For a long time, those cards paid for ordinary things: gas, beer, bait, the casino bus, and every Friday, Earline’s hair. The small charges showed up on my bills, and I paid them out of my paycheck and tips.
I was a cook at a diner in Kittanning, and I’d been working that grill for twenty-two years. I knew how to keep track of what was burning while I handled the next order.
Faron used to pick me up after the late shift. We’d sit in his truck and split a piece of coconut cream pie with one fork, the radio on low.
I can still remember the way he’d scrape the last bit from the tin.
Back then, it felt like we were getting by together. I held onto that version of him longer than I should have.
In 2015, his body shop went under. His credit went with it, and so did his mother’s after she co-signed his last loan.
I put him on my cards. Then I added his mother, Earline. The bank called them authorized users.
The accounts were in my name, the bills came to me, and I made the payments.
At first, I told myself it was temporary. Then temporary turned into years. About $600 a month went onto those cards, month after month. Once, I added it all up on a napkin. It came to about $80,000. I tore up the napkin and dropped it in the fryer trash. I didn’t want to look at the number again.
Faron never got back on his feet. This spring, he moved out. “I need to live a little,” he said.
He took the good TV and left me the house payment. I let him take it. I didn’t fight him on one thing in the divorce. I was scared that if I rocked anything, the judge might leave me with his debts too.
My lawyer had told me the cards were mine to handle and weren’t part of the divorce papers, but fear doesn’t always listen when somebody explains the paperwork.
So I kept paying and kept my mouth shut until the judge signed. That was last Tuesday.
I wore my good blouse to the courthouse. Faron wore his fishing shirt. Earline came along in a fresh perm, the one I’d paid for the Friday before. We walked out onto the steps, and she pulled her coat tight and laughed.
“Well, don’t you worry, Faron,” she said. “She’ll still pay for my hair.”
Faron laughed too. “Ange doesn’t know how to say no. Never did.”
They weren’t even trying to keep their voices down. They said it like I wasn’t standing there. I felt the blood rush into my face, but I smiled at both of them.
“Of course,” I said.
Then I asked Faron to give me the cards with his and his mother’s names on them. His face changed.
“You start trouble over a couple credit cards,” he said, “and I’ll tell Peg you’ve been skimming the register.”
Peg owns the diner. I’ve never taken a dime from that woman in twenty-two years. Still, the threat got to me. In a small town, a rumor can get to work before you do.
I drove straight to the diner and told Peg what had happened, from the courthouse steps to Faron’s threat. She was frying hash browns and didn’t even turn around.
“Angela, honey,” she said, “if Faron Mott walks in here to talk about you, I’ll make him pay for his coffee first.”
That got a short laugh out of me. It didn’t erase the worry, but it helped. On the shelf over the grill sits my mother’s recipe box. Her pierogi cards are soft around the edges from years of use. I touched the box on my way out the back door. I always do, for luck.
On my lunch break, I sat in my car behind the diner and called the banks. I closed the first card. Then the second. The third was the one I used for groceries, so I had his and Earline’s names taken off that account. It took about twenty minutes.
