His Cruel Allowance Game Cost Him His Wife and Heir novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Saturday Walk-Ins

Emiliano reads the nine cards and calls it financial abuse. He files for protection and custody, and Rodrigo's lawyer answers with an offer.

The legal-aid clinic was a converted dentist's office on Telephone Road, and the waiting room still had a fish tank.

I sat under it with Camila on my chest and ten envelopes in a gallon freezer bag.

It was Saturday, and the line went out the door.

A woman beside me was holding an eviction notice in both hands.

A man across from me was holding a toddler who kept trying to eat a paper form.

"Alma Tejeda?" someone said from the back.

The man in the doorway wore a grey suit that had been slept in, and reading glasses pushed up into black hair that was going silver at the sides.

He looked about thirty-seven, and he looked like he had not eaten lunch since Tuesday.

"Emiliano Cardenas," he said. "We spoke Monday. Come in. Bring the baby, she's the best witness we have."

His office was a closet with a desk.

He didn't ask me to sit before he held out his hand for the bag.

I gave it to him.

He laid the ten envelopes out in a row and read each card standing up.

Next month. Try again.

Next month. Try again.

He did not look up until he got to the last one.

Good girl.

"The nine who lost, did they come with the same handwriting?" he asked.

"His. Rodrigo's."

"And the one who won?"

"The same."

He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

"Tell me how it started."

I told him.

Two and a half years of Sunday dinners, and the first of every month, and a gray bank pouch Rodrigo carried into his study.

I told him my cards had worked for the first two months of my marriage.

Then Rodrigo said it was a family rule that Aldama wives lived on an allowance, and that his mother liked to hand it out as a game.

He said the game was meant to teach me patience.

I told him I had won three times, and each time it was forty dollars.

"And your own money?" he asked.

"I stopped working when we married. Soledad said a wife of the family doesn't clock in."

"Your savings?"

"I put them in his account to pay for the wedding."

He wrote that down, and I watched his pen press harder on the page.

"Alma," he said, "I'm going to use a word, and I need you not to flinch."

I held Camila a little tighter.

"What your husband and his mother did is financial abuse. It isn't a joke. It isn't a tradition. It's a named pattern, it's in the family code, and a judge has a name for it."

I had been waiting thirty-one months for somebody to say it.

It came out of a stranger in a crumpled suit, and my eyes filled up before I could stop them.

He pushed a box of tissues across the desk without a word.

"The video your friend's neighbor sent you," he said. "The one from the hallway. Can I see it?"

I played it for him.

He watched Soledad say it was over forty dollars.

He watched the officer ask about the envelope.

Then he asked me to open the dinner photo his cousin had posted to the family chat.

I had saved it from the group, the picture of Rodrigo setting the stack down.

He leaned in close to the phone.

His eyes stayed on the gray pouch beside the envelopes, on the stamp.

"Gulf Coast Fiduciary," he said, almost to himself.

"It's a bank," I said. "It comes every month."

"Mm," Emiliano said, and straightened up.

He didn't say anything else about it.

"Here's what I'll file by Monday," he said. "A response to their petition. A counter-petition for primary custody. A motion for temporary support, because your husband has money and you have forty dollars and a baby. And a request that the judge look at the video."

"I can't pay you," I said.

"Good. The clinic doesn't charge." He almost smiled.

"Why do you do this?"

"My mother cleaned offices for forty dollars a night," he said. "Nobody ever filed a motion for her."

He pulled a sticky note off the pad and wrote a name on it.

"A client of mine owns a bakery on Heights Boulevard. She needs someone on the counter for the six a.m. shift, and she'll let you wear the baby."

I thought about the bakery, and a counter, and flour in the air, and no one who knew my husband's name.

"I'll go Monday," I said.

At the door I turned around.

"What happens if he says I stole forty dollars?"

"He'll have to say it in front of a judge," Emiliano said. "With the video in the room."

I was halfway down the hall when his phone rang behind me.

I heard him say, "Cardenas."

Then I heard him say, much more slowly, "Read that again."

He came out into the hallway with the phone still at his ear.

"It's Rodrigo's attorney," he said. "He's offering you a deal."

My stomach dropped.

"If you come home by Friday, the game ends. No more envelopes. And you get a welcome envelope."

"How much?"

"Five thousand dollars," Emiliano said. "Sealed in black wax."

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