Thirty-nine years into my marriage, I found a pack of birth control pills zipped inside a sunglasses case in my husband’s truck, and when I asked him who else rode in it, he said, “Stay out of my truck, Cassandra.” So that night I went out to the garage and did something to those pills I can never undo.
Sal had been driving our daughter-in-law to work every weekday since March, when Jakub sold her car.
7:10 out of our driveway, his thermos in the cup holder, her lunch bag on her knees.
I thought it was the kindest thing he’d done in years.
The case was in the passenger door pocket. Brown, cracked at the hinge. I’d never seen it before.
I only found it because I borrowed the truck to haul his mother’s old recliner to the dump.
The man at the gate charged me eleven dollars and had a fishing hat on with the price tag still hanging off the brim.
I sat in the dump lot with the case open on my lap.
Twenty-eight pills. Two already gone. Somebody had scraped the pharmacy sticker off with a thumbnail.
I’m sixty-three. I had my tubes tied the year Jakub was born.
So they weren’t for anybody in our bed.
At supper I kept my voice light. “Anybody else ride in that truck besides Kayla?”
He put his fork down. “Why were you in my truck?”
“I took your mother’s chair to the dump.”
“Stay out of my truck, Cassandra.”
He hadn’t called me by my whole name like that since his father’s funeral.
They couldn’t be Kayla’s. At Easter she’d squeezed my hand over the ham and told me they were trying for a second. Piper wanted a brother. Jakub had already picked out a name.
So I went down the list in my head.
Tessa, the girl who did the books at his shop. Twenty-six. She’d signed his Christmas card with a little heart over the i.
I drove past her apartment twice that week. Never saw his truck.
That was worse.
Thursday night, after he started snoring, I took my sewing kit and the flashlight out to the garage and climbed into the driver’s seat.
I slit the foil behind every pill with my seam ripper.
I tipped each one into a sandwich bag and pressed one of my little white aspirin into the empty pocket. Same size, near enough.
Then I painted the backs shut with clear nail polish, one at a time, and blew on them.
It took me until ten past two.
I zipped the case back into the door pocket exactly the way I found it.
I wanted her pregnant. I wanted him explaining a baby to me at sixty-six years old.
I’m not proud of that. I’m telling you because it’s true.
Nothing happened all summer. Sal drove Kayla at 7:10. I stopped checking the door pocket in July because I couldn’t stand to.
Then Labor Day.
We had everybody over. Jakub ran the grill. Piper went through the sprinkler in her church clothes.
Jakub tapped his beer bottle with a fork and stood up.
“We’ve got news,” he said. His arm was around Kayla’s shoulders. “Number two. Due in April.”
Everybody clapped.
Kayla didn’t look at her husband.
She looked down the table at mine.
Sal set his burger on the paper plate and went gray from the collar up.
He didn’t say congratulations. He said, “Excuse me,” and went inside, and I heard the bathroom fan come on.
I sat there doing the math with my hands in my lap.
7:10 every morning. Eight months. The case in HIS door, on HER side.
She’d lied to me at Easter. They both had, over a plate of ham.
Tuesday I waited until Jakub’s truck pulled out for the warehouse, and I drove across Wilkes-Barre to their house.
Kayla opened the door in her scrubs with a dish towel over one shoulder.
“Piper’s on the bus,” she said. “Cassandra, what’s wrong?”
“How long,” I said.
“How long what?”
“How long have you been sleeping with my husband.”
She didn’t cry. She didn’t slam the door.
She laughed once, with no air in it.
“You think Sal…” She put her hand flat on the doorframe. “Oh my God. You actually think that.”
“The pills were in his truck, Kayla.”
“I KNOW where they were. I put them there.”
She stepped out and pulled the door shut behind her, like somebody inside might hear. Nobody was inside.
“Jakub counts the pills in my purse,” she said. “Every night. He told me at Christmas if he found another pack he’d put me and Piper out on the lawn.”
I opened my mouth.
Nothing came.
“He sold my car so I’d have to ask him for rides. Sal said no. Sal said he’d drive me. I take one every morning at the light by the high school, and your husband has been KEEPING ME SAFE for eight months.”
Her chin was shaking. Her voice wasn’t.
“And I got pregnant anyway. I never missed ONE.”
She went inside and came back with the June pack. Empty. She’d kept it.
She turned it over and held it up to the porch light.
Every foil back was shiny.
Every one had a hard little bubble on it.
“Somebody did something to these,” she said.
I didn’t say anything.
“Sal found a bottle of clear nail polish under his seat last week. He asked me if it was mine.”
