“He picks them up on Tuesdays with his wife,” the girl at the counter said, her fingers tracing the faded blue thermal paper. I didn’t say anything for a second. I couldn’t. My husband of twenty-three years only owned two suits. And I was standing right in front of her.
The girl looked at me, then looked down at the receipt. She must have seen something in my face because she slowly pulled her hand back. The little blue slip of paper sat on the glass counter between us like a tiny bomb. “Are you sure it’s the same Dave Miller?” I asked. My voice sounded thin, like dry paper.
“Oh, yes,” she said, her smile faltering. “He has a monthly corporate account under that name. He brought in six designer suits last week alone.” I felt a dull ache behind my ribs. My husband didn’t have a monthly account. He didn’t have six designer suits. And he was supposed to be at a regional sales conference in Cleveland.
I need to back up for a second. We lived in Toledo, Ohio, in a modest ranch house we bought in 1999. I worked as a billing coordinator at a local pediatric dental clinic. I spent my days sorting through paper charts and fighting with insurance companies that didn’t want to pay for toddler cavities. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was steady. Dave worked in industrial hose sales. He traveled a lot, mostly up into Michigan and over to Indiana. We were frugal people. Or, at least, I thought we were. I drove a 2008 Buick LeSabre that smelled like old coffee and damp carpet. I clipped coupons from the Sunday paper. I refused to update our laminate kitchen countertops because I wanted to make sure we had enough saved for retirement. Dave always agreed with me. “We have to watch the pennies, Sarah,” he would say, tapping his fingers on the kitchen table. “The future is expensive.” He always wore the same two charcoal suits he bought on sale at Men’s Wearhouse on Secor Road. One was for weddings and funerals, and the other was for his big sales pitches. I was the one who ironed them. I was the one who carried them to our local dry cleaners, where they charged $6 a suit. But that Monday morning, I was doing the laundry before work. I picked up Dave’s heavy wool winter coat from the mudroom bench. It needed to go to the dry cleaners before we stored it for the spring.
