Christopher Ransom: The Birthing House

'Not really,' he said. 'It's kind of a surprise, something I wanted to do with a little of the money left over. So don't go in there for a few days, 'kay?'

'Ooh, a surprise.' Jo studied him a bit, then lost interest. 'When I get back I think I'll tackle the garden, get my hands dirty.'

'Save some energy for me.' He offered a lame and hopeful smile.

'Not so tapped out, after all.' She slapped him on the ass and went up to change.

He had knocked down all but two book boxes forming the massive pyramid in the library when the phone rang. Her voice echoed up the servants' stairs, excited.

'Oh, hi! Yes, we're great. Everything is just beautiful.' A long pause ensued. Jo punctuated the beats with a series of 'Uhhuhs'. His stomach lurched when he heard her say, 'Donna! Sudden is right.' And then in a lower voice, 'Of course I'm interested. '

Donna was Donna Tangelo, Jo's headhunter. Calling from LA, already.

Conrad folded up more boxes and continued his eavesdropping for another five minutes.

'Yes, Donna, we'll talk it over and I'll call you back tomorrow, I promise. Thanks for thinking of me.'

Before he could ask what the hell that was all about, Jo bounded up the stairs and announced, 'I'm hopping in the shower, honey.'

He flexed his mouth for another thirty seconds, turned away from the closed bathroom door and went to the kitchen for a beer to celebrate the completion of the unpacking. It was the time a cold beer tasted best, especially a Coors Light on a hot day.

Upstairs the shower stopped hissing. He thought about her up there, covered with nothing more than water droplets in the humid afternoon. She would apply lotion to every inch of her skin and then dress quickly, throwing her hair into a ponytail before it could dry. The window to spontaneous post-shower sex narrowed with the age of the marriage. He did not want to lose her to another job that made her a basket of stress, but running up there with a boner wasn't going to change that.

Ah well, there was the cold beer.

They were eating pizza over the little two-top, a rusted wrought-iron thing they had purchased at the Rose Bowl Flea Market for twenty dollars and decided to call quaint. After a month of pretending school was out for the summer, the prospect of yet more change lent the meal a first-date feel. He was alarmed by how difficult it was to read his wife as she set her pizza slice down, eyeing him cautiously.

And they're off!

'So, you think I should take it?'

'It's very flattering.' He could tell she wanted to take it, so he spoke slowly, carefully. 'Maybe a little soon? Like maybe you want to keep your options open before you jump back in?'

'Yeah, no, I love it here, sweetie,' she said. 'I really do.'

'So?'

'Well, if I took this, we wouldn't have to touch our new little nest egg.'

'So it's purely a money thing?' The old sales routine: ask questions, put them in a box. Yes or no. Shut down and close.

'No, but there's less than we thought,' she said, her face tightening. 'Of my share, anyway. I took what you gave me and paid off the rest of our debts.'

Conrad set his pizza slice down on the paper plate and patted his lips with a paper towel. 'And?'

Up until the insurance from the accident, Conrad's income from the bookstore and various dubious writing assignments had been so small Jo had handled all of their finances except for pocket money and a few small bills: DirectTV, his cell phone, the lone credit card in his name only with its laughable $700 credit limit. After he paid cash for the new house, he'd given Jo half of the remaining two hundred and change to pay off her MBA ($43,000) and told her to 'Set up some IRAs or something.'

'And we have to be careful now.'

Then she explained exactly how fragile their new little nest egg was.

Another twelve thousand went to her father, who'd loaned them the moving and deposit money on the LA property. Somehow Conrad had managed to forget about this. Another four thousand for the movers to get out. It had only cost sixteen hundred to move from Denver to Los Angeles, but that had been metro to metro. LA to the middle of Buttfuck, Egypt, or at least Black Earth, Wisconsin, cost a lot more because 'there aren't a lot of Cheeseheads heading west,' she said, and Conrad laughed. In pain.

'There were other debts,' she said.

' Other other debts?' He really had no idea. He'd always assumed the bulk of their lifestyle, furnishings and vacations had come straight from Jo's income, which had been north of eighty thousand last time he'd asked.

'The credit cards were pretty bad.' She winced.

'How bad?'

'Thirty-four thousand.'

He winced back. 'We had thirty-four thousand dollars in credit card debt?' He could not keep his voice from rising. 'For what?'

She sighed. 'Conrad, I was pretty much paying for everything. Rent was twenty-two hundred alone. Utilities, the cars.'

'I sold my Maxima a year ago.'

'I know, honey, but you were upside down on the equity by almost three thousand.'

'Still, thirty-four thousand? Jo, Baby, c'mon! Maybe ten thousand went to furniture and stuff, but--'

'I wanted to have nice things, okay? I wasn't working my ass off to live in an empty house. Your TV was two thousand.'

'Jesus! If I had known--'

'Conrad, stop. I wanted to get you something special for your birthday. Don't be difficult.'

'Is that -' He tilted his beer and suckled. 'Shit.'

'Need another beer, honey?'

'Yes, please.'

She fetched him one. She knew this was harder for him than it was for her.

'Thanks, Baby.'

'Where were we?'

'I was about to ask, is that all?'

She patted his hand. 'And I was about to say in a hesitant tone, well, not exactly. I took a pay cut a year ago.'

'A year ago.'

Jesus, wasn't this something you talked about with your husband, even when you kept separate checkbooks?

'David sat me down and asked me if I liked my job. I lied and said yes.' David Donaldson was the VP of Sales at her former company, PrimaPro Pharmaceuticals. Jo'd called it minddestroyingly boring work for a merciless boss, but it paid well. Or had paid well. 'He said I was talented and worked hard, but he couldn't really afford a director of marketing and another for sales, that whole bullshit spiel. "We're a sales firm, not a marketing firm." Like it was my fault he hired me before the class action bullshit tanked the stock.'

'Jo, why didn't you tell me?'

'Oh, you didn't really want to hear about it. I don't blame you.'

'I did too want to hear about it.'

'Conrad Harrison. You'd just gotten laid off. I was scared. And you were never home. Nights at the bookstore while I worked days. We hardly ever saw each other. That was the deal we made until something better came up. I understood that. Now we have to pay for it. Can we leave it at that?'

He stared at her, unsure who was to blame.

'We carved that whole life out and it wasn't easy to cut back. I loved that house. I wanted to buy it--'

'We never could have afforded it. Or did you really want to stay in LA for another five years?' He loaded that question to the hilt.

'No. No . This is a great house. I'm just trying to adapt. Think about the next move. My next move. Job, I mean.'

Conrad sighed. 'I'm sorry. Cutting your salary down. You shouldn't have had to deal with that blow by yourself. That must have been horrible.'

'It wasn't. But I might've gone shopping a few times to ease the pain.'

Her forced laughter made him sad. They had lost control of a lot more than their finances in the past year. They had lost even the normal day-to-day verbal tennis ball going back and forth across the net. The financial shit was the same as the thing with That Fucker Jake. And not so different from Conrad's thing. The thing with the girl, Rachel. Not that he'd done anything, but still. It had been close. Bad choices they wouldn't have made if they'd kept each other in the loop. The money was like that - it came from the same place, anyway. Worst of all, here they were talking in a healthy way and it sucked, yes, but it was honest. He didn't want it to end. He wanted to sit here in their new old kitchen until they were discussing holes in their Medicare coverage.