The girl at the credit union turned her screen a little toward me, the way I turn mine toward a customer when I need them to see the number for themselves and not just hear it from me.
“Eight hundred twelve dollars and forty cents,” she said. “That’s the available balance on the savings, Shari. Did you want to pull from checking instead?”
I had been a teller at First State Bank for eleven years. I knew that voice. It was the careful voice you use when you can already tell the person across the counter is about to have a very bad day.
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“There should be forty-three thousand in there,” I said. I said it calmly, because I was sure it was a mistake, and mistakes are something I fix for a living. “Can you pull the transaction history for me?”
She printed it. Five sheets of paper came out of the little printer, warm, and she slid them under the glass. I stood at the counter in my work clothes with my purse on my arm and read them like a stranger’s.
November 3, a withdrawal of eight thousand, paid out as an official check. November 21, six thousand five hundred. December 9, eleven thousand. Then smaller ones through January, two thousand here, four thousand there, every check made out to the same place.
Kowalczyk’s Corner Tap. My husband’s brother’s bar. The bar where we had eaten fish fry almost every Friday of our married life.
“Shari?” the girl said. “Are you okay? You want to sit down a minute?”
“I’m fine,” I said, and folded the papers in half, and then in half again, until they were small enough to hold in one hand. “I’ll come back for the earnest money check. Thank you, honey. You did everything right.”
I don’t remember walking to the truck. I remember the cold, because it was the second week of February in central Wisconsin and the wind off the river had teeth, and I remember sitting behind the wheel without starting it.
We had found the house four days before. A little brick ranch on the west side, three bedrooms, a one-stall garage, a basement that only smelled a little like a basement. It sat two miles from the paper mill where Russ had worked since he was twenty.
I had already put my hand on the kitchen counter there and pictured my grandmother’s cookie jar on it. I had already, God help me, picked out which bedroom would be the sewing room.
The money was gone. All of it. And every single withdrawal had been signed by my husband.