Ava came downstairs after he left. She stood in the kitchen doorway in her softball sweatshirt.
“Mom,” she said. “What’s going on? For real.”
I thought about what to tell her. I thought about lying. I thought about saying it was nothing, grown-up stuff, don’t worry about it.
But I’d been raised in a house where people counted money together at the kitchen table. Where nothing was hidden.
“Somebody’s been taking forty dollars out of the jar,” I said. “Every week. For twenty-two weeks.”
Ava’s face changed.
“Not me,” she said quickly. “Mom, I swear. I would never.”
“I know, baby,” I said. “I know it’s not you.”
She looked at the door Duane just went out of. Then back at me.
She didn’t say anything else. But I watched her understand.
Chapter Five: Tina
Thursday afternoon, a regular customer named Tina came into the steakhouse with her sister.
Tina Sutherland. She’s maybe fifty-five. She comes in every Thursday at two o’clock for the soup and salad bar. Always sits in my section. Always orders the French onion and a Diet Coke with extra ice.
Her husband, Burt, worked at the same plant as Duane.
I knew Burt. Big man, bald, with a gray goatee. He worked maintenance at the paper mill. He and Duane bowled together on the plant team for a few years, before Duane quit.
When I brought their coffee, Tina leaned closer.
She waited until her sister went up to the salad bar. Then she put her hand on my arm.
“Lita,” she said quietly. “There’s something you ought to know.”
My stomach tightened. I didn’t know why. Something in her face.
“Okay,” I said.
She explained that Burt had repeatedly seen Duane buying forty dollars’ worth of scratch-off lottery tickets at a gas station near the plant.
The Speedway on Bridge Street. Right outside the plant gates. Where every guy on the shift stops for coffee and cigarettes on the way in.
Every Monday.
Since spring.
I gripped my order pad.
Every Monday. The day he took the jar money to the credit union.
Forty dollars.
“Since spring?” I said. My voice sounded strange to me. “When in spring?”
“March, Burt thinks,” Tina said. “Maybe April. He said Duane started buying them right after Easter. The big ones. Ten-dollar tickets. Four at a time.”
March. Twenty-two weeks.
“Has he ever won anything?” I asked.
Tina hesitated.
She looked over at the salad bar, where her sister was taking a long time choosing croutons. She looked back at me.
“That’s the strange part,” she said. “Burt said he won four thousand dollars back in June. The station even put his picture on the wall.”
June.
I stood there holding the coffeepot. Somebody at table nine was waving at me for a refill. I didn’t move.
That was the month Duane told me his truck needed an expensive transmission repair and insisted we cut back on spending.
Chapter Six: June
I remember June very clearly.
Duane came home from work on a Thursday and sat down at the kitchen table with his head in his hands.
“Transmission’s going on the truck,” he said. “I took it to Fred’s on Western Avenue. He says it’s thirty-two hundred, maybe more. And it’s got to be done. I can’t get to work without it.”
His truck is a 2016 Silverado. It has a hundred and forty thousand miles on it.
I believed him. Why wouldn’t I?
“We’ve got to tighten up,” Duane said. “Everything. No eating out. No extras. I’m going to pay for it out of the joint account, so the jar needs to be fuller. Can you pick up some shifts?”
“Of course,” I said.
I’d picked up three extra shifts to help cover the supposed expense.
Three doubles. Eleven hours each. Three Sundays in a row in June.
I missed Ava’s softball tournament for one of them. The district semifinals in Circleville. She went three for four and made a diving catch at short to end the game.
I saw it on video. On my phone. In the back room at Gallagher’s, on my break, standing next to the walk-in cooler with my feet aching.
She looked for me in the stands. You can see it on the video. After the catch, she turns around and looks at the bleachers.
I wasn’t there.
And the transmission.
I’d never seen a bill. I’d never seen a receipt. Duane said he paid Fred cash. He said Fred gave him a discount for cash.
I never asked to see it. Why would I? He’s my husband.
The truck ran fine in June. It ran fine in July. It’s running fine now.
I finished serving Tina’s table without mentioning another word.
I refilled their coffees. I brought her French onion soup. I brought her sister a second plate from the salad bar. I smiled.
I know how to smile. Eleven years of waiting tables teaches you that. You smile at the man who sends back his steak three times. You smile at the family whose kids throw crackers on the floor. You smile at the table that leaves a dollar on a sixty-dollar check.
When Tina paid her bill, she left me a twenty on a fourteen-dollar check. She squeezed my hand.
“I’m sorry, honey,” she whispered.
“Thank you for telling me, Tina.”
Chapter Seven: The Gas Station
The following morning, I drove to the gas station.
The Speedway on Bridge Street. Right across from the paper mill gates. I got there at nine-fifteen. Duane’s shift started at six. He’d be inside the plant until six tonight.
I parked by the air pump. I sat there in my car for a long time.
Then I went inside.
