The Casino Sign My Mother Read

He came in at a quarter to three in the morning with his boots still on, and I knew before he said a word.

I had been a nurse eleven years by then. You learn a face. You learn the particular looseness a man’s mouth gets when he has done a thing he cannot take back and has decided, on the drive home, that it was fine.

Greg set his keys in the dish by the door. He missed the dish. The keys hit the counter and slid off onto the floor, and he looked down at them like they had jumped out of his hand on purpose.

“Dana,” he said. “Hey. You’re up.”

I was up because the check had not come in the mail that day, and I had called the power company office at four in the afternoon, and a girl named Kim told me it had been picked up at the counter that morning. Signed for. By Greg.

Eight thousand dollars. The lease money for the one wind turbine that stood on my forty acres, the check that came once a year in the first week of October, the same week every year since they raised the turbine.

“Where’s the check, Greg.”

He got the refrigerator open. He stood in the light of it with his back to me.

“We’ll talk in the morning,” he said.

“It’s morning.”

He turned around with a beer he was not going to drink, because he was already past drinking, and he gave me the smile. The loose one.

“I had a good run for a while,” he said. “I was up. You should have seen me, I was up almost four grand at one point.”

“Where is it.”

“It’s gone, baby.” He said it gentle, like he was breaking news to me about somebody else. “It’s just fun money anyway. It’s not like it’s real money. It’s that turbine money, it just shows up. It’s not like you worked for it.”