The Receipt on My Husband’s Pillow

“I’m not calling a lawyer yet,” I told Becky. “But I’m not doing nothing, either.”

“What’s the difference?”

“I’ll let you know when I figure it out,” I said, and went back inside to check in a parakeet.

I figured it out that night, scrubbing the roaster pan long after it was clean.

I couldn’t make Travis stop. Nobody can make a grown man stop anything; I learned that from watching my uncle Dale drink himself out of a farm.

What I could do was make sure that whatever Travis did next, he could not do it with the roof over my children’s heads.

The next day I took my lunch hour early and drove to the credit union on Main Street.

A woman named Kathy, who I knew from the Methodist church, sat me down at her little desk and opened a checking account in my name only. It took twenty minutes and a copy of my driver’s license.

Kathy didn’t ask me why a married woman of forty-one wanted an account with only her name on it.

She’d been doing that job a long time. She just slid the papers across and said, “You want the free checks or the ones with the pheasants?”

“Free,” I said.

Then I went back to the clinic and found Kim, our office manager, in the back with the invoices. I asked her for a new direct deposit form.

Kim looked at the new account number I’d written down, then at me, and didn’t say a word about it. She just said it would take one pay period to switch over.

I moved the $3,912 left in savings into my new account that same afternoon. Ava’s braces were going to get paid for if I had to work Sundays, too. I also called the bank and had the online transfers shut off on the old savings account, so nothing else could leave it.

When Travis came home that night, I waited until the kids were in bed, and then I sat down across from him at the table and told him what I’d done.

I kept my voice at the level you use in a church foyer.

“My paycheck goes to the credit union now,” I said. “In my name. I’m paying the mortgage out of it. All of it. Every month.”

He looked at me. “Jen, I can pay the…”

“Your check covers the electric, the propane, the groceries and the truck,” I said. “Mine keeps a roof over the kids. That’s how it’s going to be.”

He opened his mouth and shut it again. Then he nodded. He didn’t argue, and he didn’t ask me how long. I think he knew he didn’t have the right to ask me anything yet.

“Are you going to tell your dad?” I asked.

He looked down at the table. “No.”

“Then I won’t either,” I said. “But I’m not going to lie for you, Travis. If somebody asks me straight, I’ll tell them.”

Nobody asked me straight. Nobody ever does, in a town of three thousand people. They just watch.

The payment was due on the first, and that year the first of September was Labor Day, so I went on the Tuesday.

On my lunch hour I drove to First State Bank, where we’d had the mortgage for eleven years, and stood in line behind a farmer paying on an operating note and a teenage girl cashing her paycheck from the Casey’s.