34
As soon as Pete and the kids leave for soccer on Tuesday night, Ethan is at my kitchen door with a bottle of Sancerre and chocolate pretzels. I love every word in that sentence. I spent the day cleaning out Deb Parker’s basement and wishing I was in Ethan’s pool watching him swim toward me underwater, waiting for him to pull me under with him. We’ve both already eaten dinner, so we sit outside with wine and dessert and listen to the creek. He tells me that Rose just got a big shipment of recalled dog food for the shelter, and he laughs because Brenda hates the new designer kibble he bought in town.
I’ve draped my legs over his and he puts his arms around me. It feels like we’ve been doing this for years. “I can’t wait to get you divorced,” he says into my hair.
“Me too,” I say.
“Want to get all your information together tomorrow? We could do it together during camp.”
I look up at his face and see it’s a sincere offer. I suspect that’s the only kind of offer Ethan makes. “Thanks, but I feel like I need to tackle it myself. You know I used to be a pro.”
“There’s really nothing sexier than an accountant,” he says, pulling me onto his lap and dipping his head to mine.
He leaves thirty minutes before my kids could possibly be home and I kiss him by his car. I think of Phyllis and kiss him anyway. When they’re home, Greer tries to be cool telling me that Caroline Shaw invited her to sleep over on Friday night, but I can tell she thinks it’s a major win. They all shower and Cliffy wants to read Captain Underpants, so I get in bed next to him while he giggles and turns pages. When he’s sleepy, I go down to the basement and put the wet clothes in the dryer. I haven’t cleared this space yet, and I’m sort of looking forward to it. But I know I have to go through the paper first. We are meeting with Pete on Friday to decide on a budget. That’s only three days away.
I go to the dining room and flip on the lights. The paper pile has grown. In the dead of night I can hear it breathing. There are actually two stacks of paper and I fight the urge to measure them. Measuring your paper piles is an exquisite form of procrastination, and I won’t allow it. I do, however, take my laptop, which I happen to know is thirteen inches wide, and hold it vertically against the piles. Yes, they are each over a foot tall. Earlier today I ironed my pajama bottoms, mainly because I was waiting for the girls’ soccer stuff to dry. I look down at them now and they remind me of a crisp summer suit. They trigger a memory, and I follow it back upstairs to my closet.
My closet is a terrible double-barred thing where anything that’s longer than half your body sort of lounges in a mess over the bar below. I hunt around through blouses and skirts and the dress I wore to my rehearsal dinner until I find my navy blue suit. I pull it out and there’s dust on the shoulders. It’s been neglected since before Greer was born, but it’s still in pretty good shape. The skirt is too short, but the blazer is sublime, with its three gold buttons and the tag right inside the collar, brandishing those two beautiful words: Ann Taylor. I pull it off the hanger and put it on over my T-shirt. It fits perfectly. I dust off my shoulders and button just the top button. It’s a pantsuit now over my ironed pajamas. Somewhere, the Rocky theme song starts to play.
I race back to the living room and set a timer on my phone. I open my laptop and start a brand-new spreadsheet. The white of the background and all of those tiny rectangles give me the chills. I type Expenses at the top and take a deep breath.
The first envelope I open is the hardest. I feel the old overwhelm creep up, like the sheer volume of paper in front of me is going to suffocate me. It’s my utility bill, $257 for the month of June. I decide to just track the single expense and I search through the pile for other utility bills so that I can come up with an average. I am both ashamed and delighted to find that I have data going back to November because it’s been so long since I dealt with the paper. I estimate the earlier fall bills by googling historical weather, and I have a number.
I do the same with the credit card bills. They are basically food, clothing, and general household expenses like haircuts and plants. There’s a separate bill for club soccer that I find astounding. Summer camp isn’t that cheap either. The mortgage, the life insurance, health care copays. There’s the servicing of our boiler and, of course, cable and mobile phone charges.
When I have a number for the average minimum amount of money we need to sustain life around here, I lean back in my chair. I didn’t have an expectation of the number so I can’t say if it’s high or low, but I like knowing what it is. There was nothing in this pile of paper that was going to take me down. In fact, the order created by these little rectangles emboldens me. I remember my onetime dream of a spreadsheet that would monitor my many accounts. When this is settled, I am going to figure out the next steps to get me there.
I sort the bills in piles and three-hole-punch them into a binder. A binder! I print out overviews for each category and then a summary page for the front. I format my spreadsheet with thick lines between categories and then change it into Times New Roman font. I reprint, re-three-hole. It’s two a.m. before I head back upstairs, hang up my blazer, and go to bed.