PART 1 — TAKE THEM
It started over a couch.
I was having breakfast in my own apartment on Fenwick Row on a Saturday in the March when I heard something hitting the door frame, and Wade came in backwards, pushing a burgundy velvet three-seater with sagging cushions and both armrests worn down to the backing.
“It’s Mom’s. She’s getting the place painted and she doesn’t want to throw it out. It’s here for a month.”
I looked at it for a while.
I am thirty-two. I am the senior accountant at Tessler Construction and I have been there nine years, and I bought that apartment at twenty-eight, eleven months before I met Wade Ostrom.
He arrived three years ago with a suitcase, a laptop, and an inexhaustible supply of business ideas.
“I’m allergic to dust,” I said. “That is not staying in my front room.”
“Don’t be dramatic, Bernie. My mom helped us out when we got married.”
Ilma Ostrom gave us a used blender and a bag of groceries. Wade talks about it the way you would talk about somebody paying for a wedding.
The couch stayed.
Four days later Ilma let herself in with the spare key Wade had given her for emergencies, went through my refrigerator, told me salmon was a waste of money, and sat down on that couch and stroked the arm of it like it had been repatriated.
That afternoon I was in the hall with a laundry basket and I heard her say to her son, in my kitchen:
“When the money starts coming in for you, don’t put it all into the household. Keep some back. You never know with women.”
That night I opened the statement for the supplementary card, which I had never once looked at properly in three years.
Bars. Games. Gas. Flowers.
On the eighth of March there was a florist charge for ninety-five dollars.
He had given me three tulips from the supermarket by the station.
I did not make a scene. I changed the passwords, dropped the card limit to four hundred dollars, and stopped covering things I had been covering without ever having agreed to.
The card declined at a gas station eleven days later and he rang me from the forecourt.
“You humiliated me.”
“Use your own money.”
“You’re obsessed with money.”
“No. I’m the one earning it.”
After that, everything got faster.
Ilma began ringing about her back, about a noise in the water heater, about a tap. One evening she asked me to come over and mop her bathroom because a plumber had left it in a state.
I said no.
Two weeks after that I got in from work at ten to nine and Ilma was lying on my couch — the burgundy one — with her feet up on my coffee table under a shawl.
“Mom’s blood pressure’s up,” Wade announced. “She’s staying a few days. She’ll have our room.”
“She has a house twenty minutes away.”
Ilma sighed at the ceiling. “If I’m in the way I’ll just go home and die on my own.”
“Bernie, make her a tea,” Wade said. “And do the hall, she dropped her drops.”
“You do it.”
He came closer. “Excuse me?”
“I’m not your housekeeper and I’m not your mother’s.”
Her birthday was that Saturday.
She had it in my apartment. Twenty people, in my front room, and I catered it, and I want to be clear that nobody asked me to and that this is the part I have to own.
At about eight in the evening I was crossing the room with a platter in both hands.
Wade came over, took the platter out of my hands and passed it sideways to his cousin without looking at him.
Then he pressed his mother’s door keys into my palm and closed my fingers around them with his own.
And he said, to twenty people:
“Take them. Either you go and clean my mother’s place right now, or tomorrow I file for divorce. Say yes, in front of everyone.”
The room went silent.
Ilma was in the good chair and did not turn her head.
Twenty people. His cousin with a platter in his hands. My own neighbour from across the hall, who I had invited because I was embarrassed not to.
Nobody said one word.
I looked at him for about four seconds.
Then I smiled and said, “Yes. All right.”
And Wade Ostrom smiled back with enormous satisfaction and said, “There we go. About time.”
I got my coat and my bag and I left.
He thought he had finally broken me. That is what he told his cousin afterward, and his cousin told me, in the January, when it no longer cost him anything to tell me.
Ilma’s apartment is on Pell Street, four stops out, in a red brick block from the sixties.
I let myself in at twenty past eight in the evening.
There was no living room to clean.
There were boxes stacked to the ceiling down the whole length of the wall. There was a folding table with two monitors on it and a thermal label printer and a scanner. There was a rolling rack with poly mailers on it.
And on the wall over the table there was a whiteboard, four feet by three, covered in numbers in my husband’s handwriting.
I stood in that doorway with my coat still on for a long time.
Then I put my bag down, took out my phone, and started photographing everything, because I have been an accountant for nine years and there is a part of my brain that does that before the rest of me has caught up.
