the game, he realized that telling his wife that he’d willingly let a man strap his arm to a bone-breaking machine might create challenges in their marriage.
He wasn’t going to outright lie about it. He would admit that he’d been gambling, and he’d explain that it was a cash prize from a game. He just didn’t necessarily need to include every single detail of the experience. He had two more days in Vegas. There was plenty of time to figure out precisely how to share his exciting tale of adventure.
Now that he was back in his room, his plan was to call home, take a shower, watch some TV, and go to bed. If he’d won the money when he was young and single, this would have been a very different night, but though he was a piece of garbage who would recklessly gamble away money they most definitely couldn’t afford, being unfaithful to his wife was not one of his flaws. No escorts for him.
“Hey,” he said, when Jenny answered.
“Hey, you. How’s the trip going?”
“Great. Really great. I can’t wait to tell you about it.”
“Well, I’m on the phone right now.”
“What I meant was, the training sessions are going great, way better than I expected, but the details would bore the crap out of you. I can talk you through the whole day if you want, minute by minute.”
“It’s either that or I tell you about my day.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Let’s just say that both of our sons have lost their video game privileges for a while.”
“What’d they do?”
“I’ll let them confess to you, one at a time.”
“All right. Put the criminals on.”
Tim had mouthed off to his mother, which was nothing unusual. Patrick had been caught trying to cheat on a math test, which was completely out of character. He’d cried when telling Ethan what he’d done, and Ethan felt guilty playing the role of Stern Disappointed Father, considering that he’d expected to be begging for Jenny’s forgiveness for his own mistake. Because Patrick was otherwise a great student—he’d cheated because he was worried that he might not get an A—the punishment from the teacher had been pretty light: three days of after-school detention and a zero on the test.
Ethan informed both of his sons that they’d discuss this when he got home. Then he told Jenny that he loved her and missed her. She said the same. He almost wanted to tease a big surprise, then decided against it. This surprise did come with a shameful confession, so it was better to do it in person.
He had tickets to a show the following night, but getting to the performance space involved walking through a casino, so he gave the tickets away.
When he got back home to Kansas City, he gave his sons their presents and their lectures.
He’d decided that he should tell Jenny about the money separately, so he waited until Tim and Patrick had gone to bed.
Ethan had a knot in his stomach as he took a couple of beers out of the refrigerator and handed one to Jenny. He honestly wasn’t sure how she’d react.
“I have some news,” he said, sitting down next to her on the couch. Their children had done sort of a mix-and-match with their parents’ features: Patrick had Jenny’s light brown hair but was unfortunate enough to look like his father in the face, while Tim had inherited Ethan’s black hair but his mother’s good looks.
“Good news or bad news?”
“Good news. Well, news with a very happy ending, and a bump along the way.”
Jenny popped open the can of beer. “Am I going to need this?”
“It can’t hurt.”
She took a long swig of it. “Tell me.”
“When I was in Vegas, I fell off the wagon.”
“Oh, shit, Ethan, are you serious?”
“Yeah.”
“I told you not to go on the trip. You promised it wouldn’t be a problem.”
“I know, I know. I should have listened to you. I was totally fine. And then I just thought, well, fifty bucks can’t hurt, can it?”
“Of course it can. Didn’t you have your note with you?”
Jenny looked like she was about to burst into tears. She seemed to have already forgotten that this story had a happy ending.
“I did. And I read it. I even read it out loud. It just didn’t work. I started playing, and, yeah, I was down for a while. Way down. But in the end I came out ahead.”
“How much ahead?”
“Brace yourself. Fifty thousand dollars.”
“What?”
“I’m serious. We now have an extra fifty thousand dollars in