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.

Ilma Ostrom gave us a used blender and a bag of groceries. Wade talks about it the way you would talk about somebody paying for a wedding.

The couch stayed.

Four days later Ilma let herself in with the spare key Wade had given her for emergencies, went through my refrigerator, told me salmon was a waste of money, and sat down on that couch and stroked the arm of it like it had been repatriated.

That afternoon I was in the hall with a laundry basket and I heard her say to her son, in my kitchen:

"When the money starts coming in for you, don't put it all into the household. Keep some back. You never know with women."

That night I opened the statement for the supplementary card, which I had never once looked at properly in three years.

Bars. Games. Gas. Flowers.

On the eighth of March there was a florist charge for ninety-five dollars.