Counting What's Already There

She had promised her brother a number by Sunday: what one year of her life actually cost. Joanne Calder did not make that sort of promise lightly.

Monday evening she cleared the dining table, the same way she did when she was going to be marking her students' exams. Completely. Placemats off. The bowl of pears that lived in the middle went to the counter. She put the good notebook square in front of her chair, open to the page where she had written House: $652 on Sunday night, with the two question marks sitting underneath it like students who hadn't done the reading.

Then she went down to the basement and got the shoebox.

She had been using it to hold her paper life. Till slips furred at the creases, because she had never once thrown one out. The bank statements she still had mailed to her, because a thing on a screen could be taken away from her and a thing on the table could not, were stacked under the box, and she did not expect to need them. The receipts were the year, as far as she was concerned.

The house she already knew. $652 a month covered the taxes, the insurance and anything that arrived in a pipe or a wire, and she could have said it in her sleep.

Groceries took her three evenings. Twelve months of it, one shop at a time, the Co-op and the Sobeys and the two weeks in February when she had the flu and lived on canned soup. It came to $520 a month. Then the car, insurance and gas together, $263. The phone and the internet and the cable bill she had meant to cut twice, $164. Her prescriptions, $93. Everything else that arrived like clockwork, the paper, the two charities she gave to every month, all adding up to $173.

She added everything up on Wednesday night and got $1,865.

She multiplied it by twelve, got $22,380, and sat back in her chair, and the tightness she had carried since Marilyn's cake let go of her.

$22,380 was not frightening at all. It was a good deal less than she had braced for, and for a moment, with the papers in tidy piles on the table, Joanne felt like someone who was going to be perfectly fine.

She very nearly phoned him.

What stopped her was the dentist.

Thursday morning the office called about her cleaning. The woman on the phone was lovely. Joanne took the pen off the fridge, put the appointment on the calendar, and then stood there holding it.

$214. Twice a year. It was not on her list.

She went back to the table and pulled the statements out from under the shoebox.

The dentist was not in the box because nobody keeps a dentist receipt in with the groceries. That was the trouble with the shoebox. It held what she bought over and over, and the year was full of things she had bought exactly once. So she started again from January, down every line of the bank's record instead of her own, looking for what had come once, hit hard, been paid, and been forgotten. The basement window a branch went through in the April thunderstorm. The furnace man. Four winter tires. Christmas, which she had put on the card and cleared in February and never once thought of as a cost. Her glasses. The dress she had bought for a wedding. The week at the cottage in August, gas there and back, her share of the propane, and the groceries she always overbought.

The second column took her until half past eleven.

The house and everything that broke in it, $2,850. The car, tires and servicing and registration, $1,290. Dentist and eyes, $1,640. Christmas and birthdays, $1,240. The cottage week, $1,970. Clothes and haircuts, $1,130. And last, in her careful hand, a line she did not enjoy writing: things I can't name, $1,580, because the statements said the money had gone somewhere and she could not tell where it went.

$11,700.

She put the two columns together and got $34,080. She did not believe it, so she added it again, and got the same number.

Joanne looked at that for a long moment.

It was $11,700 more than the number that had made her feel fine on Wednesday. By any measure it was the uglier number. And she found, with the statements fanned out across the table and the house quiet all round her, that she was not upset in the slightest.

Because the first number had been a comfort, and this one was a fact. She had spent thirty years teaching people to tell those apart.

She underlined the total twice and, because she was who she was, put the date beside it.

Maya texted on Saturday to say she couldn't make Sunday, she was going hiking with friends, she'd call later in the week.

Simon came at ten past four. Early, even for him.

"You've moved the pears," he said from the doorway, noticing the smell of lasagna cooking.

"I've been working."

"I can see." He hung his jacket over the back of the couch in the front room and pulled out a chair at the table. "Do I get to look, or am I meant to guess?"

