Memo: Roof

Tuesday, November 9, 2021, 7:40 a.m.

The banking app wanted a memo for the transfer, and Jake had been hovering over the keyboard for almost a minute, sitting in his car in the distribution center's lot with the engine idling for the heat. The amount was already in, $2,000, and the source account was the savings account, the joint one, the one with both their names on it. He typed "bitcoin" and deleted it. He typed "investment" and deleted that too.

He typed "roof" and hit send before he could think about it again.

Then he did a second one, a thousand dollars from his own checking, and that memo took no thought at all because there was no one to explain it to. Three thousand dollars all told. It was more than he'd settled on the night before, and a good deal less than he'd pictured at two in the morning on the couch, doing math with Kyle's three percent still buzzing around his head.

The night before he had searched, of course, whether it was a good time. He'd read that it was, because "the trend is up and there are fewer and fewer bitcoin left to mine," and that it wasn't, because "the market is overheated and greed is at extreme levels," in two articles published on the same day and sometimes on the same site. The Fear & Greed Index read 75. He texted Tyler at one, and Tyler, halfway through his shift, sent back two lines that Jake read many times and didn't much listen to:

"Nobody knows if it's a good time. If you go in, go in with money you won't need."

The first buy

The money didn't land in the exchange until after eleven. Jake knew because he spent the morning pulling his phone out every ten minutes, on the loading dock, in the shift meeting, in the battery aisle, and when the balance finally showed up, three thousand dollars exactly on a white screen that looked nothing like his bank's, he felt something very close to what he used to feel as a kid at the top of the high dive at the public pool.

He ducked into the locker room, empty at that hour, and sat on the wooden bench with the phone in both hands. He thought about the two thousand dollars from the joint account, about the word "roof" he'd typed three hours earlier and how easy it would be to move the money back that same afternoon without anyone ever knowing. He thought about his father, who never bought a single share of anything in his whole life and still lost everything. And he thought, mostly, about the green line on Kyle's phone.

The price was around $67,500, another record. He tapped buy, confirmed, confirmed again when the app asked if he was sure, and a number with a lot of decimals appeared: 0.0444 BTC. He looked at it for a while. Written like that it was almost nothing, a zero and a point and a string of digits, and at the same time it was the first thing he'd ever owned that moved while he watched it.

And it was moving up. By lunch he was ahead one percent, thirty-something dollars, and Jake, who had been scheduling shifts for the same salary for fourteen years, spent the whole afternoon feeling a little smarter than everyone else on the floor. He didn't tell anyone. He only texted Tyler, at four:

"I'm in."

The answer took a while, because at that hour Tyler was asleep.

"Nice. How much and from where?"

Jake answered the first question. He left the second one alone, and Tyler, who was nobody's fool, didn't ask again.

Dinner

Dana got home from the ER at nine-thirty with the face she had on the heavy nights, and the three of them ate in the kitchen, leftover chili and what was left of a bag of salad. Emma said she had a game Friday against the Catholic school and the coach was going to start her. Jake said he'd be there. Dana said she had the evening shift but she'd try to swap it.

"Oh, and our tax refund should come in March," Dana said, stacking the bowls. "I was thinking we could put some of it toward the beach this summer. We haven't gone anywhere in three years, and Mom would love the Outer Banks."

"Sure," Jake said. "Sounds good."

He said it with his phone face down on the table, next to the salt. He didn't look at it until Dana went up to shower, and when he did, it was still green.

The days after

That same night, just after midnight, bitcoin closed below what he'd paid. Not by much, one percent, next to nothing; Jake told himself that was normal, and it was. On Wednesday it dipped a little more, and on Friday, at Emma's game, in the bleachers of a gym that smelled of rubber and sweat, he checked it three times before halftime. He was down a hundred and something dollars. Emma hit two baskets in the first half. Jake cheered for both.

On Saturday morning, while he was doing the grocery run with Dana's list, a message from Kyle landed in the family group chat. It was a screenshot from the three percent platform, a green balance and a column of daily payouts stacked one on top of the other, all identical, not a single day missed. Underneath, a rocket emoji. Linda replied with three hearts. Pam didn't reply at all.

Jake stood in the canned goods aisle staring at the screenshot with a can of tuna in each hand. He was down a hundred and something dollars on something real, and his brother-in-law was getting paid every day for something that, according to Tyler, didn't exist. But he didn't say so to anyone, because to say it he'd have had to tell them about his own first.

That Tuesday bitcoin closed at $66,954, one percent below the day before. Nobody in the world knew yet that Monday's close, $67,562, would be the highest price in a long while, and Jake certainly didn't.

What he did know, because he'd watched it arrive for years without paying it any attention, was that the joint account statement landed in both their inboxes, his and Dana's, on the first of every month.

Last updated: October 6, 2026