He kept both hands on the wheel and didn’t turn his head. Finally, he said the charges weren’t his, but he knew exactly who had been using the card. I asked him why he’d taken my emergency card, and he said he hadn’t taken it at all. He claimed someone had asked him for the information months ago, and he thought it was being used for “paperwork.” Then I asked why every charge had been signed for by the same person. He pulled the car over and finally looked at me.
He admitted he’d given the card to his mother. She had been using it to pick up prescriptions and pay for things she couldn’t afford, but the charges had started getting larger. He said he kept driving me to appointments because he was trying to figure out how to pay everything back before I noticed. I asked him how much had been charged. He told me it was $7,840. Then he reached into the glove compartment and handed me an envelope he’d been carrying for weeks.
Inside were receipts, copies of the charges, and a cashier’s check for $7,840. He had sold his motorcycle to cover every dollar. I asked why he hadn’t simply told me, and he said, “Because she told me you’d never forgive her, and I couldn’t lose you both.” I looked at the boy who hadn’t been late once in eighteen months and suddenly understood something I’d missed. He hadn’t been protecting his mother from me. He’d been protecting me from finding out what she was willing to do to him.
