My Husband Bought Dinner After Cutting Off My Grocery Card

My card failed over a bag of potting soil and three pears.

The total was $28.60. The clerk tried it twice. Behind me, a man shifted a flat of mums from one arm to the other.

I paid with cash and called Travis from the parking lot.

"I took you off the household cards," he said. "We need to get serious about spending."

"I bought soil."

"That's how it starts."

That evening, he took six friends to dinner in downtown Columbia. He ordered two bottles of wine and told the server the whole check was his.

I had washed my hands, but a blue stain stayed beneath one nail.

At fifty-two, I was a small Japanese American woman with a straight black bob threaded with gray, brown eyes, and a sun spot beside my left cheek.

I worked as a botanical illustrator. I drew seed heads, roots, and the small veins that told one leaf from another. I tested watercolor pigments on the cuffs of my gardening shirt, which Travis said made me look like a woman who had lost a fight with a printer.

He liked that joke enough to use it twice.

Travis was a broad white man of fifty-five, with sandy hair combed over a pink scalp and a soft mouth that tightened whenever a bill reached me first.

He prepared taxes in an office he owned off Broadway. At dinner, he leaned back as if the whole room were part of his office.

"Keiko's lucky," he told our friends. "She's never had to work. She's had her little flower hobby our whole marriage."

My fork stopped above my plate.

"I had a publisher deadline this morning."

"For the seed catalog," he said, smiling. "Sweetheart, nobody means you don't keep busy."

Our friend Beth looked down at her bread. Her husband asked Travis about golf.

I could have named the hours. I could have described painting a bean pod under a lamp until my neck locked. Instead, I asked for a box for half my dinner.

"See?" Travis said. "I take care of her."

He left a $70 tip where everyone could see it.

On the way home, I asked about the royalty payment due from Prairie Fold Press, a small seed-catalog publisher.

"Production costs," he said. "Their business hasn't been good."

"Three years of bad business?"

He turned the radio up as we passed the courthouse.

At home, the kitchen desk held a notice from our bank. My card access had ended. The checking account was in his name; I had been an authorized user. So had the credit card. He had always called them our accounts.

I tried the household budget login. My password no longer worked.

"You don't need all those screens," he said from the doorway. "Ask me when you need something."

"What if you say no?"

"Then maybe you don't need it."

He went upstairs.

I sat at the desk until the furnace clicked on. Outside, dry oak leaves scraped along the walk. It was the first cool week of October, and I had left my basil uncovered.

I thought of going out to cover it. Then I opened the flat drawer beneath my drawing table.

Travis called that drawer my scrapbook.

It held the original licenses for ninety-six plant plates, plus the dated sheets that showed I had drawn them before our wedding. Each license listed me as the owner. The publisher had bought permission to print the work, not the work itself.

The contract also gave me the right to inspect the royalty records.

I had explained that once to Travis.

"Fine print," he had said. "That's my department."

Beside the contracts lay an envelope Prairie Fold had included with a package of color proofs three years earlier. It had first been sent to a Columbia post office box, then returned to the publisher marked ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN.

Inside was a letter asking me to verify a change in payment instructions, with a copy of the request attached.

When I had shown Travis that package, he had called it an address error. He said he would handle it.

I had kept it because the return stamp had bled through the paper in a fine red branch. I often saved odd paper for color tests.

My best leaves always had a thin white vein left unpainted. Cover that line, and the leaf went flat. Leave it, and the whole thing had a spine.

I laid the envelope beside the contract.

I still had $5,900 in my own credit union account, built from weekend drawing classes. Travis knew about it. He called it my brush fund.

For the first time, I considered what else it could buy.

I unfolded the attached payment request. Beneath the new payment address sat the name of a company I had never heard of.

Ash Pin Services LLC.

Below that was a signature that was supposed to be mine.