Totally and Completely Fine(35)

“He’s been sniffing around Lauren ever since she came to visit the Philadelphia Story set,” he said.

That was enough. I’d had enough.

“Sniffing around?” I asked. “I’m a person, not a lost steak. Don’t be a macho asshole.”

At least Gabe looked a little guilty at that.

Not that it stopped him from talking.

“Sorry,” he said, not sorry at all. “It’s just—”

“You don’t like him, I know.” I sighed. “You’ve made that perfectly clear.”

Before he could say any more, I pushed back from the table.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m going to go check on Lena.”

I could see my mom giving Gabe a look as I left.

Poor Chani. We were really giving her a front-row seat to the Parker family dysfunction. She’d have to really like Gabe in order to stick around.

But I was pretty sure she did.

There was no accounting for taste.

Chapter 21

Then

“When we win the lottery,” Spencer said, “I’m going to buy one of those big stone mansions over on Lloyd Street.”

“You’d have to win the lottery to pay the heating bill on it,” I said. “I heard it costs more than the mortgage during the winter.”

We were eating dinner—spaghetti and meatballs because it was the kind of meal that we could stretch over a couple of days, putting the extra grocery money into the house fund.

“That’s not how the game goes,” Spencer chided me.

He had dark circles under his eyes from working the late-night shift at King Cheese and then the early shift at the hardware store. But the overtime money was good, and each check brought us closer and closer to our goal.

Spencer’s goal.

He wanted to buy a house with the kind of intense focus and desire that had once been reserved mostly for me. There were moments when I was jealous of this new devotion.

It was all he thought about. All he talked about. Sometimes, he confessed, he had dreams about it. And I wanted to move out of our crappy apartment—the place that had once felt like adulthood and freedom—which now seemed to be getting smaller with every passing month. But I didn’t need a house, I just needed more space.

I was still working at the grocery store and took on as many extra shifts as I could, but I’d gotten tired of seeing all that money go into a savings account. There were so many things we could have used, things we needed but went without.

“When we win the lottery,” I said, “I’ll buy that electric blanket back.”

Spencer’s mouth paused in the middle of chewing to curve into a frown.

“What?” I demanded, even though I knew exactly what.

We’d been fighting over that damn blanket for weeks now. I’d seen it in the window of a store downtown and, knowing that we had another cold winter coming and a heater that barely worked and cost too much to run, bought it and brought it home.

“I told you we couldn’t afford it,” Spencer said.

“It was forty dollars,” I said. “We can afford it.”

We’d had this argument dozens of times over our short married life. About a whole number of things. An electric blanket. New curtains. A bedside table that hadn’t been found on the side of the road.

There was saving money and there was being ridiculous.

Spencer thought we were the former, while I knew he was the latter.

“It will go on sale,” he said.

“Yeah, after the worst of winter has passed,” I said.

“We have to think of the house,” he told me.

That’s what he always said.

“What if I don’t want to?”

The look he gave me was sheer confusion and bewilderment.

“What if I don’t want to think about a stupid house all the time?” I asked. “What if I want to think about myself? What if I want to spend our money on an electric blanket so I can be warm in the winter, and buy a new swimsuit in the summer because my old one is starting to sag? What if I want to go out to dinner once in a while instead of figuring out all our meals from the half-off can section of the store?”

I’d felt this way for a while now but didn’t know how to say it. Didn’t know how to tell Spencer that the house mattered to him a lot more than it mattered to me, and if I had the choice, I’d spend our money on a nicer apartment and a night at the movies. With popcorn.

I wanted to enjoy life, not wait for it to begin.

And now that I’d started, it all came pouring out. How much I hated our place, how I hated how tired he was all the time, how we barely saw each other between shifts, how I was worried that we would never be able to buy a house and we’d just be stuck in this basement forever, freezing and miserable.

He listened silently until I was done. Then he stood and walked out of the apartment.

“Fuck!” I said to the empty kitchen.

We never fought. We argued occasionally over small things, like who had left hair in the drain （me） and who needed to do the dishes every night （him）， but it never came from a place of real anger.

I hadn’t realized, until that moment, exactly how angry I was. How resentment about our finances was festering deep inside of me. How I felt left out of our plans for the future because they centered completely around Spencer’s needs.