Chapter Seventeen
Beau · Then
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We were broke for the first four years, and they were the best years of my life, and I didn’t understand the connection between those two facts until I had money and a title and a wife who wouldn’t look at me.
When we started out I was bottom-rung at the distribution company and Martha was a first-year paralegal billed by the heartbeat, and between us we made just enough to be constantly, low-grade terrified about money.
We had the third-floor walk-up with the bad plumbing.
We had a car we prayed over at every cold start.
We ate a lot of rice. When Theo came we put his crib in our room because there was no second room, and I’d lie awake doing the math on diapers and daycare and feel my chest go tight—and Martha, my unsentimental, fortress-walled Martha, would feel me not-sleeping and put her hand flat on my chest in the dark and say, “Hey. We’re going to figure it out.
We always figure it out. Go to sleep—we’re a team. ” And I would.
That was the thing. We’re a team. We said it constantly those broke years, like a charm against the cold starts and the rice and the math.
A flat tire at midnight, a layoff scare, a hospital bill—we’re a team, we’ll figure it out.
And we always did, and the figuring-out together was somehow the best part, better than if we’d had the money and not needed to.
There’s a closeness you only get from bailing the same boat with someone.
We bailed a lot of boat. I have never felt less alone in my life than I did broke in a third-floor walk-up with a baby in our room and a wife with her hand on my chest telling me we were a team.
Here’s the part I’ll be chewing on for the rest of my life.
I spent those four years desperate not to be broke.
I wanted to give her better than rice and a praying car.
So I chased the next rung, and the next, and I was good at it, and the rungs came, and the money came, and the title came—the site lead, the relocation, the house with good light.
And somewhere in all that getting, I lost the only thing the being-broke had given us, which was the team.
You don’t say we’re a team, we’ll figure it out when there’s nothing to figure out.
You don’t bail the boat together when the boat isn’t leaking.
We got the dry boat I’d been killing myself for, and we sat in it at opposite ends, and I missed the leak.
God help me, I missed the leak. I missed being broke with her more than I ever enjoyed being comfortable without her.
Nobody warns you that you can succeed your way out of your own marriage.
That the very thing you’re chasing for your family can be the thing that dissolves it—not because money is evil, but because the chasing takes your eyes off the boat, and the comfort removes the daily reason to reach for each other’s hand in the dark.
We were closest when we had nothing and needed each other to survive the week.
And then I made sure we’d never have nothing again—and in doing it, I made sure we’d never need each other that same way again, either, and I called that providing.
I called it love. I called it being a good husband.
Martha put her hand on my chest in the dark for four broke years and told me we were a team.
By the time we got to Mercer, we slept on opposite edges of a bed in a house I’d bought with the success I’d chased to take care of her, and neither of us reached across the middle, and I’d lie awake at five with my chest tight again—except this time there was no math to do, nothing to figure out, no leak to bail.
Just a man who’d gotten everything he wanted, missing the version of his life where he had nothing but her hand on his chest, telling him we’d figure it out.
We were a team. I’d give back every rung to be a team again. But you can’t, it turns out, buy back the leak once you’ve fixed the boat. You just sit in the dry, comfortable, silent boat, and remember how close you used to be when you were sinking.