, dated the coming Monday. It was a pre-admission estimate for a heart procedure I had not scheduled, because I had not told anybody the cardiologist had said it. I looked at Patricia, and she was already crying.
I had hidden it from her for six months. My doctor found a blockage and said I needed a surgery that insurance would only partly cover. I was too proud and too scared to tell my wife. I told myself I would manage on my own, and I stopped sleeping. Patricia read it in my face anyway.
She found the cardiologists bill in my truck, and called the hospital herself. The out-of-pocket cost was forty thousand dollars. She did not want me to worry or put off the surgery, so she went to Pastor Glenn, who counsels gamblers and helps struggling families. He told her the only way fast enough was the high-limit table.
That was foolish, and she knows it. But it was love and fear, not greed. She had gone to the riverboat on Wednesdays for six months, with Glenn accompanying her to make sure she never lost more than she could afford. The marker was the casinos credit line, and the champagne was just a prop, the free glass handed to every player, which she never drank.
Pastor Glenn explained it patiently at the storage unit. He had been trying to talk her out of it, and the unit was where she kept the receipts to show me how little she had really risked. She had actually won a little, enough for the hospital deposit, but she was terrified of the marker she had signed.
My wife gambled for the first time in her life to save mine, and I was so stubborn that she felt she had no other way.
I held her hands across the little table and told her she should have trusted me. She said, You should have trusted me first. We both laughed in the worst way possible. Then Glenn, to his credit, pulled out his phone and said, There is a better way, and I think the Lord has been trying to tell you both.
The church had a benevolent fund for exactly this kind of emergency, and the hospital had a financial assistance program for retired workers. Within a week, a hospital counselor in Houston cut the bill by two thirds, under a charity care policy I had never heard of. The IBEW pension office covered most of the rest.
Patricia went to the casino one last time, with Glenn, and settled the marker in a meeting with a manager. The casino agreed to a payment plan with no interest, because she was a first-time player who had self-excluded. She signed the self-exclusion form that day, and she has never been back.
The surgery went well on Monday. When I woke up, she was asleep in the chair beside my bed, with a pound cake in a foil pan on her lap. A nurse told me she had refused to leave for three days. I reached over and took her hand, and she opened her eyes.
These days Wednesday is still her night out, but now she brings me with her. We go to Bible study together, and she bakes, and the whole choir fusses over my recovery. We have no more secrets, and we have a pact. Whoever hears bad news first tells the other one that same night.