She had the notebook ready. She had been carrying it from room to room for two days like a paper she wanted marked. She handed it to him, then went to the counter and put the kettle on, so she would have something to do and would not have to watch his facial reactions as he looked over her work.

He took his time. She listened to him not saying anything. It was worse than she had expected.

"$34,080," Simon said at last.

"To the dollar. I counted it twice."

"I can see where you counted it twice." He was still reading. "You put the cottage in."

"The cottage is a cost."

"The cottage is absolutely a cost. Most people leave it out because it's a nice week." He turned to the first column again. "How much of this is the house?"

Joanne did not have to look. "$7,824. Just under a quarter of it."

"And how much of that $7,824 is rent?"

She turned round. "None of it. You know that. I paid it off two years ago."

"I know." He laid the notebook flat and looked up at her. "Then look at what that means. That $7,824 is what the house costs." He tapped it once. "No rent or mortgage payment, Jo. Most people your age are still carrying a mortgage or paying rent, adding a large number on top of what you have here on the page."

The kettle started up behind her and she let it.

"All right," she said. "That's one."

"That's one." He looked down at the page. "Now. What's already going to pay for some of it?"

"Nothing's going to pay for it. That's the problem."

"Thirty years of teaching," Simon said. "Every contract you ever signed, they took money off the top and sent it to the Canada Pension Plan. What do you think that was all for?"

Joanne opened her mouth and shut it again.

"It's going into a cheque," he said. "Yours. Every month, for good, and it increases when inflation climbs. You put into it bit by bit from the day you started working and have never counted it as anything you own."

"I've never counted it as anything at all."

"Nobody does. And there's a second cheque at sixty-five. Old Age Security."

"Which we're not getting into tonight."

"Which I'm not doing tonight." He pinned the page down with one finger. "But look at what you've got. A real number, finished, which most people never manage to figure out. And two cheques that turn up every month and aren't accounted for yet." He looked up. "So what's actually left for the $318,000 to do?"

She thought about it. "Less," she said. "Considerably less."

"That's it exactly. You've been asking your savings to pay for your whole life. It doesn't have to. It covers what's left once everything else has turned up."

She made the tea. Her hands did it without her thinking about it again.

"You still haven't told me if it's enough," she said.

"No. But last Sunday you couldn't have asked me properly, because you didn't know what you were asking." He turned the notebook round to face her as she sat down. "You do now. A week and a shoebox."

"Thirty years and a shoebox."

"Fair," Simon said, and poured them both a cup.

Joanne let him get one sip in. Then she got up, went out to the hall, and came back with her purse.

The envelope was white and it had Service Canada across the top. She had got it Thursday, the same day the dentist rang, and had not opened it. She had wanted to finish figuring out her number first.

She opened it now, at the table, with him sitting there.

Four pages. The first three were her working life in columns, every year she had paid in, and she knew the low ones on sight, the years the college gave her one course. On the last page was a single number, under one line of plain type: what her pension would be if she started it now.

She read that twice.

"Now," she said. "As in this year. As in I could already have been getting this."

"Since sixty, in fact." Simon leaned over and read it upside down, which he had been able to do since he was nine. "It doesn't start on its own, Jo. Nobody posts it to you. You have to ask for it, and you never asked, because you were still working."

"Nobody told me I had to ask."

"Nobody tells anybody."

Below it, in smaller type, the sheet set out how the amount moved. Sixty-five was the standard age. Seventy was the latest and the largest. Hers, for starting this year, sat a long way under both.

Three doors, then. This year, sixty-five, or seventy. And the numbers under them were nowhere near each other.

"Which one am I supposed to want?"

"That," Simon said, "is the right question, and it is a quarter past six, and dinner has been ready for ten minutes. We should eat."

"Simon."

"Thursday." He picked up his fork. "Come to the market with me and we'll go through all three. Bring the envelope."

She looked at the three of them a moment longer. Then she folded the pages back along their creases, flat, and put them in her notebook, where they stayed until Thursday.