She looked right at me.
“It’s NOT mine, Cassandra.”
Then she looked down at my hands.
The porch light
My nails were done.
I do them every Sunday night at the kitchen table, two coats of clear, and I’d done them two days before. Under that porch light they had the same shine as the backs of those pills.
I put my hands in my cardigan pockets. It was too late for that and we both knew it.
“It’s mine,” I said. “I did it. A Thursday in June, in the garage.”
Kayla sat down on the top step. The dish towel slid off her shoulder onto the concrete and she left it there.
“Why,” she said. It didn’t come out like a question.
“I thought they were somebody else’s.”
“Whose? Whose did you think they were?”
I said Tessa’s name. On that porch, out loud, it sounded so stupid that Kayla laughed again, the same laugh with no air, and put her face in her hands.
“I sat in the bathroom at work with the test,” she said into her hands. “Three of them. I thought God was doing it. I thought God wanted me stuck in that house.”
She lifted her head.
“It was you. In Sal’s truck. At night.”
“Two in the morning,” I said. I don’t know why I said it. Like the time made it better.
A truck came around the corner at the end of the street and slowed. Sal’s truck. He pulled in behind my Buick at the curb and sat there with the engine running, looking at my car.
Kayla stood up and wiped her face with the back of her wrist.
“Does Sal know?” she said. “Does he know it was you?”
Fridays
Every Friday for thirty-nine years, Sal came home from the shop and put his wallet on the kitchen counter, and I went through it.
Receipts, gas, the lunch place by the shop, whatever was folded in the back. I wrote it all down in a green spiral notebook I kept in the drawer by the stove. One column for the date, one for where, one for how much. When a notebook filled up I bought another one just like it at Rite Aid.
Sal called it the audit. He laughed about it for the first ten years and then he stopped laughing and just set the wallet down.
The truck was his. Nobody ever said that out loud. It was just understood. The wallet was mine to read and the truck was his to keep, and that was how we lasted.
When Jakub was in first grade he started sitting at the table on Fridays while I did the book. I gave him the loose change out of the wallet and he counted it into little stacks of quarters and dimes on a paper towel. I paid him a quarter for every dollar he got right.
He never got one wrong. Not once. He’d line the stacks up with the edge of the table and wait for me to check them.
I thought that was the cutest thing I ever saw.
That same year I started something else on Fridays. I wrote down ten dollars more for groceries than I spent, and on Saturday I put the ten dollars in a passbook savings at the credit union, in my name only. I kept the passbook under the tray in my sewing kit.
I never had a reason. I just wanted to know I could.
By June it said $14,212.
Jakub grew up into the son who calls every Sunday. He runs the grill. He picked Piper up from kindergarten every single day because he didn’t trust the bus. When he sold Kayla’s car in March he told me at my own table they’d save four hundred a month on insurance with one car, and I said that was smart.
I said that was smart.
The sandwich bag with the real pills in it was in my sewing kit too. Under the tray, on top of the passbook. I’d never thrown it out. I couldn’t think where you throw a thing like that.
On the porch, Sal turned the engine off and got out. He came up the walk slow, the way he does on his bad knee, and he looked at the empty pack in Kayla’s hand, and then he looked at me.
“Get in the truck, Kayla,” he said. “You’ll be late.”
She went in for her lunch bag.
Sal stood on the step below me so we were the same height.
“Go home, Cass,” he said. “I’ll be there by nine. Stay out of the garage.”
The bottle under the seat
He came in at ten to nine and put the bottle on the kitchen table between us.
My bottle. Same brand I’ve bought since the eighties. The cap was crusted where I’d let it sit open that night in June.
“I found it the Wednesday before Labor Day,” he said. “Under my seat, rolled up against the rail.”
“You asked Kayla if it was hers.”
“I asked her so I wouldn’t have to ask you.”
He sat down. He didn’t take his jacket off.
“I didn’t know what you did with it. I didn’t know you did anything. I thought maybe you’d been in there painting your nails, being nosy.” He rubbed his face. “Then Jakub stood up with that beer.”
That was the gray I’d seen come up out of his collar. He’d done the math faster than me. He’d had the bottle.
“Why didn’t you tell me,” I said. “In June. When I asked who rode in the truck.”
“Because she asked me not to.”
“Kayla.”
“She came to the shop in March. Walked. Two miles in those clogs she wears. She said Jakub went through her purse every night and she needed somewhere to keep them, and she asked if she could ride with me, and could I please not tell you.”
“Why not me?”
