Chapter 8
Chapter 8 - A Ticket With His Number on It
The cleaner's on Harris is a narrow shop between a nail salon and a check-cashing place, and the woman behind the counter was about sixty and did not want to be involved in anybody's business.
I told her the truth.
I told her I was separating from my husband and there was an item with my name on it that had come in on his account.
She looked at me for a second and then she said, "Blue robe, terrycloth, tie waist?"
"That's the one," I said.
She went in the back and came out with it on a hanger, wrapped in plastic, and I stood there in a dry cleaner's for a minute and looked at my mother's robe hanging on a steel rail under a fluorescent light.
The tag said the drop-off was April 8.
Aaron's cell number was on the claim ticket.
The name on the ticket was not mine, and the return address was not my house.
I asked her if I could take a picture of the ledger page, and I told her why.
She turned the book toward me and held the lamp arm down so the numbers came out clean.
I took four photos.
I took a photo of the ticket, a photo of the page, a photo of the robe, and a photo of the row of hangers so anyone looking at it later could see exactly where it was and what it was hanging next to.
"I'll hold it," she said.
"It's paid up."
"Hold it," I said.
"Do not release it to him."
"I know his kind," she said, and that was all she said about that.
I drove straight to post and sat in the legal office until a specialist named Captain Ruiz could see me.
He'd been the one on the phone from the beginning.
I laid the folder out across his desk the way I'd lay out a map.
Bank statements with the April account in Aaron's name and Melissa's name.
The loan paperwork on the truck with a signature that was supposed to be mine.
The R was wrong.
The way the pen sat in the paper was wrong.
He'd traced it or he'd practiced it and either way it was not my hand.
The recorded statement from the kitchen table, where Aaron had admitted to the account, the loan, and the plan to move three hours away.
The messages on Melissa's phone, including the photo captioned "your wife's other skin."
The dry cleaner's ledger photograph from that morning.
Captain Ruiz went through it slowly and didn't say anything until he reached the leather folder with the loan.
"The signature's actionable," he said.
"That's not a marriage issue anymore.
That's a federal issue if the loan touched any benefit or allotment.
It did, didn't it."
"It touched my deployment pay," I said.
"Then it's actionable," he said.
"You understand I'm not your lawyer.
I'm telling you what any lawyer will tell you."
"That's why I came here first," I said.
"I want to know what's actually mine before I sit down across from somebody who's going to charge me by the hour."
By two that afternoon I was in a divorce attorney's office three blocks off post, and her name was Natalie, and she had a bulldog face and a very calm voice and she listened to me all the way through without interrupting.
"You can file," she said.
"You can petition to freeze the accounts.
You can preserve the fraud claim.
You do not need to fire a single shot to do any of it.
You need paperwork and a date and a witness, and from what you've shown me, you have all three."
"I want to file all of it today," I said.
"Then we file all of it today," she said.
It took the rest of the afternoon.
I signed where I was told to sign.
I answered questions about dates I already knew and dates I had to look up.
At 4:40 she handed me a stamped copy and told me the freeze would hit the accounts before the banks closed.
I sat in my truck in the parking lot and watched the sun go down over the post water tower.
My phone rang at seven.
It was Aaron.
He wasn't angry.
That surprised me.
He sounded almost pleading.
"Can I come by," he said.
"To talk.
Just to talk."
"No," I said.
"Rebecca, it's my house too."
"The house is not yours to ask into anymore," I said.
"And I'd think carefully before you go stand in a driveway you were planning to leave in April."
There was a long pause.
"Then where am I supposed to go," he said.
"That was decided in April," I said.
"You just forgot to tell me."
I ended the call.
I put the phone in the cupholder and sat there until my hands were steady.
I was not going to fire a shot.
May you like
I had something better than a shot.
I had a date, a ledger, a signature that wasn't mine, and a woman in a folder who'd decided to write things down.
