Our budget. Rent, power, water, phones, insurance, groceries, and a column he’d labeled LAWYER with a question mark, and at the bottom a subtraction problem he’d gotten mostly right.

“What is this?”

“I wanted to know how bad it is,” he said.

“It’s not bad.”

“You stopped buying the coffee you like.” He said it fast, like he’d been holding it. “And you were on the phone in the car in the driveway for forty minutes. You do that when it’s bad. You did that at the old place.”

I sat down. Something enormous was arriving and I needed to not get it wrong.