I Labeled Everything I Paid For

When the bills came due

Here is the part the men on Merle’s lunch crew never think about when they talk big about keeping money separate.

Separate cuts both ways.

For the first two weeks Roy thought he had won something. He had his own money now, all of it, no wife nagging about the propane. He bought a new pair of boots. He put in for another hunting weekend. He picked up his shells and his beer and sent his mother forty dollars on his phone because she said the pharmacy had her over a barrel again.

Then the bills came.

I paid my exact half of everything and not one cent more. Half the propane. Half the electric. Half the water. Half the county taxes when the fall installment hit. Half the truck insurance, since we were both on the policy. I paid mine the day each one came in, on time, to the penny, and I left the other half sitting right there on the counter with a little note that said his name and the number he owed.

Roy had never once in his life looked at what the propane actually cost to keep a farmhouse warm through a county winter. He had never seen the tax bill land. He had built his whole comfortable life on the belief that his two hundred and fifty dollars a month covered a man’s fair share, and that the rest of it, the real weight of it, ran on air.

His half of that first month came to more than eleven hundred dollars.

He stood at the counter with the notes fanned out in front of him and did the math three or four times, moving his lips, the same way I had done a year before over that nine thousand dollar spreadsheet. I watched the color go out of him.

“This can’t be right,” he said.

“It is right,” I said. “I have the receipts. Every one. Want to see the folder?”

He did not want to see the folder.