“I was about to go to the grocery store,” Pill said.
Man up, Corey, he told himself as a laserlike pain ripped through his lower back. “We have food. We don’t need another thing from another store brought into this house. Except maybe a new dinette set. Whose idea was it to get chairs with no backs?”
He planted his palms on the epicenter of the pain and leaned back against it. He remembered tasking her with the chore of changing his bachelor pad over to a home they could share and how she flew through his decorating budget in a day with just a few pieces to show for it. The thought seemed to make his back fire off more laser assaults.
“I’m going to need your therapeutic hands to massage my back later,” Corey said, awaiting a response. He didn’t expect shrills of anticipation, but he didn’t expect silence either. “Seriously, my back is killing me. At least walk on it again for me before I go in to work.”
He had seen on television how the right amount of weight and pressure applied to the right area could alleviate back pain. He figured he’d save the money he would spend on doctors and chiropractors by allowing Pill to rub, kneel into it, or even balance her full weight on his back. It seemed to work, at least for a little while. Early on in their marriage, the skin-to-skin contact would be a precursor to other acts of marital duty and relief.
Pill picked at the crisp ends of her fish she had left to get cold on the table. “Have you ever considered that maybe your back is always hurting, not because of the chairs, but because you lift heavy packages for a living?”
“You might be right, but until I get promoted to middle management or start my own company, this is how I pay our bills,” he responded.
At that, Corey watched her pop up and take her half-eaten meal to the stove-mounted microwave. She sent the paper plate through a rotation in the microwave to reheat her food as he had done his own when he first came to the kitchen. She used the reflection in the microwave door to stare at herself as she finger combed her hair. Pill became so obsessed with tousling the hair on top and getting every hair just right that she let the alarm buzz for a minute with her food trapped inside just to achieve the look she was going for.
“You and Tyson are always talking about starting a moving and hauling company, and when you do, guess what?” Pill said, rejoining him at the table. “You will still be lifting heavy objects all day.”
Corey was having a hard time telling if she was being sarcastic or not. Maybe they both were still a little peeved from Marriage Maintenance, but every comment of hers was coming out like an insult to him. “So, are you mocking me now?”
“Me? Of course not. You can do what you want, Corey. You seemed to have your heart set on it. I was just pointing out the truth—the painful truth,” Pill said, mimicking his attempt to relieve his back pain from earlier before releasing a satisfied grin. “Wait, I’m sorry. Now I am mocking you.”
Corey scratched at his temple before letting his palms drop to the tabletop. He let out a deep breath. He was trying hard to work on his temper, and that meant walking a fine line with Pill. Goodness, Corey, you’re so sensitive, he could hear his mother say. He should be able to take a little ribbing without going off.
Pill must have noticed his temperament because she began tugging and pulling at Corey’s arm in her own way of telling him she was playing. He gave her a slight shove. She could be quite touchy-feely when she wanted to, but was fast to restrict him when he wanted to touch and be touched.
“I don’t need you all broken up,” Pill said as if he were a laborer in a factory she owned. She returned to the last scoop of grits on her plate that she ate without another word.
Maybe this was her weird way of showing concern, he rationalized. He had promised to take care of her and all that that entailed. He wanted to make good on those promises. In actuality, he had doubts about the moving and hauling business himself. Tyson wanted to move on it right away with one raggedy truck and start-up funds combined from their savings. Corey, who had been three courses away from an associate degree in business management when he first met Pill, wanted to take a more measured approach. He wanted to finish school and get a business loan. That way, he could deal with the administrative issues and hire someone to do the manual labor.
“What I got my heart set on is being an entrepreneur and succeeding on my own, among other things,” Corey said, tipping the lid off the shoebox that had been acting as a centerpiece. He pulled out a sky-blue cloud-covered journal that he had attempted to color over with a dark marker.
“Don’t laugh. Dani bought this for me a long, long time ago. I guess Ma made her spend her allowance to buy me a birthday gift or something. This was the best she could come up with. Anyway, even though I dissed it, I’ve written my goals in it for a while now. Last time I wrote in this thing had to be a couple of months after I started dating you.”
Corey was pleased to see Pill appear intrigued. He needed her to be invested in the family dream before he broke it down to their day-to-day spending. He was trying hard to get her to see beyond the mall to the entire map.
He flipped past pages of abandoned business ideas and plans he had since junior high school to one of the last entries, “Marry a beautiful woman. Check,” he gestured as if he were checking off items on some sort of bucket list.
Corey knew his wife never fished for compliments, but she gladly reeled them in. Her pout couldn’t help but turn upward as he continued. “And have two kids, at least one by the age of thirty.”
Pill clutched her chest very dramatically as if she were choking and grappled for her water glass to help wash down what Corey could only guess was lodged in her throat. Corey was poised to intervene. What he didn’t expect after the dramatics was to hear his wife’s cold laugh that was beyond mocking; it was sinister.
“So what you saying, Pill?” he snapped.
