Love Saves the Day

Laura looks up in surprise. “Anise Pierce? Why would I want to get in touch with Anise Pierce?”

“She recorded a couple of albums in Alphaville Studios. We’re up to ten thousand signatures on the online petition, and I’ve got a few media outlets sniffing around. I thought that if someone of her stature came on board, we might be able to nail something down.”

“I don’t want to get in touch with Anise.” Laura picks up the folded paper napkin in her lap and drops it over the uneaten plate of eggs. I can tell already that Laura is going to show her bad mood to Josh, just like she showed it to me upstairs—and I think how much luckier Josh is than I am, because he can talk back to her.

He looks confused again for a moment. “I just think it would really help us if—”

“I already told you, I don’t want to,” Laura interrupts. “I don’t think this building on Avenue A should be your priority right now. We’ve got things to worry about here.”

“What kind of things? What are you talking about?”

“If you want to worry about who can afford to live where,” she tells him, “maybe you should worry about where we’re going to live when your severance runs out next week and we can’t afford to keep this place anymore.”

Now my stomach feels upset, like somebody is squeezing it in their fist. We might have to leave this apartment? How is that possible? Why didn’t anybody tell me that something like this could happen? If Sarah doesn’t know where to find Laura, how will she know where to find me?

“Oh, come off it, Laura,” Josh says. “I know we’ve lost a chunk of our savings, but we’re still a long way from losing this apartment.”

“You come off it, Josh.” Laura’s voice gets louder. “I refuse to be the only person around here who worries about work. Do you ever think about what might happen if I suddenly lost my job? Do you even know how bad things have been at the firm lately?”

“How the hell should I know?” Josh’s voice gets louder, too. “You don’t talk to me about what’s happening at your job. You don’t talk to me about anything. For months I’ve been trying as hard as I know how to get you to open up about something—your mother, your job, anything at all—but all you do is shut me down. What am I, a mind reader?”

“I didn’t realize you had to be a mind reader to do basic math,” Laura says. Her voice sounds angrier than it sounded even when she used to get mad at Sarah. “I didn’t realize you had to be a mind reader to add the zero dollars you’ll be earning to our monthly budget and come up with zero dollars for rent.” Laura is shouting now. She stands up and slams her chair so hard against the kitchen table that it bounces off and tumbles on its side onto the floor. The loud noise and the shouting scare me so much, I skid as I run for under-the-couch. I can still see and hear Laura and Josh, but I feel safer here as I twitch the fur on my back fast-fast-fast. Laura laughs, but it’s a kind of laugh that sounds the exact opposite of when a human finds something funny. “And the truly outstanding part of the whole thing is that I never wanted an apartment this big or expensive in the first place!”

“Give me a break with your revisionist history bullshit!” I hear Josh yell. “We picked out this apartment together. We spent weeks looking for a place where we could start a family. You didn’t have one word to say against any of that, but now you turn green every time the subject of having children comes up. Maybe I’m not a mind reader, and maybe I can’t do basic math, but I’m not blind, Laura.”

“How can we even think about having children if we don’t have any money!”

“Oh, and you were just so thrilled when you got pregnant the first time.” Now his voice sounds mean. “Your happiness and absolute elation were written all over your face. How stupid do you think I am?”

“Don’t mix things up! That was then, and this is now, and now we can’t have children without worrying about how we’ll pay for everything.”

“Enough already!” Josh roars. “Everything with you is about money! Stop with the money! We have money!”

“Not enough!” Laura yells back at him. “You have no idea how terrifying it is to have no money at all! You don’t know what it’s like when—” Suddenly Laura stops yelling and is silent.

“When what?” Josh demands. “When what, Laura? What happened to you that was so terrible you can’t even talk about it?”

Laura is silent. When she speaks again, her voice is lower, but it sounds cold. “What happened is that my husband started caring more about strangers, and about playing babysitter to his niece and nephew, than he does about our future.”

Josh’s voice gets lower, too, but somehow that makes his words crueler. “You are not the person to give me lessons on how to treat family. You left your mother alone in that miserable apartment you could barely bring yourself to visit once a month. You didn’t even take time off work when she died. Think about that, Laura. And don’t talk to me about family.”