I won’t lie to you, I thought about another woman first. I did. I thought, he’s got somebody, the miles, the secret money, the second life. And maybe he does, I still don’t know. But the truth turned out to be something I never in a million years would’ve guessed.
Because then the letter came. Yesterday.
It came to the house, in the regular mail, addressed to both of us. Dale was up at the dealership. I almost didn’t open it, because it’s not my way to open his mail, but it had my name on it too, right there next to his, so I figured it was ours. It’s from the IRS. They’ve flagged the returns. They figured out somebody claimed the same three children on two different returns, and you can’t do that, and now they want their money back. Forty-seven thousand dollars, the letter says, plus penalties.
He doesn’t know this letter came. He has no idea. I took it straight out to the garage and I’ve been sitting on this little step stool ever since, in my nightgown, with the chicken-thigh receipt still in my robe pocket from weeks ago.
And I would’ve thought, okay, this is bad, but it’s his mess, he filed it, he’ll have to face the music. That’s what I told myself. I read down to the bottom where there’s a whole section about the fraud. It says when a false return is filed, the person responsible for paying it back, the one they come after, the one who could be charged, is the person whose name is on that return as the filer.
So I went back inside. My hands were shaking so bad I could barely work his laptop. I opened that secret email one more time. I clicked on the very first tax return, the oldest one, seven years back, and I scrolled all the way down to the signature line, to the name on the bottom, the name on every single one of those false returns he’d been filing as “Single, Head of Household.”
It wasn’t his name.
It was mine.
Margaret Ann. My maiden name and my married name, my Social Security number, my date of birth. He didn’t file those returns as himself. He filed every last one of them as me. The second email, the secret bank account, Ridgeline Consulting, all of it, set up under my name. So if it ever fell apart, if a letter ever came, the person the government would come after wasn’t him.
It was me.
And all I can think about, sitting out here in this cold garage, is forty-one years of him sliding papers across the kitchen table and saying, “Just sign here, hon.” All those mornings I poured the coffee and signed my name without looking. I thought that was trust. I thought that was love. I thought that was just how a marriage works.
