Issue 4: Echoes
Eighteen Hundred Dollars
Janel Comeau
When Rebecca Everett was still Rebecca Cooper, there had been five things she’d wanted in a husband.
He should be kind.
He should be loyal.
He should clean up after himself.
He should get along with her parents.
And, perhaps most importantly, he should make enough money to split the rent on the $1800-per-month two-bedroom apartment that she had secured in a good neighborhood just before the rental market really started getting bad.
On the day she walked down the aisle toward Jacob Everett, Rebecca knew she was marrying a man who possessed just four of those qualities.
After a year of living with him, she had revised the number down to three.
And as she sat watching him dig into a basket of onion rings on a Sunday night nearly three and a half years into their marriage, she was beginning to fear that he might have only two.
They were seated in a booth at Mack’s Burger Shack, a greasy mom-n-pop establishment that locals frequented when—and only when—the line at Dairy Queen was too long to bother with and the McDonalds had switched to drive-thru only for the night. A Cheezy Chickenburger was slowly congealing on a bed of French Fries in front of Rebecca, but she ignored her food to stare at Jacob, who ignored her to stare at his phone.
“Jacob,” she said.
He looked up from his basket of vegetable oils and corn syrups.
“Huh?” he said. It was the way he normally grunted a question at her.
She reached into her tote bag and pulled out a manila envelope. He made no move to take it, so she slid it across the table to him.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“Open it,” she said.
He made a big show of sighing and wiping his hands and reaching for the envelope as if this was the most burdensome task anyone had ever been asked to do in the entire history of human civilization. Rebecca had not stuck down the adhesive strip, but he ripped the top off the envelope anyway and slid out the contents.
He said nothing as he scanned through the pages—printouts of text messages, credit card statements with highlighted charges, a map that showed his phone had spent the night at a house his phone had no business being at—and then set them aside. He picked up another onion ring and resumed his dinner.
“Well?” Rebecca asked.
“Well, what?”
“That’s it? You have nothing to say?”
He took a bite of his Double-Decker Peanut Butter Bacon Burger and chewed with the slow deliberation of a man enjoying a rare cut of the world’s most expensive hand-massaged wagyu.
“So, you’re spying on me now?” he said, through a mouth full of beef.
Rebecca nearly choked, though she hadn’t taken a single bite of her dinner.
“You think that’s the problem here? Really?”
He nodded his head toward the pile of documents. “You’ve been going through my phone when I’m, what, sleeping? Or in the shower? That’s a complete invasion of my privacy.”
“You’re not even going to deny that you’re cheating on me?”
Jacob shrugged and pulled a wadded-up handful of brown paper napkins out of the dispenser. “Is there much point? You’ve clearly already decided that I have.”
Rebecca tapped the envelope on the table. A page of social media messages was sticking out of the top, and she could just read the upside-down words ‘miss you too baby’ from where she was sitting.
“I didn’t ‘decide’ anything! It’s all right here! If you caught me sending messages like this to someone else you’d be flipping tables in this restaurant right now.”
He lowered his half-eaten burger back into the basket. “Rebecca, to be clear, I have never been violent toward you in my life. And I really don’t appreciate you making such a serious accusation.”
“I’m not accusing you of anything, I’m just saying—”
“You were ‘just saying’ that I’d start flipping tables in a restaurant. When have you ever seen me do anything like that?”
“That’s not—” Rebecca was suddenly aware of how loudly she was speaking and dropped her voice. “That’s not what I’m saying.”
“Is that why you brought me here to have this little conversation? I’m just such a terrible person all of a sudden that you couldn’t possibly have brought this up privately at home?”
“No! I’m sorry, okay?” she said. “I’m sorry I said that.”
He met her eyes for a moment, then picked up his burger and resumed eating.
She tapped the envelope again. “We still need to talk about this.”
He stopped mid-chew and sighed deeply.
“Fine. I was lonely and working long hours, and you weren’t always around. Some boundaries got crossed that shouldn’t have. It’s over, and it won’t happen again.”
“And?”
“And what? You really think you’re going to leave me over this?”
“Shouldn’t I?”
“And how do you think that’s going to work out for you?” he asked, his voice as flat as the look in his eyes.
Rebecca blinked. “What is that supposed to mean?”
