Treading Water

Nadia and Theo had been married eleven years. She ran the front desk at a family medical clinic. He ran a shift at a logistics warehouse out past the ring road. They had two kids, Sofia who was six and Liam who was three, and a mortgage on a small house in the city they had both grown up in. Two incomes, two healthy kids, a roof over all of them. Anybody looking would have said they were doing fine.

Theo had a rule about money, though he'd never have called it that. Money was Nadia's department. Somebody in the house was watching the account, and it wasn't him, so it had to be her.

Nadia had the same rule, pointed the other way. Theo was the one who was good with numbers. He could walk down a row of pallets and tell you to the dollar what was sitting on them. A man who could do that knew what was in the chequing account. So she didn't look.

The rule lasted eleven years. It broke on a Thursday afternoon at the Save-On, with payday still four days off.

Sofia was with her, just the two of them, which didn't happen often. Sofia rode in the part of the cart she was getting too big for. She'd picked the cereal with the bird on it. Milk, bread, the chicken that was on sale, grapes because Liam would only eat fruit if it was small and round.

Sofia wanted to put everything on the belt herself, which doubled how long it took, and Nadia let her, because it was Thursday and they weren't in a hurry.

$112 and change.

Nadia tapped her debit card. The machine thought about it. Then it made a sound that wasn't a beep, and a word came up on the screen.

Declined.

Try it again, she told herself, and tapped a second time. Same sound. Same word.

Behind her a man moved his basket to his other arm. The cashier reached over and cancelled it without being asked, which was kind and made it worse.

"Mom?" Sofia had turned around in the cart. "Why is it beeping?"

"It's being silly," Nadia said.

She got out the credit card, the one they kept for emergencies, and tapped it, and it beeped the way it was supposed to. The screen said Approved. The relief went through her so fast that it embarrassed her.

Six people in the line by then. A woman two carts back leaned out to see what was taking so long. Nadia felt her face go hot and knew it showed, and she thanked all of them on her way past.

Sofia held it until the parking lot.

"Are we poor?" she said.

"No."

"There's a kid at school says they're rich because they have a trampoline."

Nadia swung the bags into the back and shut the hatch. "Then we're one trampoline off," she said.

Sofia thought about that the whole way to the van.

Nadia buckled her in, got in herself, and didn't start the engine. $112. Four days out. And it hadn't been there.

She tried to think when she'd last looked at the balance. Not glanced at it. Looked. She couldn't.

Then she started the van, because Liam had to be picked up by 5:30. On the way Sofia sang most of a song from school, got the middle wrong, and started again from the top, twice. Nadia said it was a good song. At the lights on Sixty-Seventh she worked out that the credit card would carry them to Monday, and that something would have to move to pay the credit card, and she couldn't think what.

Nadia was thirty-six. Her clinic was the one with the fish tank in the waiting room and the sign asking for 24 hours notice. She knew which patients hated needles, and which ones came in scared and said they were fine. She got home most days at 5:40 with her feet aching.

Theo was thirty-eight, and he had never once in his life been the one who worried. When the furnace made a noise, he said it'll settle. When the dishwasher started leaving grit on the glasses, he said it was probably the soap. He wasn't lazy about it. Things had worked out his whole life, so he expected them to keep doing it.

He got home at 6:15 and the evening went the way it always went. Liam ate the chicken and refused the rice because it was touching the chicken. Theo told him rice was rice. Liam said it wasn't anymore.

"The machine was being silly at the store," Sofia said.

Theo reached past her for the beans. "Yeah?"

"It beeped at Mom."

"Huh." He asked Sofia who she'd played with at recess, and Sofia was off, and that was that.

Nadia let it go by. Saying it at the table, with the kids sitting right there, would have made it something that was happening to all four of them.

Bath, teeth, two books for Liam and one chapter for Sofia. It was nearly 9:00 before the house went quiet.

Theo was on the couch with his phone. Nadia stood in the kitchen doorway for a second before she said it.

"The card got declined at the Save-On today." She waited until he looked up. "In front of Sofia."

Theo turned the phone face down on his knee. "The debit card? There's money in there." It'll settle, that same voice. "Maybe the machine—"

"It wasn't the machine, Theo. There wasn't enough."

"There's always money four days out." He said it easily, the way he said most things.

"How do you know that?"

He started to answer. Then he didn't.

"I figured you kept an eye on it," Theo said at last.

"I figured you did."

Nadia took a pen out of the jar by the phone and an envelope off the pile of mail, and sat down at the kitchen table. After a second Theo came and sat across from her.

"We take home $7,400 a month," she said. "The two of us together, after tax."

"About that," Theo said.

"The mortgage is $2,350." She wrote it at the top. "Utilities run about $350. Insurance is another $175 on top of that." She wrote both underneath it. "So the house is $2,875 before anybody in it eats anything."

"Sure," Theo said.

"Liam's daycare is $326."

"That's the fifteen-dollar-a-day thing," Theo said.

"That's the fifteen-dollar-a-day thing." Nadia wrote $549 under Liam's number. "Sofia isn't in it. She's in grade one, so she's in out-of-school care, and out-of-school care doesn't get the funding. We pay whatever they charge."

Theo looked up at her. "The six-year-old costs more than the three-year-old."

"By a couple of hundred a month," Nadia said.

"That can't be right."

"I've been paying it since she started school."

He didn't have anything for that.

"So it's $875 for the two of them." She drew a line under the column, did the subtraction, and turned the envelope around so it faced him. "That's $3,750 out of $7,400."

Theo looked at it without picking it up.

"There's $3,650 left," Nadia said. "Every month. That's what I'm trying to tell you. There is $3,650 a month in this house and I can't tell you where one dollar of it goes."

Theo started listing. "Groceries. Gas. Sofia's swimming. That thing for Liam's feet."

"That's not $3,650."

"It has to be." He sat back in the chair. "It's coming out of somewhere."

"I know it is."

He put his elbows on the table and looked at the envelope for a while without saying anything.

"We're not broke," he said finally. He wasn't arguing. He sounded about nineteen. "We both work. I pick up overtime. We make decent money."

"We do," Nadia said. "That's not the part I can't explain."

"So where is it?"

"I don't know." She turned the envelope back around to face herself. "And neither do you. That's the actual problem."

Theo picked it up then and held it, looking at her handwriting.

"$3,650," he said.

"Every month."

"For how long?"

"I don't know that either," Nadia said.

They went to bed a little after eleven. Nadia lay there listening to Theo not sleeping either.

Eleven years, and there had never once been a person in that house who could have answered his question. She'd had half of it. He'd had the other half. Nobody had ever held both.

"Saturday," she said into the dark.

"What about Saturday?" Theo said.

"You and me. Both of us." She turned over to face him, though there was nothing to see. "I'm not doing this on my own and then telling you about it after."

Theo was quiet long enough that she thought he'd gone under.

"Saturday," he said.