The Room Over Haskins Hardware
I wish I had said something wise. I did not. I got up and put my arms around him, and he put his face in my sweater, and we stayed like that until my phone buzzed.
It was the clinic. I let it go to voicemail. That is the only call I have ever let go in six years of billing.
When we sat back down, I told him my part. I had paid the $1,020 to see what he would do with it.
That was not fair to him either. I had tested him instead of talking to him.
“I should have asked about the overtime in August,” I said. “You told me at supper, and I let you change the subject because I didn’t want the answer.”
Then I told him what I had in savings, and he told me what he had left. We had never said those numbers out loud to each other, not once in two years.
We sat in that room an hour and a half and talked about money. The house. The truck.
My student loan. His retirement. Whether we wanted a baby in two years or four, and what a baby costs.
Walt came up once. He knocked, looked at the two of us, set a coffee on the desk for me and one on the windowsill for Travis, and went back down without a word.
By two o’clock we had a plan, written on the back of the café sack, because neither of us wanted to see a legal pad again.
Both our checks would go into the joint account. The house, the truck, the groceries, everything would come out of it, and on the first Sunday of every month we would go over it together.
I would put in more than I had been. That was fair, and I said so.
But I would put it in as his wife, toward our house, not as a tenant paying for a room.
Travis asked if I wanted the desk brought home. He said he would carry it himself, down Main Street at noon on a Saturday, if that’s what it took.
I looked at the window, and the street, and June’s calendar.
“I want to keep the room,” I said.
He looked hurt for a second, and then he did not. He looked around at the tall windows and the oak floor and the radiator, which picked that moment to knock.
“I like it here,” I said. “I like walking to work. I like hearing the store. I can afford a hundred seventy-five dollars, and I’m not paying it to anybody I’m married to.”
Travis nodded slowly. “That’s fair,” he said. Then he winced at the word, and we both laughed, the first real laugh between us in a month.
Before he left, he picked up the envelope and held it out. I told him to put it toward the house payment, where it should have gone in the first place.
“You can put it in the account tomorrow,” he said. “But this one’s yours. It was always yours. I need you to take it from me first.”