The Red Hunter(79)

If he missed a paycheck, they’d have about two weeks before they were out of money altogether, with no credit to carry them over, if not for her small savings account. Thank God, he hadn’t known about it. Or had forgotten about it.

She was alone the afternoon she found out. It was raining, and she felt as if her whole life had crumbled around her. She couldn’t have been more crushed if she had discovered him cheating, if he was in love with someone else. Financial infidelity; he’d kept secrets, mismanaged their money, taken out a loan against their future, one he had no way of paying. She felt a hard stab of guilt; she never should have stopped working.

Her small account was all they had. Money she’d inherited as a teenager from her grandmother. She’d used it mostly for her education. But she kept it, contributing to it from the subbing jobs she took sometimes, things she’d sold on eBay. She’d hoped one day to surprise him—part of the down payment on a house, covering some of Zoey’s education costs.

She went to the bank, deposited some money into their checking and paid down some balances, bringing them at least current on everything. She sent him a text:

Can you come home early?

What’s wrong?

I need to talk before Zoey gets home.

Can it wait?

No.

He’d wept at the kitchen table. She tried to understand, to feel for him. She tried not to hate him, herself. But there was more. Withdrawals, cash advances that she didn’t understand, that didn’t correspond with their payments due and normal expenses. How could she have been so na?ve?

She had the printouts, the last six months of banking statements, credit cards, pension. It was all easy to get to; she knew all the passwords, so it wasn’t like she hadn’t had access all this time. She just simply hadn’t looked.

She told him about the account she had. He looked at her with red-rimmed eyes.

“How much?”

“A little over ten thousand,” she said. “A bit less. I paid down some balances, made us current at least.”

He laughed a little, this kind of derisive snort he issued that drove her crazy. “That’s a drop in the bucket.”

“It’s a small buffer at least,” she said. “We need to get a debt counselor. I’ll go back to work. We can consolidate that debt, and set a budget, work on paying some of this off.”

He shook his head, an odd black look on his face. It was the strangest thing, as she sat there with him, the sensation that her husband, a man she’d known since childhood, was someone else. Who was he? A stranger, someone less somehow than the man she thought she knew. The kind of love they shared was supposed to be unconditional. Wasn’t it? She didn’t even want to look at him.

“What else?” she said. It was there, standing in the corner, a black shadow, a wraith. A nebulous, shifting menace.

“This isn’t bad enough?” he asked.

“The withdrawals, the cash advances, so much debt. We’re not exactly living high on the hog here, Chad.”

He shook his head. “You think it’s cheap? That school? The rent here. Insurance. Food. Clothes. Vacations. Hell, we spent a hundred dollars on dinner and the movies for the three of us last weekend.

“It doesn’t add up,” she said. “I know what we spend.”

Did he forget that she was smart, educated, good with numbers? She didn’t blame him for forgetting if he had. She had forgotten all of that herself. She had let him take the reins of her life and let her world grow small—the house, the school, Zoey, Chad. Her friends had all left Lost Valley. One lived in the city, a magazine executive. Her other close girlfriend was a travel writer, always sending gifts from exotic climes. She never envied them, both of them childless, one unhappily married, the other always with someone new. At least Heather was happy. Well. Happy-ish. As happy as she could be. Or was that just what she told herself?

“What else, Chad?” she asked again. “Where did all that money go?”

She’d gone through his paystubs, too. There were one or two that showed overtime. But mostly not. She wracked her brain for dates he said he was working, events at school he missed. She checked the corresponding stubs. There were discrepancies. She’d never once doubted, not for a second, that he wasn’t where he said he was, doing what he said he was doing. She’d never doubted his love. Other men lied and cheated; friends’ marriages collapsed around them. Not Chad. Not their marriage. And here they were. What a sad cliché. Not that she was faultless. Not at all.

“Heather,” he said.

“Just tell me,” she said. “We’ll fix it together.”

He reached for her hand. And his touch repelled her. She let her hand rest beneath his for a moment, then drew it away. That dark stranger, the one that resided in his eyes, knew the truth. On some level, he’d lost her. Long before this, they’d been in a slow drift, too busy, too caught up in the day-to-day to even notice.

“I have a way out of this,” he said. “Give me a chance to make it right.”

One of the things she had always liked about numbers was how predictable they were. Money, too. Money came in. If you didn’t spend it, you saved and it grew. If you spent more than you made, you accumulated debt. So, there was the enormous sum that they owed and the paltry (by comparison) amount of his paycheck. Heather would have to go back to work. They’d have to get someone to help them reorganize their debt and get on a tight budget. Chad would need to work overtime when he could. There was no other way to navigate this crisis.