Two years ago she took down a picture in the hall and put it in a cupboard and told me afterward that it “wasn’t right there.”
She tells me how to raise my children in front of my children. She has views about Ruari’s speech, about Etta’s reading, about the fact that we don’t do church.
And she has never, not once in seven years, said thank you for a meal in this house.
Not out of malice. She simply does not experience it as a thing that requires thanks.
The spreadsheet started in 2021 and it was not revenge.
I do farm books. Household and business costs have to be split for tax and I got sick of guessing, so in January of 2021 I started a tab called EVENTS and I have put every gathering into it since.
Date, headcount, food, drink, fuel for the trip into Threlfall’s, sundries.
Twenty-three gatherings between January 2021 and June of this year.
Nine thousand one hundred and forty dollars.
That is not a number I ever intended to look at as a total. I only ever looked at the rows. And then one evening in May I sorted the column and the total came up at the bottom and I sat there for a while.
Nine thousand, one hundred and forty dollars.
Our mortgage payment is eleven hundred and forty a month.
So on the twenty-first of May, I sent an email.
