PART 2 — THREE YEARS
I want to be honest about how a person like me ends up in that hallway with a set of keys in her hand.
I am not a soft woman. I am the person at Tessler who tells a project manager that his numbers are wrong in front of his own team, and I have been doing it since I was twenty-five.
At home I was somebody else entirely, and I did that on purpose.
I met Wade at a friend’s thing in the September. He was thirty-four and worked in operations at a distribution company and he was funny in a way that made a room easier.
He moved in ten months later. There was never a conversation about rent.
I want to set that down exactly, because it is the load-bearing fact.
There was never a conversation. Not once, in three years. He moved in, and I paid the mortgage because it was my mortgage from before, and then he was contributing to groceries, and then he was contributing sometimes, and then the supplementary card existed and it was easier.
And every single time I thought about raising it, I thought: I do not want to be the accountant at home.
That is the whole thing. That is the sentence that cost me three years and a great deal of money.
I did not want to be the woman who runs a household like a ledger, because I had watched my mother do exactly that to my father and I had promised myself at nineteen that I would never be her.
So I overcorrected into a woman who did not look at her own statements.
The first year was fine. It genuinely was and I am not going to rewrite it.
The second year, the business ideas started.
There were eleven of them. A subscription box. A supplements line. A consultancy that never had a client. A partnership with a man called Ordell that involved four thousand dollars and eleven weeks and produced a website that still exists.
I funded three of those. Not all of them. Three. About nine thousand dollars in total and I have the transfers.
Every one of them ended the same way, which was not in a failure but in a fade — he would simply stop mentioning it, and if I asked, there would be a reason involving somebody else.
In the September of last year, he came home and said he had been let go.
Restructuring. Whole team. Very hard on everyone.
I was decent about it. I told him to take a month. I picked up the two things he had been paying — the internet and one insurance — and I told him not to panic.
Then October, November, December.
He was up at eleven. He was on the couch. He had a thing on Thursdays that I never got a straight answer about.
And his mother started coming over, and started saying things about how hard it is for a man, and how a wife’s job in a season like that is to make the house easy.
By the March I was working nine-hour days and coming home to two adults and a burgundy couch.
Ilma Ostrom, for the record, is sixty-one, in good health, and has a paid-off apartment on Pell Street and a pension from thirty years at the water authority.
She had told me the previous Christmas, in my own kitchen, that she had “nothing.”
