This is an excerpt from The Happenstance, Olivia Dreizen Howell’s essay newsletter on Substack. It’s where she writes about the things that arrived unplanned, often looking like the worst thing that ever happened: starting over, raising two boys, and building something from the ground up.
Most of The Happenstance is free to read. A few pieces sit behind a paywall. That isn’t to keep anyone out. Some of this writing is personal, and we’d rather it not travel the internet unattended.
In August 2019, two weeks after my husband moved out, I got a CVS receipt sent to my email.
Ordinarily, this would not have been a big deal. I went to CVS constantly then. It was across the street from our house, and I was there many times a week for diapers, shampoo, snacks, medicine, whatever small domestic emergency the day had created.
But this was a Saturday night.
I was home alone with the kids.
And I had not gone to CVS that day.
At first, I barely noticed it. CVS receipts show up in your email and you don’t exactly stop your whole life to investigate. But then I looked closer and saw the address.
It was not the CVS across the street from our house.
It was a CVS in the Midwest.
So I sat down on the stairs in my kitchen while the kids played in the other room, and I opened the email again.
It was my account. That much was clear. Someone had used my CVS card to get the discount. Technically, it wasn’t even my card. It was under my grandmother’s phone number, because she had died and I had kept using her number for the coupons and points she had spent years earning.
And if I’m being honest, I kept using it because it made me feel like she was still alive for one second when I typed her phone number into the screen.
Evidently, my ex still had the little CVS ExtraCare tag on his keychain. The tiny plastic barcode thing you scan at the register. A ridiculous little leftover from our shared life.
And there it was.
A bottle of water.
A box of Ferrero Rocher.
Condoms.
When I got to the third item, I audibly gasped and called my sister.
Read the rest at The Happenstance.
More from The Happenstance
Essays by Olivia Dreizen Howell on starting over, raising two boys, and building something from the ground up.
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