She pulled the car over. She actually pulled the car over, and she said, “How long were you employed there?” I told her eleven weeks, maybe twelve if you counted orientation. She asked whether I had ever received a pension statement from the state, and I laughed because the job had been temporary and almost fifty years ago.
She didn’t laugh. She told me to check the old records before we went back inside. When we got home, she had me search for my Social Security number in a state retirement database. My name appeared almost immediately — along with an account I had never known existed. The balance wasn’t enormous, but it had been earning interest since 1979.
Then she found something else. The account had been marked “inactive — no beneficiary on file,” and the last address listed was from a house I hadn’t lived in since 1984. My attorney looked at the screen and said, “Your husband just told the court you never worked. If this pension is what I think it is, he may have accidentally put something very important into the record.”
