She took her time, savoring every bite of the chocolate lava cake and finishing the glass of a vintage Cabernet that cost more than my first car payment. The waiter, looking anxious because three of the four guests had sprinted out, finally approached the table with a trembling hand to present the leather folio. The bill was astronomical—easily over $1,500.
“Ma’am,” he whispered. “Your party seemed to have… left in a hurry.”
“Oh, don’t worry about them,” my mom said, dabbing the corners of her mouth with a napkin. “They just had to run.”
She reached into her purse, but she didn’t pull out her own debit card. She pulled out a sleek, heavy, black American Express card.
“Put it on this,” she said pleasantly, adding a generous 30% tip to the total.
Here is the kicker: what my in-laws “forgot” was that my husband—their son—had been given that specific card for “emergencies only” back in college. His father, arrogant and obsessed with controlling the finances, never cancelled it because he liked seeing his name on the “Family Account.” Before we left the country, my husband had handed it to my mom and said, “If they try to pull the wallet trick, consider this an emergency.”
The best part was the timing. Because my father-in-law has transaction alerts set up on his phone, he received a push notification for a nearly $2,000 charge while he was literally driving the getaway car. He couldn’t turn around to cause a scene because he had just staged a fake “emergency,” and he couldn’t dispute the charge as fraud because the restaurant had security footage of him eating the lobster and drinking the wine for two hours.
My mom walked out of the restaurant, thanked the valet, and took a luxurious Uber Black home. The next morning, my mother-in-law sent a passive-aggressive text: “We saw a large charge on the account last night. We assumed you made a mistake?”
Mom’s reply was legendary: “No mistake! Since you all forgot your wallets, I just used the family emergency fund. After all, leaving a lady alone with a bill is quite the emergency, isn’t it?”
They haven’t “forgotten” their wallets since.
