10. The Ledger
THE LEDGER
The sign went up on the lawn on the nineteenth of April. Duszak's people put it in crooked and Todd went out in the rain and straightened it, which I thought was the saddest thing I'd ever seen a man do.
Six weeks left. Scott had a job in Columbus starting the ninth of June.
Todd was going home to Parma to work at his uncle's lot and be extremely unclear about the rest. Aaron had two more years of the program and a lease he'd already half signed on a place across town with two guys from his cohort, and he had not brought it up once since March, which was the loudest thing in the house.
Kim from the slide library asked me in April, sleeving a carousel on the light box, what I was doing in the fall.
I said I didn't know.
She said, "You could move in with me. I've got the second bedroom until my sister comes in January."
And I said, "Can I tell you something insane," and I told her about ninety percent of it, right there over a light box in Barrow Hall, and Kim Dushek put down a slide and said, "Angie. Sweetheart. What are you going to do next year?"
Which was the correct question and the one I'd been walking around all spring.
Because that's the thing about the best year of your life happening in a rented house with a sign on the lawn.
You can't renew it. The whole reason it worked, all of it, the reaching without asking and the beer on my back and being handed a paper towel and a thank-you, was that four people were stuck in a building together with no exit until the thirty-first of May.
Nobody was choosing it. That was the entire point. It was infrastructure.
You cannot go out and find that. There is no personal ad for it. You can find men, God knows, but you can't find a house.
That's the thing I didn't say to Kim and haven't said out loud until now. Not that I was ashamed of it. That I'd finally, at twenty-one, gotten the exact thing I'd wanted since I was seventeen, and it came with an end date printed on a photocopy taped to the front door in October.
I was nine days late on the twenty-eighth of April.
I'd known for about four of them. Aaron had known for all nine, obviously, and had said nothing, and had gone very quiet, and had started doing this thing where he'd put his hand flat on my stomach in the night without waking up, which he denied in the morning and which he absolutely did.
I didn't buy a test. I want that understood, because everyone assumes I ran out and bought one, and I didn't, not in April.
I liked the nine days. I'd wanted proof for eight months and here it was, the best kind, the kind that isn't in a wastebasket and can't be tied off, sitting quietly in my own body while three men moved around a house pretending to be relaxed.
Todd had started asking me if I wanted anything from Zeb's about four times a day.
Scott had fixed the window in my room that stuck, without being asked, in April, six weeks before we all moved out of it.
Tuesday night, the house asleep, and I came downstairs for water in the shirt with the whole place at fifty-eight degrees because that argument I never won either.
The ledger hung off the fridge on the pierogi magnet. Phone bill, split four ways. Long distance itemized. Todd's four dollars from the eleventh of November, still outstanding. The rule with a line through it and STRUCK 3/24, ALL PARTIES PRESENT, and a chili pepper.
I took the pen out of the spiral and I turned to a clean page, and under everything, in handwriting a lot worse than Scott's, I wrote:
ANGIE. MAY 31. TBD.
And then, because it was true and because there was nobody up to see me be sentimental about it, I put a question mark after it and hung the notebook back on the fridge for whoever got to the kitchen first.
Somebody would settle it. That was how the house worked. Everything got settled in the notebook eventually, the milk and the phone and the four dollars and the rule, and the four of us had never once failed to work out who owed what.
I got my water and stood in the dark kitchen in a t-shirt that said the name of a dealership in Parma, nine days late, six weeks from the end of the lease, and upstairs a man who had walked to Zeb's in January and not wanted a sub was asleep with his hand where he'd put it.
Tomorrow's problem.
I went up.
THE END