Chapter 47

Six weeks after their wedding, Eve opens their credit card bill, shrieks, and claps her hand over her mouth like a girl in a horror movie. Shedrops the bill on the table, takes a few steps back, leans against the ugly peach-colored kitchen countertop, and tries to calm her breathing.

She is alone in their apartment. It’s a Saturday morning. Dom has back-to-back personal training sessions all day today until five. She doesn’t want to look at it again. She feels literally sick.

No. Grow up, Eve. She picks up the bill with her fingertips. A thought occurs: It’s not their bill! She’s accidentally opened someone else’s mail! But no, it’s their bill. Their shiny new names are right there: Eve and Dominic Archer-Fern.

There will be a mistake. She will find the mistake. She sits at the kitchen table and uses the straight edge of the envelope like a ruler, to go through the bill, line by line. So many lines. So much money. The bridesmaids’ gifts, the groomsmen’s gifts, the hairdresser, the makeup artist, two bottles of prosecco for the girls while they were having their hair and makeup done, three meat lover’s pizzas for the boys when they got hungry waiting for the wedding to start, the stupid uncomfortable wedding-night lingerie she will never wear again, her wedding shoes, Dom’s wedding shoes, the tuxedo rental, the taxis in Sydney, the painful couples massage they thought was included in their accommodation package (the words “additional cost” in tiny letters), the half-price happy hour cocktails (why did they buy drinks for that couple from Adelaide? That girl worked in a literal bank and her husband was up himself), the minibar bill (once they started, they kept taking stuff from the minibar, and it started to feel like it was free), the Uber home from the airport (Dom’s dad offered to pick them up! Why did they say no?), the insurance they had to pay on all their stuff in their new apartment because apparently that’s what you have to do, their phone bills, their first electricity bill (oh my God, why did no one tell them electricity cost so much, isn’t it like a basic human right?), Dom’s daily midmorning smoothie, Eve’s daily midmorning coffee, the grocery bills (why were they buying so many groceries? Who knew eating regular food was so expensive?).

There is a huge bowl of fruit in the middle of the table: mandarins, bananas, oranges, apples. Dom eats an extraordinary amount of fruit every single day. “Aren’t raspberries kind of expensive?” Eve said when they did their last shop. “We can afford it, can’t we?” Dom was confused.

The next day Eve discovered half the raspberries were covered in white fur! Disgusting! What a waste of money.

Neither of them has lived away from home before and Eve’s mother keeps reminding them of this, and giving them helpful advice, as if they are actual idiots. They are twenty years old, they can drink and vote and drive.

“Don’t forget you’ll have to pay all your other expenses, like electricity, groceries, car insurance,” she said when they’d put in an application for this rental. “Have you done a budget?”

Budget. Such a Mum-type word. It isn’t like they’d applied for a place somewhere expensive like Battery Point. They are a twenty-minute drive out of Hobart, on the first floor of a red-brick building without balconies.

It’s not exactly charming, but there is a beautiful big tree directly outside their kitchen window and the sunlight filters through its flickering leaves so on breezy days it creates a disco ball effect of bouncing light and shadow, and on clear days they can see right through the big tree to the mountains. “That’s a lovely outlook,” Eve’s mother had said approvingly, but hadn’t been so thrilled by the discarded vapes, cigarette butts, pizza boxes, and empty glass bottles that littered the front of the building, which turns out to be a popular local hangout for teenagers. This wasn’t mentioned on the list of features in the real estate advertisement. Sometimes Eve and Dom are woken in the middle of the night by raucous laughter, sobbing, and yelling: all those big raw teenage emotions.

The point is they didn’t lease a fancy apartment, which is why Eve assumed they could afford, like, normal stuff. Not diamonds and designer bags. Just raspberries and electricity.

She finds a pen and notepad, opens her laptop, and sits upright in her chair, like she is at work. She is an organized, intelligent person. She was pretty good at math at school. She will do a boring “budget.” She will get on top of this.

