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 funded three of those. Not all of them. Three. About nine thousand dollars in total and I have the transfers.

Every one of them ended the same way, which was not in a failure but in a fade — he would simply stop mentioning it, and if I asked, there would be a reason involving somebody else.

In the September of last year, he came home and said he had been let go.

Restructuring. Whole team. Very hard on everyone.

I was decent about it. I told him to take a month. I picked up the two things he had been paying — the internet and one insurance — and I told him not to panic.

Then October, November, December.

He was up at eleven. He was on the couch. He had a thing on Thursdays that I never got a straight answer about.

And his mother started coming over, and started saying things about how hard it is for a man, and how a wife's job in a season like that is to make the house easy.