The Receipt on My Husband’s Pillow

I set the envelope down on the table. “How much worse?”

“Not more money,” he said quickly. “You know all the money. It’s how it started. I never told you how it started.”

I waited.

He took a breath like a man going under water. “Two years ago, in the spring, I opened a trading account. On my own. For corn futures.”

I didn’t even know what that meant, not really. He saw it on my face and explained it, plain, the way he explains things to farmers at the scale house.

He had watched the market every day for fifteen years for his job.

In June two summers ago it was dry, and everybody at the elevator was saying the crop was in trouble. Travis was sure corn was going to climb.

So he bought two contracts of December corn on his own, ten thousand bushels, with $9,000 he moved out of our savings into a trading account.

I had read right past that transfer in August, because I was looking for the other name.

“Then it rained,” he said. “The whole first week of July. Best rain we’d had in three years. And corn fell eighty-six cents in two weeks.”

Eighty-six cents on ten thousand bushels is $8,600. He said it before I could do the math. He’d done that math so many times, I think it was carved on the inside of his skull.

“I’m the elevator manager,” he said. “I’m supposed to know that market better than anybody in this county. And I lost almost nine thousand dollars of our money on a guess, and I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t tell anybody. Do you understand? I couldn’t stand you knowing I was that stupid.”

“So you started betting on football,” I said.

“I started betting to win back the nine,” he said. “That’s all it was supposed to be. One good weekend. And then I was down twelve. And then twenty. And every time I was down more, it seemed even more like I had to win it back before you found out, because the hole was so much bigger.”

He laughed, one short awful laugh. “And then I asked you to take Saturdays. So I’d have more time to fix it. That’s the truth, Jen. That’s the worst thing I ever did in my life. I put you to work so I could keep digging.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t trust myself to.

“I bet on a soccer game in Turkey at two in the morning last week,” he said.

“With your paycheck gone from the account. With you paying the house. I lay there on the couch with Owen’s apples in my head and I still did it.”

So he knew about the apples. Of course he did. Owen tells his dad everything.

“I can’t stop,” he said. “I’ve tried. I deleted it in September, and I put it back on in three days. I can’t stop by myself, and I can’t keep finding those receipts on my pillow.”

He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his phone. He looked at it for a long second.

“I have to call somebody, Jen,” he said. “Right now. Before I lose my nerve.”

I thought he meant a hotline. Or Becky, even, to tell her she was right about him. I didn’t know who he meant.

He didn’t open the app. He went into his contacts and scrolled and pressed a name, and then he put the phone on speaker and laid it face up on the kitchen table between us, next to mine.