My wife just stared at her sister across that parking garage while the bucket of casino chips slipped out of her hands and rolled under the SUV.
Her sister pointed straight at me and yelled, “Tell him whose debt you were actually paying.”
I thought affair immediately. Or drugs. Something secret enough to burn through eleven thousand dollars in cash withdrawals.
My wife kept shaking her head at her sister like she was begging her to stop talking.
Then her sister said, “Tell him why Vince keeps calling Mom’s house at two in the morning.”
I didn’t know any Vince.
My wife finally looked at me and said, real quiet, “Can we please not do this here?”
That made everything worse.
I asked her who Vince was, and her sister laughed this ugly little laugh and said, “The man she married before you.”
I honestly thought she meant some old ex-husband from twenty years ago until she added, “The one who got out in February.”
My wife started crying immediately after that, but not dramatic crying. Just exhausted. Like she’d been awake for days.
She told me to get in the SUV because people were staring.
The whole drive home her sister followed behind us flashing her headlights every few minutes like she didn’t trust my wife to tell the truth alone.
When we got to the house, my wife unlocked the hall closet and pulled out a metal cash box I’d never seen before. Inside were money order receipts, handwritten payment schedules, and a stack of prison visitation forms with her name on them going back almost three years.
I grabbed the top visitation form, and right when I turned it over to see the inmate name, somebody knocked hard on the front door.
My wife looked through the window beside the entryway and whispered, “He found out I stopped paying.”