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.

I did not put the couch out.

That is the thing people find strange when I tell this, and I have stopped trying to explain it properly.

It went out with everything else of his in the January, and there was a whole afternoon of it, and I made a point of not being in the building.

What I kept is the whiteboard.

I asked for it in the negotiation as a joke and Raisa put it in the schedule with a straight face, and it came back to me in the spring in a courier's van, wiped clean.

It is in my hall now with the shopping list on it.

Take them. Either you go and clean my mother's place right now, or tomorrow I file for divorce. Say yes, in front of everyone.

He said that to me in my own front room, with my platter in his cousin's hands, at his mother's birthday party that I paid for, in front of twenty people who all found somewhere else to look.