Yes.

I called Marty at home tonight. His wife answered and said, "Is this the clerk?" and I said yes, and she said, "He's been sitting by the phone all weekend pretending he isn't." Then he got on, and I said yes, and he said, "Good," and then he said, "Monday we talk numbers again, and then we never talk about it at home. Deal?" Deal.

Here's the plan. I clerk for him through October, and I train my replacement, a runner from our desk who reminds me of me two years ago, only taller. Monday, November 1, I walk into the bean pit with my own trading card and my own deck and I stand in the back where the new people stand, and I trade one-lots. Darlene's last day is New Year's Eve. She says she's going to stand behind me for two months and watch and not say a word. I've never seen Darlene not say a word. That alone is worth the price of admission.

I know the screens are coming. Maybe in five years, maybe twenty. Everybody I respect thinks so, even the ones who won't say it. But I figure it like this: whatever comes next, people who know how a market really moves are going to be worth something, and I can either learn that standing in a pit with my hands up or reading about it in a book. And I'm a cop's kid. We don't read about it in a book.

Mom lit a candle. Dad said, "Call me at the lake the first day you lose money, and I'll tell you what I tell everybody. Did you cry? Did you fix it?" Paul said he wants a cut. Tricia asked if I'm going to be rich. I said, Trish, I'm going to be loud.

And the first thing I'm doing with my first good week is buying a trading jacket that fits.

Thanks for reading, all two and a half years of it. Palms in.

Numbers night. I sat at the kitchen table with a legal pad, which is where every decision in my family has been made since 1972.

The math of a one-lot: a quarter cent on one contract of beans is $12.50. If I'm right by a penny, that's fifty dollars. If I'm wrong by a penny, that's fifty dollars the other way. Do that fifty times a day and you can see how it adds up, in either direction, before lunch.

So I wrote down rules, the way Marty taught me to keep his position, where I can see them:

1. One-lots until Marty says otherwise. Not until I think otherwise. Until he does.
2. A loss limit for the day. When I hit it, I walk out of the pit and go clerk for somebody, anybody, till the close.
3. A loss limit for the whole thing, a number Marty and I agree on. If I hit it, I'm done, no arguing, and I go back to clerking and I don't feel sorry for myself.
4. Never trade to make back what I lost. That's what happened to Eddie.
5. I don't need to be right. I need to be out.

Number five is Marty's, from a year ago. It's still in my wallet on the back of a trading card.

FLOOR WORD: one-lot. One contract. The smallest trade there is. Where everybody starts, and where some people should have stayed.

The kid upstairs, the one the old guys call Nintendo, let me sit at his screen after the close today and try it.

It's a gray box with numbers in rows. The bids on one side, the offers on the other, how many at each price. You click, and you're in. You click again, and you're out. Nobody yells. Nobody's elbow is in your ear. Nobody's face tells you anything, because there are no faces. I made three pretend trades in a test account and lost on two of them and didn't feel a thing. That's what scared me. On the floor, you feel every tick in your stomach.

He's a nice kid. He said, "You know this is coming, right? All of it. The pits. Five years, ten." I said maybe. He said, "Not maybe." Then he asked me what a bean looks like. I told him I'd only seen them for the first time in July. He didn't think that was funny. I did.

So here's my problem: do you start something new in a room that might not be there in ten years? Or is that exactly when you start, so you learn it while you still can?

Labor Day weekend at a rented cabin on a lake in Wisconsin, because my retired father now fishes. Turns out he likes it. Turns out he's terrible at it and doesn't care, which none of us saw coming.

This morning I went out with him in the rowboat at six, just the two of us, and the lake was flat and gray and quiet, which after the floor is like being underwater. I told him about Marty's offer. He listened all the way through without saying anything and reeled in his line and looked at his worm.

Then he said, "You're asking a cop about risk." I said I guess I am. He said, "Every day for thirty-two years I went to work and didn't know. Your mother didn't know. There's risk that picks you and risk you pick. The kind you pick, you get to set the rules. That's the good kind. That's a luxury." Then he said, "Don't lose more than you can lose," which is the best trading advice I've heard from anybody, and he's never traded anything but baseball cards.

He didn't catch a fish. I didn't either. We were out there three hours and it was one of the best mornings of my life.

I asked Darlene.

We went across the street after the close, to the bar with the brass rail where the clerks go, and she ordered a beer and I ordered a beer and I told her about Marty's offer. She didn't say anything for a long time. Then she told me something she's never told me in two and a half years.

In 1979, she wanted to trade. She had the money saved and a broker willing to back her. And a guy she respected, a big trader, a man who'd been nice to her, sat her down and told her she didn't have the voice for the pit. That the men wouldn't trade with her. That she'd get eaten alive and lose her savings and her clerking job. So she didn't. And she's stood on the second step for twenty years since, next to men who weren't half as smart as her, watching them make ten times the money.

"I had the voice," she said. "I've always had the voice. You've heard me." I said I have. Everybody in the building has.

Then she put her hand flat on the bar and said, "Do it. If you lose, you lose. At least it'll be your money you lost, and not your nerve." And then she ordered us two more and said we weren't going to talk about it again, and we didn't.

Marty made me an offer today.

After the close, in the members' lunchroom, over his turkey sandwich, like he was asking me to pass the mustard. He'd back me. He'd put up the trading money, his firm would clear my trades, and he'd help me get a membership leased so I could stand in the pit on my own badge. I trade one-lots in the back of the pit, where the new people stand. We split what I make. If I lose what we agree I can lose, it's over, and I go back to clerking, maybe for him, and no hard feelings.

I said, "Why me?" He said, "Because you've been right about where I am every single time somebody asked you for a year and a half, and you never once told me what to do. That's rarer than you think." Then he said, "And because you passed that test without me having to ask twice." Then he said, "And because you don't need to be right."

I said I need to think. He said, "Take till the end of September. After that I find somebody else to be nice to."

I rode the train home and didn't read my paper. I just looked out the window at the backs of the houses on the Southwest Side, block after block, every kitchen light on.

Hot. It's been brutal in Chicago for two weeks. The floor is air-conditioned, but you walk out of the building at two o'clock into the Loop and it's like walking into a dryer. The news says people have died, old people mostly, alone in apartments with the windows shut.

My dad's been retired three months and he still can't stop being a cop. Every afternoon this week he's gone up and down our block and the next two knocking on doors. The old widowers, the lady across the street, the man two doors down who doesn't like anybody. "You got a fan? You drinking water? You want to come sit in our basement where it's cool?" Two of them came. My mom has been making iced tea by the gallon.

He was working in 1995, the bad summer, when so many people died in the heat that they ran out of room. He doesn't talk about it. He just knocks on doors.

I saw a soybean.

Two years and three months on the floor, and I'd never seen one. I drove downstate last Sunday to help Tricia move into a summer sublet, and on the way back I pulled off the interstate onto a county road and stopped the car next to a field. Rows and rows of low green plants, knee-high, going all the way to the edge of the sky. I walked out into a row in my sandals. The beans aren't even there yet this time of year, just leaves and little purple flowers. A farmer went by on a tractor and lifted two fingers off the wheel at me, like, sure, lady, go ahead.

Beans are under five dollars this summer. Back in the pit that's a number on a board. Out there it's a man on a tractor who's going to get less for that field than it cost him to plant it. I stood in the row a while and thought about that.

Then I drove home and Monday I went back to work and sold them like nothing happened. Well. Marty did. You know what I mean.