He Let Our Baby Die Over a Hospital Bill novel · Chapter 5 of 32

Chapter 5: The Tab

I put my mother on the bus to Pueblo with the envelope still in my hand.

That night, after her son was asleep under his rocket, Gina poured two glasses of boxed wine.

We spread the tab across her kitchen table.

Forty-one pages.

"Okay," Gina said, pushing her red glasses up. "I've read a thousand garbage bills. Let's see what kind of garbage this is."

Page one was the total. $38,412.50, including nine percent interest under the reconciliation clause.

Page two started four years back, the month I moved into his house.

The license was on page four.

"Marriage license, city and county of Denver," Gina read. "Your share, seventeen fifty. Paid." She looked up. "He put the paid ones in too?"

"So I'd see how good he'd been to me."

She kept reading.

"Toilet paper, Costco, forty-eight rolls. Your share, eleven ninety-nine. Note: N. uses more." She put the page down. "Deenie. He wrote that N. uses more."

"I do use more. I'm a woman."

Page twenty was a column of birthday gifts he'd given me, each one split, so I'd paid for half of my own presents.

"Half of a cashmere scarf," Gina said. "Half of a spa day. Half of your own birthday cake. Did he make you buy half the candles?"

"The candles were a dollar forty. I paid seventy cents."

She laughed so hard she had to put her forehead on the table.

I laughed too, and it hurt my stitches, and it was the first time in nine days.

Then she turned to page thirty-one and stopped.

The heading said: INTIMACY (NET INITIATIONS).

It was a column of dates.

Beside each date, a tally mark.

Beside each tally, twelve dollars and fifty cents.

At the bottom of the column it said: Rate: half of a standard date night.

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