I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow, but neither the conversation with our bank, nor that with the credit card issuer, improved my lie. Our bank account, which we had established together fifteen years ago when we bought a place and finally moved in together, was empty. Wiped out, including the fifty-five hundred bucks in our savings account. One Jeremy Nakamura had withdrawn every penny in a cashier’s check from the bank’s Avenida Casanova office in downtown Caracas the day before yesterday. When the helpful credit card representative in India explained that spending on our credit card had far exceeded our limit, I asked her if she could enumerate the recent purchases that had put us over the top.
“Isn’t our limit like thirty thousand dollars?” I asked her.
“It was. It was raised six months
