Breaking the Bank Read Online Free Page A

She inserted the card, punched in the commands to receive one hundred dollars, and waited. There it was again—that paling and darkening of the screen. Then came the humming that preceded the ejection of the money, the printed receipt. She grabbed the receipt first. A debit of one hundred dollars, just like before. She reached for the wad of bills. It felt thick in her hands, and she counted hastily. Ten bills. But they were not twenties, not this time. Instead, she was holding ten one-hundred-dollar bills. Mia closed her eyes, thinking that she wasimagining the number, seeing what she wanted to see, not what was in fact there. When she opened them, the one remained fixed in the corner of the bill, solidly buttressed by the twin zeroes. One thousand dollars. She was overcome with a sensation of heat and cold simultaneously: her scalp grew hot and itchy, as if it were shrinking perceptibly, while her armpits were suddenly drenched with sweat. One. Thousand. Dollars. A thousand dollars. A cool grand.

TWO
    M IA THOUGHT About the money all the time now: while she was readying Eden for school; girding her loins for another round with Mommy Mousie; riding on the crowded subway; trudging through the aisles at the supermarket; nagging Eden to do her homework; lying in bed late at night, waiting for sleep to come and release her from the day.
    How could such a thing have happened, not once but twice? That the bank could make such an error, two separate times, seemed barely within the realm of credibility, but the subsequent failure to rectify or even acknowledge such errors was on another plane entirely. She waffled back and forth about what to do next: Tell someone there about what happened and offer to return the money? Consider herself lucky to have hit the jackpot on those two occasions and leave well enough alone? Go back to the bank to see if the magic would work yet again? She tossed all the options in her mind as if she were juggling balls in the air.
    Mia wished she could talk to someone about this. Her first impulse was to call Julie, to whom she ritually confided everything. Julie was the person she called when Lloyd told her he was leaving; it was Julie who listened as she poured out her worry about her daughter, about her growing disillusionment with her brother. But even as her mind articulated the desire, Mia knew she was not going to do anything of the kind. To talk about it to anyone else would pin it down, qualify it in some way she was not ready for.
    She hid the money in a box high up on a shelf in the apartment’s single closet. In the box were the ivory
peau de soie
shoes Mia had wornon the day she married Lloyd. The dress, the ring, the preserved bouquet of gardenias she had given away, sold, trashed. But she had loved the shoes with their delicately curved heels and their low, sexy vamp and was unable to part with them. She rolled up the bills and tucked half inside the left shoe, half in the right. Although she had used a few, and would no doubt use more, she didn’t want to keep the money in her wallet. Better to have it high up, so that every time she wanted it, she would have to go through the ritual of dragging a chair over to the closet, climbing up, rooting around for the box.
    M IA HAD had the benefit of a comfortable if not affluent upbringing in a large prewar building on Ninety-ninth Street and Amsterdam Avenue. The address was far from swanky; the Upper West Side, in those years, was not yet the upscale, monied enclave it would become. The neighborhood was replete with bookstores and bagel places, butcher shops and dry cleaners. Mia was fitted for her first bra at the Town Shop; her mother bought produce at Fairway, herring and lox at Barney Greengrass, coffee at Zabar’s. The streets were populated by men with beards, turtlenecks, and wide-wale cords; the local women wore silver jewelry, Birkenstock sandals, and “ethnic” clothing: Mexican shawls, printed cotton skirts from