Promise Me

The most dangerous of all indulgences is trust.

Beth Cardall’s Diary

Sunday morning was gray, the sky streaked with dark, spidery clouds. I got up early and went out looking again—still wearing the same clothes from the day before. Nothing. It was around five in the afternoon that I faced the inevitable. He was gone. My money was gone. My house was gone. He had probably skipped town, gone back to Italy or wherever it was he really came from. I pulled into a Kmart parking lot and called Roxanne from a pay phone.

“Any luck?” she asked.

“No,” I said crying. “He’s vanished.”

“I was hoping you’d call. I’ve got news.”

“What?”

“This morning I told Ray about what had happened, and he said that he saw Matthew yesterday afternoon at the Chevron station. I asked him how he knew who Matthew was and he said he didn’t, that Matthew had just walked up to him and asked if he was my husband.”

“How he know that?”

“I have no idea. Anyway, Ray didn’t know he had stolen your money, so they were just slinging spit, you know, talking man stuff. Ray asked if he was going to watch the Mike Tyson fight, and Matthew said he was headed to Wendover to put a little down on it.”

“Oh, no,” I said.

Wendover is a small gambling town about an hour and a half from Salt Lake City just over the Nevada border—a cultural by-product of Utah’s antigambling laws.

“I’ve got to go out there,” I said. “I’m going to get my money back.”

“Honey, let me and Ray go with you.”

“No. I’m going to do this. I have to do this.”

“Honey, you be careful. There’s no telling what he might be capable of.”

I ran back out to my car. So that was it. He was a gambler. A thief, a liar and a gambler, and he was about to lose Charlotte’s and my future.

The drive to Wendover is 120 miles west on I-80, passing the Great Salt Lake and the Bonneville Salt Flats, one of the flattest places on the planet—so flat that you can see the curvature of the earth. The flats are the grounds where dozens of world land speed records were claimed, from Ab Jenkins’s 1935 Duesenberg “Mormon Meteor” to Craig Breedlove’s “Spirit of America,” the first car to reach 600 mph.

For me it was a hundred miles of nothing to see—nothing to distract me from the cauldron of panic that boiled in my chest. I wondered how many other women Matthew (I could barely think his name without feeling sick) had scammed in this way.

On a practical basis there were other things to worry about. What would happen when I got there? Would I find him? Was he violent? Would the casino help me? What if he had already lost all my money?

First Marc and now Matthew. I wondered why I was so adept at attracting broken men. Maybe they were all broken.

I reached the neon glow of Wendover around eight-thirty and drove past a sixty-four-foot-tall sheet-metal cowboy pointing down at the stripe across the road that separates Utah from Nevada. I stopped at the first casino I reached, the Rainbow Casino, a brightly lit trap in the desert landscape. I parked my car in the crowded parking lot and ran inside, fueled equally by adrenaline and emotion.

The casino interior was cavernous and crowded, echoing with the clinking, whirring sounds of slot machines and the electric song of illuminated wheels of fortune. I ran up to a tall, uniform-wearing man standing at the concierge desk.

“May I help you?” he asked.

“Where do they gamble on boxing?”

“The Tyson-Douglas fight,” he said. He pointed past a large, illuminated field of slot machines. “Over past the lobby at the Race Book. But you’re too late to get anything down, the fight’s started.”

“Am I too late to get my money back?”

He looked at me dully. “Once the fight starts, no money changes hands.”

I stepped away from him, speechless. I was too late. I walked over to the part of the casino where the man had pointed. There was a large neon sign that read RACE AND SPORTSBOOK. Beneath the sign was a large bank of televisions—an entire wall of screens—the majority of them tuned to the boxing match. The Tyson-Douglas fight was clearly the main event, and a large, excited crowd of mostly men were talking and drinking and shouting out as the two fighters danced around the ring exchanging blows.

Then I saw him. Unlike the rest of the crowd, Matthew seemed detached from the event, sitting alone at a small round table. He held a drink in one hand. The sight of him made me feel sick and scared and angry in equal parts. “Matthew!” I shouted. He didn’t respond. I shouted louder. “Matthew!”

He looked around, then over at me, clearly surprised to see me. He stood as I approached. “Beth. What are you doing here?”

“I want my money back.”

He said calmly, “You’ll get it. And a lot more.”

“I want it now.” Several of the other patrons looked over at us. “Hand it over,” I shouted. “Now!”

He looked around, embarrassed by the attention I’d drawn. “I can’t do that. I don’t have it anymore.”

“Who has it?”

“The casino.”

“How much of it did you gamble?”

He looked at me warily. “Listen—”

“How much?!”

“All of it.”

I slapped him. “You crook. That was everything we had.” I began to hyperventilate. “That was Charlotte’s schooling. That’s what keeps us off the street. I can’t believe I trusted you.”

More people were now watching us than the monitors.

“Beth, you have to trust me. I would never do anything to hurt you.”

I was crying. “Are you insane? You’ve hurt me more than anyone I’ve ever known. You’ve hurt me more than Marc.”

“Beth, you don’t understand.” He reached out to me and I screamed.

“Don’t you dare touch me! Don’t you ever touch me again. I don’t ever want to see you again.” I began backing away from him. I was hysterical. “You stay away from me and my daughter. If I ever see you again, I’ll call the police. Stay away from me!” I turned and ran out of the casino.

