Free Skipping a Beat by Sarah Pekkanen Page B

the big deal?”
    One evening a month or so after the prom I didn’t attend, I opened our front door and slipped through the house, intending to go right to my bedroom. I’d been avoiding my parents as much as possible. But I heard my mother’s voice in the living room, and something told me to stop and listen. “How much did we lose?” I heard her say.
    “It’s going to turn around for me,” Dad said. His voice was so tight and shrill I almost didn’t recognize it. “I swear to you, we’re going to be fine.”
    They were sitting side by side on the couch, not looking at each other. Neither of them had bothered to turn on a light, and the room was so shadowy I couldn’t see their faces.
    “How much?” my mother asked. “The store? Please tell me you didn’t borrow against the store.”
    “Eliza, I promise you I’m going to win it back,” Dad said.
    “The house?” Mom asked. Where his voice was shiny and anxious, hers was dull and worn, the flip side of a penny that was glinting in the sun but tarnished underneath.
    “I swear to you,” Dad repeated feverishly. “I’ve had a bad streak, but do you know how much I won last week? Two thousand dollars. In one night! I’m so close to turning it around. Baby, just hang on. We’ll get back to where we started, then I’ll quit.”
    “Oh, Steven,” my mother said, and the desolation in her gentle voice broke my heart.
    Nothing stopped him from gambling, not when the bank foreclosed on the general store that winter, not when our pickup was repossessed a few months later, not even when we were evicted from our house and had to move in with Dad’s brother and his wife during the summer before my senior year of high school.
    If I hadn’t met Michael a few months earlier, I don’t know what I would have done. Run away, maybe, or quit school and gotten a job so I could move out. Everyone was miserable; my aunt was so angry at our intrusion that she marched around with her mouth in a thin, tight line, barely speaking except when she and my uncle were fighting behind their closed bedroom door, and my mother just looked wan and colorless, as though she’d given up on life and was waiting for it to be over. All the joy had seeped out of us, and the worst part, the part I could never forgive him for, was that Dad didn’t stop. He tried to borrow from the neighbors, from his friends, even from the mechanic at the auto shop, a guy with tattoo sleeves on both arms. He put an oil-stained hand on Dad’s shoulder and I caught him whispering, “Get help … I’ve been there …,” while I stared at a blue-inked Marilyn Monroe flirting on his thin forearm and wondered when I’d started to feel so old.
    It felt as though our family had been ripped open and exposed for everyone to see, with our problems spilling out like the ugly gray stuffing of a once-smiling teddy bear. Sometimes Dad stayed away for more than a night, and I knew he’d found his way up to Atlantic City again, probably by hitchhiking. I could barely stand to be in the house at those times, knowing either Dad would come home all manic, trying to make up for a year’s worth of pain with gifts and glib charm that would quickly evaporate, or he’d be dark and withdrawn.
    Dad and I never went for a ride together again.
    So you see, the prenup was my way of trying to protect myself. When Michael and I got married, he was still struggling to get his new company off the ground, and he owed tens of thousands of dollars in loans from college and business school. I earned more money than he did at that point, and I had less debt. I had no doubt Michael would be successful, but as much as I loved him, as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t bring myself to gamble on him.
    Our prenup was so straightforward that a lawyer drew it up in an hour: We’d be married, but as far as money was concerned, we were essentially two separate people. Whatever each of us brought into the marriage and subsequently earned would