I was huddled in a corner of the bank branch, clutching my knockoff handbag, its fake leather peeling in several spots. The line at the teller windows was endless. In my palm I held what I had considered the greatest humiliation of my life for seven years, an old red debit card, its edges worn and chipped, lying dormant at the bottom of a shoe box in my closet for over twenty five hundred days, mixed in with yellowed utility bills and faded photos from my college years.
If my landlord hadn’t made a scene that very morning, threatening to throw my belongings onto the street, if the debt I’d taken on from a lender for my mother’s treatment wasn’t coming due, I probably would have never taken it out of there. On this card, Daniel had said the day we went to the courthouse, was ten thousand dollars, a sum that seven years ago was a fortune to me and which now was my only lifeline to keep from drowning.
The memory of that day returned as vividly as if it were yesterday. It had been pouring rain, a curtain of water that seemed to want to wash everything away, but couldn’t cleanse the bitterness from my heart. We had just left the courthouse, the divorce decree still fresh with ink in my hand. Daniel stood there in a black trench coat that fell below his knees, holding a half smoked cigarette. His face was an icy mask, devoid of any emotion. He looked at me, and I will never forget that look. It was a mixture of contempt, cruelty, and something akin to pity for an abandoned animal.
He pulled the card from the inner pocket of his coat. He didn’t hand it to me. He tossed it toward me. It landed in a puddle of dirty water at my feet. He took a long drag from his cigarette, exhaling the smoke into the sheet of rain, and said in a frigid voice, the pin is your birthday. There’s ten thousand dollars on it. Take it and start your life over. Consider it payment for your youth so you never show your face to me again.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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