“What are you saying, Corey? I got to live up to a time line you wrote in a child’s journal? C’mon, we’re not ready for kids, and I doubt in four years we’ll be there either.”
Corey closed the journal very slowly. His teeth were chomping together to keep time to the thoughts going through his head. He knew the next time he spoke he would be shouting if he didn’t take a minute.
“Yeah, you know what? You’re right,” he managed very evenly. “You’re way too selfish to be anyone’s momma.”
By her expression, he could tell that hit her where it hurt. He had said the M word. He didn’t know much about her mom, but whatever it was his mother-in-law was into, it took her away from her two daughters prematurely. Corey could only guess that losing her momma was a pain that resided within his wife.
He looked at the journal again before tossing it on the tabletop. “The last page of that journal was not about my goals anymore, but filled with goals we made together, sidling up the beach every weekend, talking about our future.”
He thought about how he would watch her play in the sand. The dry granules intrigued her, although she despised the stickiness of wet sand. She wrote in the sand from the safe boundary of their beach chair or let it run through her open fingers as she lay on the edge of her towel. This interpretive play went on for hours. She was content, and he never questioned her fascination. He never bothered her.
One time she surprised him by grabbing a discarded cup. She scooped up the sand and turned the cup over in crumbled heaps. She did that several times. She never understood why it didn’t hold its shape. He helped her by introducing a little water and packing the sand in the cup tightly, allowing the cup to become a mold. They started building sandcastles from that point on. Some were small and some were enormous dreamscapes. Each time she’d let him carry her over the wet sand into the cleansing waves to wash her extremities off. She had never learned to swim and was terrified of deep water, but she trusted him to protect her and deliver her safely on shore.
He remembered she had taken a few snapshots of their creations with a disposable camera. He wondered what happened to those
mementos.
“Excuse me if I’m a little upset to find out today that it was all some kind of joke. Now you’re noncommittal about what we planned?”
There was a silence oozing with anxiety. He watched her grip both sides of her head with her hands.
“Let me know if this child thing is the deal breaker?” Pill finally said very solemnly. She was famous for measuring the haystack to see how close they were to the last straw. She could go from, “I’m in it,” to “I’m done” in sixty seconds.
He felt he had better pump the brakes and pull back. It was getting way too intense right now.
“Deal breaker?” He leaned back so he could stare into the pool of onyx crystals that were her eyes and thought about whether he could give up the notion of having children for her sake. “Girl, you’re trippin’. I’m not going anywhere, and I hope neither are you.”
She snatched her eyes away from his stare, leaving him questioning. He wanted to resend it. He wanted to recite the Marriage Maintenance mantra. He wanted to remind her that “Divorce is not an option.”
“Tell me something, though, what are we working for, huh? When it’s all said and done, what legacy will we pass on, and who will we pass it on to?”
“I never said I didn’t want any kids if you were listening. I said just not in the near future.” Her eyes searched for something as her bangs seemed to become annoying to her, and she tried in several attempts to sweep them behind her ear. “Look at your mom. She had you and Dani when she was older. People aren’t having kids in their twenties anymore.”
Yeah, but we were supposed to. He didn’t want to base his life on what was in style or fashionable.
“But we got to plan now. That’s what I’m trying to get you to see. Geez, no wonder you’re blowing through our money. I was taught to write stuff down, write goals. Like the Bible says, ‘write the vision, make it plain.’ Then you stick to it.” He felt he was teaching a beginners course in commonsense.
“Have you ever bothered to ask me what I want in my future besides being everyone’s beautician, your wife, and baby maker?” Pill words dripped with indignation.
“Tell me; I want to hear it.” This time he turned in his stool toward her. Once again, he had to steady his back with his hand because of the sudden shift.
She rolled her beautiful eyes at him, then let them double back in her head until they found the ceiling where she appeared to be pulling this dream from the sky. “I . . . think I might want to own my own salon one day, yeah, or . . . or work in fashion too. I could combine them both. You know, like get an amazing space with two floors and have like a boutique or a funky T-shirt and jeans place where . . . where you could style a client from head to toe.”
It took awhile for Corey to realize she was serious. He was busy calculating the dollars and cents of her super-sized dream. He almost forgot how mad he had become when she scoffed at his goals as he concealed his own smirk. This is from a woman who couldn’t pay her booth fee.
Corey tried to keep his comment free from judgment. “Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Pill fired back. “It’s about as likely as moving and hauling.”
“Yeah, but remember, love, you’ve got to keep money in the register, and I don’t mean the one down at Macy’s.”
Tit for tat. It had become their natural ebb and flow. Corey’s back ached, and he was tired of their volley. He stood over the stool and dumped the box he had brought to the table, bringing them back to the present, back to reality.
“These are just a few bills I found unopened around the house. I’m wondering how and when they were paid if the bills are still sealed up in the envelope,” he said, picking up a white envelope with a red notice blaring and blatant underneath like a sexy camisole under a classic business suit. “Case in point, Dominion Power.”
No longer was Pill sitting so prim and proper. He could see her lower half squirm under the table.
