The Receipt on My Husband’s Pillow

The savings account had $3,912 in it. I read the number three times, sitting at our kitchen table on a Tuesday night in August, with the window fan pulling in the smell of cut beans from the Lindqvist place across the road.

There should have been $52,000 in that account. I knew the number the way some women know their weight.

I had watched it climb for fourteen years, a few hundred dollars at a time, and I had never once taken anything out of it for myself.

Ava needed braces. The orthodontist in Mason City wanted $1,200 down and $160 a month after that, and I had sat down after the dishes to move the down payment over so I could call them in the morning.

I clicked on the account history. I am not good with the banking app, so it took me a minute to understand what I was looking at.

Transfers out. Two hundred dollars. Five hundred. Three hundred. A thousand. Going back further than the screen would scroll.

Every one of them went to the same place, a company name I didn’t know. I wrote it on the back of an envelope from the electric co-op because my hand needed something to do.

Upstairs, the shower was running. Travis had come home from the elevator at nine, eaten his supper standing up at the counter, and gone up to wash the grain dust off.

He did that every night from August on. Harvest was coming, and the elevator never sleeps in harvest.

His phone was lying on the counter by the coffee maker, face up, plugged into the charger. While I sat there with that envelope in my hand, it lit up and buzzed against the Formica.

I don’t snoop. I want that understood. In sixteen years of marriage I had never looked at his phone, and he had never looked at mine.

We were not that kind of people. We had nothing to hide, or I thought we didn’t.

But I got up and looked at it. The little banner across the top said, “Your deposit was successful.” And the name on it was the same company name I had written on the electric co-op envelope.

I knew his passcode. It was Owen’s birthday. Everybody in our house used a birthday for a passcode, because we were not the kind of family that needed a hard one.

The app opened to a green screen with football helmets on it. I had to scroll a while before I understood. It was a sports betting app.

Iowa made them legal a few years back, and I remember Travis saying at the time that it was a waste of money and the state ought to be ashamed.

There was a history page. Two years of it. Football on Sundays, which I could almost understand. But also basketball, baseball, hockey. College games in states he had never been to.

A soccer game in a country I had to sound out. Bets placed at 1:14 in the morning, at 5:50 in the morning, at 12:30 on a weekday, when he would have been at work.

There was a total at the bottom of one screen. I am not going to pretend I understood every line of it, but I understood that one.

Thirty-nine thousand and some dollars in. About a thousand back out. The rest of it gone, close to forty thousand dollars of it.