When they put in their rental application for this apartment, they had to submit their most recent pay stubs. At that time Dom worked full-time at a warehouse and did personal training after hours. The warehouse laid him off after their application was approved, but they weren’t worried. The opposite. They were pleased. The plan was that Dom would expand his personal training business, and work on his fitness app, and make a lot more money. People sold fitness apps for millions!

He is getting more clients, but the problem is last-minute cancellations. Children seem to get sick a lot and cars often won’t start, which Eve finds suspicious, as Dom’s clients all drive better cars than they do. She thinks Dom should charge a cancellation fee if they send a So sorry, Dom! text when he’s literally on the oval setting up equipment, but Dom won’t even consider that. Often his clients say they don’t have any cash and ask if they can pay next time, and Dom, being Dom, always says, “Sure thing,” but he doesn’t keep records and he never chases up money. “Oh, it all works out in the end,” he says, but Eve knows that none of his clients pay twice. So it does not work out in the end.

Nothing has come of the fitness app.

Apparently you need a wealthy investor to get started. Dom isn’t sure where to find one.

She checks the balance of their joint account and whimpers. Their next rental payment is due on the twenty-sixth of the month. Their car payment is due on the twenty-seventh. Eve’s salary is deposited on the twenty-eighth of the month. Unless they deposit some cash into the account they will not have enough money for the direct debit.

She picks up her pen, draws a line down the middle of the page. and lists income on one side and expenses on the other.

Fifteen minutes later she pushes the notepad away and rests her forehead on her hands. She feels fearful, overwhelmed, but mostly she feels deeply embarrassed.

They literally cannot afford to live their lives.

They have miscalculated. Well, they never actually calculated in the first place. They just thought that if you worked hard most days then you could afford the kind of stuff that everyone else had. They have messed up big time.

How will she tell Dom?

She needs to handle this carefully. Dom is the sweetest, most loving, easygoing, and stable of boys, except for those times when he’s weird and complicated and stubbornly fixates on a wrongheaded idea.

The first time this happened was when they were seventeen and had been together for two years after they fell in love during a French lesson (so romantic, it’s like they met in Paris, ha ha, no it’s not).

It was all Dom’s dad’s fault. One night, after too much red wine, he delivered one of his famous after-dinner monologues about “life.” Eve wasn’t there. It was just Dom listening respectfully, like his dad was a priest delivering a sermon. The topic was relationships. Dom’s dad explained that most teenage relationships were destined to fail and it was “a tragedy” that Dom and Eve had met so young (he later denied using the word “tragedy”) because they’d most likely break up in their twenties when they realized they hadn’t experienced enough of the world or dated enough other people to know that they were right for each other.

Other boys would have said, “I’ll prove you wrong, Dad,” or just ignored it as the typical tipsy ravings of a clueless Gen X parent, but not Dom. He took it to heart and lay awake all night worrying about it, until he came up with a stupid solution.

Eve will never forget Dom’s cold, determined face as he broke her heart on the balcony outside the senior science lab. It was like he’d been body-snatched by aliens. “We need to break up,” he said. She kept sobbing, “Why? Why? What did I do?” He didn’t explain his reasoning because he knew she’d try to change his mind. It was the same kind of crazy no-pain-no-gain conviction that allows him to do an insane number of push-ups and chin-ups.

He seriously believed that if they broke up then, they could “quickly” have relationships with other people, get them over and done with, and be back together in six months, a year, tops. He said the breakup was like a vaccination.

Luckily Dom went home and told his dad, who was horrified that Dom had taken his ramblings so literally. He grabbed Dom’s arm and said, “But you might lose her, mate!” and then delivered another monologue, sober this time, about how you can’t trick destiny, you can’t strong-arm your life in a different direction, some things are meant to be and some things are not meant to be, and you don’t always get to choose, all you can do is enjoy the ride, and so on and so forth. (Dom’s dad talks a lot.)

In the end their breakup only lasted nine hours and twenty-three minutes. They were the worst nine hours and twenty-three minutes of Eve’s life.

Of course they were meant to be, and here they are, all these years later, happily married.

Blissfully happy!

So, so happy.

She takes a mandarin from the bowl, peels it, and chews on a piece. It’s kind of sour, but she pretends not to notice and doesn’t spit it out, not even the seeds.