The Receipt Was Itemized

October eleventh.

What happened was: we bought groceries together last Saturday because it made sense logistically, and then it did not make sense financially, and then we sat down at my kitchen table with the receipt and a pen to figure out who owed what, and forty minutes later we had not resolved the money question but we had established, conclusively, that Simone had bought three different kinds of olive oil in one trip and I had bought something described on the receipt only as MISC DRY GOODS which neither of us could identify until I found it in the cabinet. It was a bag of dried chickpeas I already have two of.

the receipt, held aloft as evidence

Simone held the receipt up like she was presenting it to a judge. I cannot overstate the gravity with which she did this. She had found a line item she could not account for and she was not going to let it go. I put my head down on the table. The receipt is long. It is a CVS-level receipt for a grocery run, which means it also had coupons printed on the back for things neither of us will ever buy, and Simone read one of them aloud in a very serious voice while I was still trying to find a pen that worked.

We settled it eventually, split the total, called it even, neither of us interrogated the chickpea situation further. I wrote the number on a corner of the receipt and folded it and put it in the drawer where I keep the paper number, and then I thought about that for a second. The paper number from 2011 that I wrote as a rough monthly comfort figure, it's been in that drawer for ten years, doing quiet work, and now it lives next to a grocery receipt we couldn't decode. Which is either very funny or very on-brand. Probably both.