I sobbed almost the entire way home. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to drive my car across the divider into every semi I passed, and if it weren’t for Charlotte, I might have. About thirty minutes from Salt Lake, just west of Tooele, I got pulled over by the highway patrol. I almost couldn’t stop crying long enough to give the police officer my information.

The officer didn’t give me a ticket. When I was finally able to tell him what Matthew had done, he was sympathetic. “Are you sure you can make it home?”

“Yes.”

“I know you’re upset, but slow down and drive carefully. We don’t want to add an accident to this.”

“Thank you, officer.”

“You’re welcome, ma’am.” He handed me back my license. “You say it was the Tyson fight?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“Well, let’s hope he bet on the long shot, because Tyson just got knocked out.”

I got home around midnight. Charlotte was still at Roxanne’s, leaving the place as dark and empty as I felt inside. It had snowed off and on all day and my home was covered with nearly a foot of new snow. My home? It wasn’t mine anymore. How could I have so casually lost it? How could I be so gullible? When he asked to be a cosignatory, his accessing my entire account had never even crossed my mind.

I think I cried all night. I cried less about the money than the confirmed reality that my deepest suspicions were right—he never wanted me. I was nothing to him but a dope. I was unlovable.

The next day I was still lying in bed at one in the afternoon when Jan brought Charlotte home.

“Mrs. C?” she shouted. “We’re back.”

I didn’t want Jan or Charlotte to see me as I was, unshowered, undressed, my face puffy and tear-streaked. “Thank you, Jan,” I said gruffly from behind the door. “Can I pay you tomorrow?”

“No problem, Mrs. C., Charlotte, Molly and I had a great time, didn’t we, girl?”

“Yep.”

“I’ll see you later,” I heard Jan say. “Give me skin.”

A moment later my door opened. My bedroom was a cave, the blinds drawn and the light off. “Hi, Mom,” Charlotte said. Through the darkness I could see she was holding her Molly doll and wearing an oversized raccoon-tail hat.

My voice was strained and weak, but I tried to sound normal. “Did you have a good time, honey?”

“Yep. Can I turn on the light?”

“Let’s just leave it off.”

“Are you sick?”

“I have a headache,” I said.

She walked to my side, close enough to see that I had been crying. “What’s wrong, Mom?”

“Nothing.” Charlotte just stared at me. She knew better. “Nothing I can talk about.”

“Is it Mr. Matthew?”

I burst into tears. How could a six-year-old be so astute? Charlotte climbed into bed and snuggled up with me. “You can hold Molly.”

“Thank you. I’d rather hold you.”

“Mr. Matthew said he wouldn’t make you cry.”

I ran my hands back over her cheeks, pulling back her long, blond hair. “He’s not who we thought he was.”

“He’s not Mr. Matthew?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is he someone bad?”

“Yes, honey. He is.”

“He didn’t seem bad.”

“People aren’t always what they seem to be.”

I didn’t climb out of bed until five. I felt like I’d been run over by a motorcycle gang. Charlotte was at the kitchen table drawing pictures with crayon. I went to the kitchen to make her some dinner. I had just put some water on to boil when the doorbell rang. I wasn’t expecting anybody and I didn’t want to see anybody. “Charlotte, will you get that?”

“Sure, Mom.” She put down her crayons and ran to the door.

I heard the door open, then after a moment I heard Charlotte say, “She’s crying.”

A minute later she walked back into the kitchen. “Mr. Matthew’s here.”

I looked at her in disbelief. “Matthew?”

She nodded.

I took the pan off the burner and turned off the stove. My heart filled with rage. It was something I had become good at—concealing heartbreak with anger.

Charlotte had left the front door open and as I walked into the foyer I saw him. He stood there, a few feet from the door wearing only a hooded sweatshirt, his arms wrapped around himself from the cold. He looked at me anxiously. I noticed he held something in his hand. An envelope.

“I told you I never wanted to see you again,” I said fiercely.

“Here’s your money back,” he said, holding out the envelope. “It’s all there with your winnings.”

In spite of my anger I felt a tremendous flood of relief. I started to cry.

He said, “I’m sorry that you think I was trying to take advantage of you. I wasn’t. I just didn’t want you to lose your home.”

I stood there glaring at him. “I don’t want your winnings. I don’t gamble.”

“Neither do I.”

“Then what do you call it?”

“It’s not gambling if you already know how it ends.” He pushed the envelope forward. “Take it.”

I took the envelope without looking at it. “This doesn’t change anything.”

“You should open it.”

The envelope wasn’t sealed. I reached in and extracted a check from the envelope. It took a moment for the amount to register. I had never seen that many zeros on a check. I raised my hand to my face.

“Mike Tyson was a forty-two-to-one favorite,” he said.

I couldn’t speak.

“Beth, you have to trust me that I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you. Ever. I went to Wendover for you. I only had your best interest in mind.” He put his hands in his pockets.

“I never want to see you again,” I said.

He looked stricken but not surprised. “If that’s what you want.” He pulled his hood up and turned and walked out to his car. I watched him drive away. He never looked back.

Charlotte walked up as I shut the door. “Is he still bad?”

Still clutching the check I crouched down and hugged her. “I don’t know what he is.”