“Nothing, I guess.” I slumped in the chair. “Who is Karen? Maybe she’s our mystery woman?”
“We’re considering it. We’ve pulled the guest lists for all the times Greg stayed at the Omni, and there were a few Karens, but none that would fit our mystery woman. They all were there with families or other people, and none of them knew Greg.” He was quiet for a moment. “But that doesn’t really mean anything. I’d be skeptical that she was even registered, much less had her own room.”
True. If Greg were cheating on me, he wouldn’t have paid for two rooms. We chatted for a few more minutes about the holiday and hung up.
I opened the bottom drawer of the desk. I desperately needed to understand our finances. I pulled a handful of the files and fanned them on the desk. Each file had a label: ING, First Bank, and then one labeled “Inheritance.” The last one commanded my attention. The first page, dated the previous January, looked like a standard bank statement. The sequential pages dated all the way back to May 2001. The statements had Greg’s and my name in the top left-hand corners. In the description column, several transactions were recorded, with interest added and at what percent. When my gaze traveled to the bottom right-hand column, I blinked to see if I had misread the number. The figure next to “Total” was $657,997.23.
I couldn’t comprehend that number. Did that mean six hundred and fifty seven thousand dollars? How was that possible? Was that ours? I grabbed the file for ING and scanned the contents. The Total column there was less impressive, only about eight thousand dollars and change. I did the same for First Bank and was relieved to discover that, as of September, we had enough in our checking account to cover the checks I’d been haphazardly writing, although I desperately needed to go lighter on my credit card. I doubted what we had in checking would cover what I’d charged over the last two months. We. We didn’t have anything in checking. We did have a moderate savings account, both of our names typed officially at the top of the statement.
Satisfied, I piled the paperwork and pushed it off to the side. Then, another thought occurred to me. Did I have access to our accounts if Greg was only missing and not confirmed to be dead or alive? I went back to the “Inheritance” file and spread all the statements out on the desk. After about an hour of studying, I figured out that sometime in 2001, after the death of his mother, Greg inherited a little over a half-million dollars. He had put the money, untouched, in a joint account that I never knew we had. But Greg’s mother had been broke. He had told me she was broke.
He had grown up poor and had paid for his own education. While in college, he’d received very little help from his mother. Poverty had singlehandedly driven him to achieve, molded the person he became. To receive a large inheritance after her death would have been a slap in the face. Why didn’t I know? Why didn’t he talk to me, both for the financial aspect and the emotional impact it must have had?
He never spoke about his mother and said very little about his childhood. The fact that my name was on the account surprised me. But then somehow… it didn’t. Putting my name there was very much him. He would have wanted me to be taken care of, and sharing everything with his wife was natural for him. But I suppose not the fact that the account existed, or how he felt about it. Like many other things, Greg was a wonderful on-paper husband and father, but he reserved a large piece of himself for himself only, as if he thought being a husband and father meant the act of being a husband and a father, not necessarily the emotional commitment that went with it. Greg the Provider.
I couldn’t reconcile the Greg I thought I knew with the Greg who would abandon his family. Either way, I was pretty sure that if my name was on the account, then that money was also mine. I put my hand on my head to stop the room from spinning.
Suddenly, I felt rich.
Chapter 16
We are going to a Sunday picnic for a birthday party for Hannah’s friend, Annie, who is turning four. We occasionally socialize with Annie’s parents, Steve and Melinda, but Steve and Greg have very different personalities, so we aren’t that close. I spend the morning making potato salad for the picnic.