I Labeled Everything I Paid For

The month I opened the spreadsheet

One month, more out of curiosity than anything, I started writing it down. It is a habit from work. When something feels off on the board, you stop guessing and you count.

So I counted. The meat, the sides, the desserts, the pop and the sweet tea, the paper plates because Wanda would not touch my real ones, the birthday gifts I bought for three nephews, the school supplies every August, the backpack I replaced for the youngest, Cody, because Wanda said the boy was ashamed of his old one. I even added in the blood pressure pills I had picked up twice for Wanda herself, because “money was short this month, honey, you understand.”

On the Saturday meals and the odds and ends that trailed off them, I had spent close to nine thousand dollars in one year.

Nine thousand.

I sat at my own kitchen table and read that number three times. Nine thousand dollars out of my own paycheck, spent feeding, gifting, and supplying people who called me lucky and dry-potatoed me on the way out the door.

Meanwhile, Roy put two hundred and fifty dollars a month into our joint account and kept the rest. His rest went to guided hunting trips, a new gun safe, boxes of shells, beers with the crew at the VFW on Fridays, and money sent over to his mother on his phone whenever she sighed loud enough into the receiver.

The week of the zero-turn mower

The week before he made his big kitchen speech, something in me went quiet and sharp at the same time.

Roy came rolling up the drive one afternoon on a brand-new zero-turn mower. Bright as a fire truck, cup holders, the works. Two thousand dollars if it was a dime. He climbed down grinning like a boy on Christmas and said he needed it “to unwind, get some seat time, clear my head after these long weeks.”

That same day I had paid the propane fill so the house would be warm, bought the wholesale run of groceries for Saturday, and driven over to the school supply aisle to replace Cody’s backpack because his grandmother had decided that was my job too.

So I said, careful and even, that maybe he could put a little more toward the house going forward. Not a fight. Just a fact.

Roy sighed the way a man sighs when you have personally let the air out of his good day.

“All you ever talk about is money, Diane,” he said, and went back outside to ride his new mower in circles.

I did not answer him.

But I wrote that down too.