The Week Two Things Hit at Once

July seventh. The phone bill and the pottery class fee landed in the same week. Not the same day, which would have been too obvious, but close enough that I looked at my notebook and then looked at the ceiling for a long moment before writing anything down.

Simone had come over after work, she does this sometimes now, just appears at the kitchen table like she belongs there, which I suppose she does at this point. I had the notebook open. She looked at it, looked at me, and started laughing. Not unkindly. The kind of laughing that means she has been there too and survived it. I told her the pottery fee was not that much and she said 'I know, that's almost the worst part,' which is exactly the correct thing to say and also not helpful at all.

after the math. before the solutions. somewhere in the middle of both.

We sat there for a while doing the math out loud. Not crisis math, I have done crisis math and this wasn't that, but the kind of math where you're mostly just confirming what you already know, which is that it fits if nothing else moves. Nothing else moved. The number I wrote down back in August held. I wrote 'fine' at the bottom of the column, which is not usually how I end a budget page but which felt accurate.

By the time the coffee was done we had stopped talking about money entirely and started talking about the open-studio Thursday in two weeks, which Simone has apparently been thinking about more than she let on when she said 'that's actually useful' at pottery. She said she wants to try without the instructor watching. I said I want to see if the bowl holds when there's no one grading it. We didn't make a plan exactly. But I wrote the date on the back of my bus pass again, in pen this time, which I think counts.