Sal looked at the bottle a long time.
“She said you’d tell Jakub,” he said. “She said you always side with him.”
I wanted to say that wasn’t true. I wanted to say it so bad I could feel my mouth getting ready.
But I’d said the car thing was smart.
“We tell him to back off,” I said. “We go over there, both of us, and we tell him.”
“And say what? That we know she was hiding pills? That’s the one thing he’s looking for.” Sal stood up. “You say one word to him and she’s out on the lawn with Piper and a baby coming. That’s what you’d fix.”
He picked the bottle up and put it in his jacket pocket.
Then he went out the back door to the garage and pulled the big door down behind him.
Dr. Pettit’s lot
Wednesday I drove to the dental office at lunch with the passbook in my purse.
Kayla came out to the lot in her scrubs and stood by my window. She wouldn’t get in.
“Sal didn’t drive me this morning,” she said. “Jakub did.”
“Since when?”
“Since Sunday. He told Sal at the cookout cleanup, ‘I’ll take her from now on, Dad, she’s my wife.’ Sal couldn’t say anything. What’s he going to say?”
I opened the passbook and held it out the window so she could see the number.
“It’s yours. All of it. Get a car. Get a place.”
She looked at it. She didn’t take it.
“Where would I put that, Cassandra? He goes through my purse every night. He goes through the bank on his phone. He’d find that in a day and then he’d want to know what I was saving for.” She pushed the passbook back at me. “You don’t get it. There’s no place in my life he doesn’t count.”
“Your mother.”
“My mom’s in Hazleton. He made me stop calling her after Piper’s birthday. He told everybody she’s a drunk.” She almost smiled. “She’s been sober eleven years. Margo Olivares. She sends Piper a card every month and Jakub throws them out before I get the mail.”
I’d been at that birthday. I’d heard Jakub say it. I’d nodded.
“He asked me something Sunday night,” Kayla said. She was looking at the street, not at me. “Why I looked at Sal when he made the announcement.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I said I didn’t. He said I did. Then he asked me whose it was.” She put her hand on her stomach without seeming to know she did it. “He asked me twice. The second time he was holding his keys like he was going to go somewhere with them.”
That was the thing I had done. I had sat in that dump lot and decided the baby belonged to my husband, and now my son had sat in his own kitchen and decided the same thing.
And Sal had driven her for eight months. Jakub could count those mornings as well as I could.
Kayla’s phone buzzed in the pocket of her scrubs. She took it out and turned it so I could read it.
whose buick is that
The book on my table
Friday Jakub came over at six. Sal was still at the shop.
He kissed me on the cheek and opened the fridge like he does and took one of Sal’s beers. He sat down in the chair he always sat in, the one closest to the stove.
“Was that you at the dental office Wednesday?” he said.
“I brought Kayla a sandwich.”
“That’s nice, Ma.” He turned the bottle a quarter turn on the table. “You two have lunch a lot?”
“Sometimes.”
He nodded like that was fine. Then he reached in his jacket and took out a notebook and set it on the table.
Green. Spiral. The Rite Aid kind.
He opened it and turned it around so it faced me.
One column for the date. One for where. One for how much. His handwriting, but my columns. He even did the little slash I put through a seven so I’d never read it as a one.
There were pages of it. Going back to Christmas.
Advil 22. Advil 21. Lip stuff x2. $14 cash. Receipt Weis $31.08. Every night, her purse.
And on Sundays, a different column. Numbers in the high thousands, climbing a little each week.
“Dad’s mileage,” he said. “I check it through the windshield when you have us over. Every Sunday.”
“Jakub.”
“He drives her four miles each way, Ma. That’s forty a week. Forty-five tops.” He put his finger on a Sunday in May. “He put a hundred and twelve on that truck one week. Where’d he go?”
I knew where Sal went that week. He drove his mother’s things to his sister’s in Scranton. I was in the passenger seat for half of it.
I didn’t say so.
Jakub leaned back.
“You remember Fridays?” he said. “I used to sit right here. You’d do Dad’s wallet and I’d do the change.” He smiled at me, the same smile he had at seven with his quarters lined up on the paper towel. “You were the only one in this family who ever kept track of anything. You taught me that. A man who hides his receipts is hiding something. You used to say that.”
I used to say that.
He slid the notebook across the table until it touched my hand.
“So help me, Ma,” he said. “Is Dad sleeping with my wife?”
Margo’s kitchen
Monday at 6:20 Jakub’s truck pulled out for the warehouse. At 6:40 I pulled my Buick into his driveway.
