Either you go and clean my mother's apartment right now, my husband said, or tomorrow I file for divorce — six months out of work, living on my salary, saying it with a beer in his hand. I didn't argue. I took the keys and walked out. What was behind his mother's door turned that threat around on him inside forty minutes.

It started over a couch.

I was having breakfast in my own apartment on Fenwick Row on a Saturday in the March when I heard something hitting the door frame, and Wade came in backwards, pushing a burgundy velvet three-seater with sagging cushions and both armrests worn down to the backing.

"It's Mom's. She's getting the place painted and she doesn't want to throw it out. It's here for a month."

I looked at it for a while.

I am thirty-two. I am the senior accountant at Tessler Construction and I have been there nine years, and I bought that apartment at twenty-eight, eleven months before I met Wade Ostrom.

He arrived three years ago with a suitcase, a laptop, and an inexhaustible supply of business ideas.

"I'm allergic to dust," I said. "That is not staying in my front room."

"Don't be dramatic, Bernie. My mom helped us out when we got married."