Here’s how it cracked open. I was putting his work coat in the wash and a key fell out, one of those cheap brass ones, with a little paper tag. An address. A unit number.

My stomach kind of turned over and my brain went straight to the worst place a wife’s brain can go. So one afternoon while he slept I drove to 1440 Birch and I let myself in like a thief in my own life. There was a made bed. There were two plates drying by the sink. A woman’s slippers by the door. I stood in that little kitchen and I built a whole second wife out of those slippers. Then I left and I didn’t say a word for three weeks while I worked up the nerve to confront him.

So now we’re back at the table, and I’m waiting for the name of the woman, and instead Dale rubs his face with both hands and says, “Your mother.” I just blinked at him. “What about her?” My mother lives across town in the senior building, or so I’d believed. We’d had Sunday dinners. She’d never said one word.

“She was evicted in March,” he said. “I found her at the Greyhound station. She was sleeping on a bench, honey.” I stopped breathing for a second. My proud, stubborn, lipstick-at-the-grocery-store mother, on a bench. “She wouldn’t go to a shelter,” he went on. “You know how she is. Too proud. She made me swear. So I signed the lease and got her in there. She’s been there since April.” Eight months. The whole eight months I’d been quietly hating those overnight shifts.

“The nine seventy-five,” I said, and my voice finally broke. “That’s why you took the second job.” He nodded.

That’s all. He took on a second job, lost his sleep, let his own wife think he was a cheat, all so mymother could keep her dignity. And I’d been the only one in the dark, building a mistress out of a pair of slippers.

I thought that was the whole of it. I really did. I started to reach across the table for his hand. But he didn’t take it. “There’s more,” he said, and he wouldn’t look at me now. “Your mother didn’t miss her rent. She’s been short every month because she sends money out. Fourteen hundred dollars. Every month, for six years.” I shook my head. “To who, Dale? She doesn’t have anybody but us.”