Sal was behind me in his truck. That was his idea. “You’re not hitchhiking home from Hazleton,” he said, and that was all he said about it.
Kayla had two laundry baskets of clothes by the door and Piper’s backpack. Her phone was on the kitchen counter, face up, plugged in, where it always was at that hour.
“Leave it,” I said. “He can count it.”
Piper got in the back seat of my car and asked if it was a field trip. Kayla said kind of.
Margo Olivares lives in a duplex off 309 with a ceramic goose on the step wearing a raincoat. She’d been up since four. She had coffee on and she hugged Kayla a long time on the step without either of them talking.
At her kitchen table I signed the back of the title to my Buick and pushed it across with the keys. Then the passbook.
Kayla looked at the passbook and didn’t push it back this time.
“Why,” she said.
“Because I said the car thing was smart.”
That’s the whole answer I had. She didn’t ask again.
Sal drove me home. Jakub was at our house by 5:30 that evening. He didn’t knock.
He stood in the kitchen with his keys in his hand.
“Her phone’s on the counter,” he said. “Piper’s not at school. There’s two baskets gone and a toothbrush gone and Piper’s bunny.” He looked from me to Sal. “Where’s my wife?”
“With her mother,” I said.
“With her MOTHER? She’s not allowed to–” He stopped. He started again, quieter. “You drove her. That was your Buick at the office. That was you. Whose car is she in now, Ma?”
“Hers.”
“You gave her your car.” He laughed. “You gave her your car. Okay. Okay. And what’s she going to do in Hazleton with a car? She’s got no job down there. She’s got Piper and one coming and a drunk for a mother. She’ll be back by Christmas. Dad, tell her.”
Sal didn’t tell me anything.
Jakub turned on him. “Unless it’s not mine. That’s what this is, right? That’s why everybody’s running. I’ve got the miles, Dad. I’ve got a hundred and twelve miles in May.”
I got up and went to the sewing kit on the shelf by the window. I lifted out the tray. I put the sandwich bag on the table on top of his green notebook.
Twenty-six little white pills. You’d take them for aspirin if you didn’t know.
“She was taking these,” I said. “In June I cut every one of them out and put aspirin in. The baby’s yours. I made sure.”
Jakub picked up the bag. He held it up to the light over the table the way Kayla had held up the pack on her porch.
He didn’t yell.
He looked at the bag a long time, and then he looked at me, and something in his whole body let go.
“You did that?” he said. “For me?”
“No.”
“You did, though.” He put the bag down gently, like it was something of his. “She was lying to me every single morning and you caught it. You’re the only one who caught it. Ma.” He shook his head, smiling. “Thank you.”
Sal stood up so fast his chair went over backward.
“Get out of my house,” Sal said.
“I’m thanking her, Dad.”
“Get out.”
Jakub took his notebook. He left the bag. At the door he turned around.
“She’ll be back,” he said to me. “You know she will. And when she is, you don’t come over. You don’t see Piper. Either of you.”
The screen door banged twice behind him.
The dump
Saturday before Thanksgiving, 7:10, Sal backed the truck out of our driveway with his thermos in the cup holder and a pumpkin pie on my knees for Margo.
I ride on the passenger side now. I don’t have a car.
Jakub hasn’t called on a Sunday in nine weeks. Sal calls him. Jakub lets it ring.
Kayla has a part-time job at a dentist in Hazleton and an appointment every month at a clinic down there. Due in April. She sends me pictures of the ultrasound and I put them on the fridge and then I take them down again because I can’t look at them in the morning.
Piper calls me on Margo’s phone and tells me about the goose’s outfits.
On the way out of town Sal stopped at the dump without asking me. I had the green notebooks in a grocery bag at my feet. All of them. Thirty-nine years of Fridays.
The man at the gate had the same fishing hat on. The price tag was still hanging off the brim. He charged us eleven dollars.
My nails are bare. I haven’t done them since September.
When we got back on the road I opened the door pocket on my side.
The brown case was still in there, cracked at the hinge. Empty.
“You want me to throw that out too?” Sal said.
“No,” I said. “Leave it where it is.”
I zipped it shut and put it back in the door pocket, on my side.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who’s been keeping a book on someone they love.
When one betrayal cracks open a marriage, the fallout can reach far beyond the couple – much like in “He Left Me for My Best Friend. His Name Is Still on Our Lease.” and “My Daughter Brought Her to the Wedding in Her Own Car”. For another story about old grief and the people who stand beside us, read “My Best Friend Stared at the Garage I Hadn’t Opened Since the Ambulance Left.”