“The lights are on, right?” she replied.
“Yeah, but it’s a late notice. It’s a darn near cutoff notice, which means we had to pay a penalty, right?” Corey held up the next few bills in the pile. “How about T-Mobile and Comcast?”
She stood up on her perch and grabbed all the bills from his hand as if taking possession would bring closure to the conversation, but he was far from through.
“No use grabbing for them now. Since I’m taking over the family finances, I need to get a handle on what has and hasn’t been paid. Starting right now, things have to be paid on time. Maybe then I could go back to school, and we could get a new house, which was another of our goals we talked about a year ago.”
“I like your parents’ house. We should plan to move there,” Pill said in all sincerity.
She would like his parents’ house. Courtesy of his Uncle Pop, his parents had a minimansion with an exclusive golf, swim, and racquet club membership and a manned entry gatehouse. He was thinking more on the lines of a single-family home that fit a family of three or four comfortably.
“You are funny, you know that. Where are my parents going if we move in their house?”
“I don’t know, old folks’ home? Dani is single and wouldn’t know what to do with that much house. I figure their house will still be fly by the time they are ready to pass it on.”
Corey’s eyebrows furrowed with frustration. “I’m going to save up and buy us a house and anything else we need. Me!” He instantly felt silly slapping himself in the chest and bellowing like a caveman. “I don’t need a house that can be mortgaged out from under me. That house will go back to the one that paid the king’s ransom for the deed—Rico Proctor Sr.”
He slid over a billfold with two notepads inside in a no-nonsense manner. “One for all your expenses. Write down everything you spend, and I’m going to do the same.”
“And the other?” she pushed, anxious to get the assignment portion of the conversation over with.
He sat next to her this time with his back up against the length of the table. “The other one is for what’s coming in. Since your salary is based on the clients you see, you can record clients and the amount they pay you so we can figure some things out.”
“Excuse me?” Pill said, raising an arched eyebrow at his request.
“I need to know approximately what you make so I can set aside your tithes for you. Maybe, just maybe, I can get you to stay within a weekly spending limit. Me too; the rules are for both of us.” He looked for signs of compliance in her face. “We can’t keep spending the way we have. We’ve got to do something. Got to try.”
“All right,” she said testily. “Gosh!”
Corey had thought seriously overnight what Deacon Tripp said about having one money manager for the household. It had gotten them both nowhere just believing that if they divided the bills that everything would work out. He had mentally prepared to take control, although he still believed his wife should pay her own tithes. He felt like a third wheel in her relationship with the Lord, assuming that responsibility for her. He would help her set it aside, but it would be up to her to put it in the tithe and offering basket.
Corey twisted his torso and used his long arm to scramble across the table to fish for the next thing he would present to her. When that became too hard to manage, he swiveled the rest of his body around until he found a vinyl-bound checkbook ledger with an account number he knew would be foreign to her. He slid it before her.
She built a scaffold with her arms on the table to support her head as if she feared what she might find inside.
He decided he better explain, “When I moved out, my momma and ’em gave me a gift. I’m willing to transfer half to our account; the rest will be off limits. A savings is best when you forget that you have it. I was holding on to it for . . . for . . . the future.”
He watched her eyes scan through his careful documentation of the then-$10,000 balance that now was just shy of seven. He saw her body relax from relief. A light in the shape of dollar signs appeared in her eyes
. She pushed back the ledger and took a sip of water. “So why are we up here acting like we are struggling?” Pill asked.
“Pill,” he said to halt her, “we are living far from easy street. Plus, a little struggle keeps you hungry. Now let’s forget all this. Right now, a brother is starving, if you know what I mean.”
Corey found the way she was circling the rim of her water glass with her finger very sexy. He placed his hand in the small of her back to initiate his own massage.
“No one is in the mood for all that now. You had me feeling like we were about to be put out on the street. Nothing about this conversation has been sexy. C’mon now,” she said incredulously.
Corey let his hand drop. What was up with her? It had been going on three weeks since they had last been intimate. She couldn’t keep denying him like that. He had provided her with a sense of security, transferring over his nest egg. What more did she want? Now he felt like he was entitled to some fruit for his labor. Since he was being the man by providing, he needed to feel like The Man. Now was time for her to deliver for him.
“You make sure and let me know when it will be a good time.” This time he didn’t even try to keep the bitterness out his voice.
“I sure will.” Her equally sarcastic remark swung on a sing-songy rope. She paused to place his paper plate on top of hers before heading for the trash can. Tit for tat.
If it was so hard for her to mix business and pleasure, he figured he’d keep it strictly business by revisiting the bills she was trying to avoid. He sliced through a few more envelopes with his thumb and almost got a paper cut. He fashioned his last order of business in his mind.
Corey pulled his credit card from his wallet that was lying among the other treasures on the table.
“I guess you don’t keep up with expiration dates either when you’re out there charging. Visa has sent a replacement card. Where is your old one?” he said.
Pill scurried over to her purse parked on the counter after pitching the trash. She came back to the table with the card extended.
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