End of the month. The Mrs. is at the kitchen table with the banking app open and a pencil she doesn't need. The number on screen sets what kind of week we get. Thinner this month, so the small stuff moves to next month, f.e. the new running shoes. Nobody asks it to.
I tell her two invoices are coming. They clear all of it inside a fortnight. She nods and goes on with the sums. (I say it in my sales voice, the one that works on clients. It has not worked on her in twenty years.)
She runs the house on what's cleared. Not what's promised, not what I know is coming. What's in the account tonight. I've explained the pipeline more times than either of us can stand, once with an actual spreadsheet. She takes it in and budgets off the balance like I never spoke. Then she closes the laptop, and we spend the rest of the evening on the sofa arguing happily about where to go in the spring. That's the one subject where she sometimes lets me win. I've called that the gap between us. She accepts it, she just doesn't get it. As if she's the one missing something…
Anyway. Here's what surfaced tonight, and I'd rather it hadn't. I know the money she trusts. I've had it. When I consulted, a hefty amount hit the account every month. Steady mattered more than hefty. You can budget a life on steady. I left it to build something of my own. Once it was built, I let myself rest. It worked. The money looked handled. I stopped looking. Ten years it took. It died with my back turned.
I deleted that last line twice before I let it stay.
She's still at the table. Only what cleared counts tonight. Whatever I know is coming, she leaves out of the sum. She'll sleep once it works out - slightly annoying, if I'm honest - and I'll lie there doing sums on the ceiling. I keep a number in front of me that never quite arrives. A floor to stay above. I call it focus. I have not let anything feel handled since.
Maybe she is the steady I keep leaving. She's turning off the kitchen light, which in this house means the meeting is over. I said I'd come up.
It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.
— Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, II (quoting Epicurus)