Jacob normally spoke words the same way he spent money—he was sparing to the point of stinginess, and he certainly saw no need to waste them on Rebecca. But as they faced each other in their back corner booth at the burger shack, he suddenly appeared to be overwhelmed with generosity.
“Well, let’s see.” He sucked the grease from his fingers and began to tick them off. “I’m an attorney. You work part-time as a substitute teacher and knit stuffed animals to sell online.”
“Crocheted animals.”
“Sure. Crocheted animals. And you net about $400 per year doing that. I know, because I file your taxes. I also co-signed your car loan. I renew your insurance policies. I fill out the paperwork for reduced payments on the gargantuan student loans you took out to go to grad school. Are you getting the picture here?”
Rebecca went as cold as her fries.
“So, let’s say you leave me,” Jacob continued. “You can’t afford to pay $1800 rent by yourself. I can. And we’re both on the lease, so it looks like I’m the one keeping the apartment. I don’t know if you’ve been keeping an eye on the rental listings lately, but every unit in our building—in our whole area, actually—is going for $2500, even $2800 easily. The intern at work just moved into a studio in the north end for $1300, and he says he was lucky to find that place. I don’t think you can even afford $1300 for a studio.”
Jacob took a long sip of his Diet Coke and continued. “If you can’t get a full-time teaching gig by September, I think you’d probably be looking at finding a rented room somewhere. Out by the airport would probably be realistic for you. Even then, you’d be spending so much more on gas to drive into the city that you’d probably have to pick up a couple of extra shifts somewhere. Maybe this place is hiring waitresses, we can ask.”
Rebecca started to shake her head, but Jacob held up a finger.
“I don’t mind paying your damage deposit on a new place, but you’ll need to buy your own furniture,” he said. “Almost everything in that apartment is mine, and it’s staying with me. I don’t think you’ll have room for most of it anyway.”
Rebecca kept her eyes glued to the napkin she had begun to tear apart, rolling the shredded pieces between her fingertips.
“I supported you all through law school,” she said. She tried to choke down the wobble in her voice. “That was the deal we had. I worked nights and weekends for minimum wage and I put all my dreams on hold, so I could support you. And this is what you do to me?”
The waitress came over to refill their water glasses, and they watched her in silence until she’d disappeared through the swinging doors to the kitchen.
“I repaid the favour, remember?” he asked. “I went to work, and you went back for your master’s degree. I paid the bills until you graduated. Remember that?”
Rebecca had her head in her heads.
“If I hadn’t wasted all those years supporting you, I’d be further ahead right now.” She sniffled. “Maybe I could afford a place on my own.”
She felt the weight of Jacob’s hand as he touched her arm.
“You don’t have to pay for a place on your own,” he said. “I don’t want to see you sharing some dingy basement with six strangers. Guys do stupid things sometimes when we’re lonely, it’s not worth ending our whole entire marriage over it.”
She said nothing.
“Let’s go home,” he said. He slid a set of keys across the table to her. “You can go wait in the car, I’ll take care of the bill.”
In her head, Rebecca tallied up the cost of the burgers and sides and drinks; it came to about half of what she had left in her chequing account. The school district hadn’t needed her much since Mrs. Pepperell had recovered from her gallbladder surgery.
“Fine,” she said.
She was on her feet and out the door and standing in the parking lot before either of them had a chance to say anything else to each other. Through the restaurant’s front picture windows, she watched her husband gather up her uneaten meal and her manila envelope full of little betrayals and dump them both in a garbage can as he walked to the cash register.
There were exactly five things that Rebecca Everett had wanted in a husband, she thought as she watched him pulling out his wallet to pay.
He should be kind.
He should be loyal.
He should clean up after himself.
He should get along with her parents.
And he should make enough money to split the rent on the two-bedroom apartment she had secured before the rents got bad and couldn’t afford to leave.
So she gritted her teeth and got into her car and drove home to her $1800 per month apartment with a husband who had only one.
Janel Comeau is a writer, illustrator, comedian and youth worker currently residing in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her short fiction has previously appeared in Jenny Magazine, the Opus 22 anthology, and the Quantum Shorts, Vol 2 anthology. Her writing has also appeared in The Beaverton, The Best New True Crime anthology series, and Write or Die Magazine.