We stopped at the mall and had beers at the Rainforest Café while we considered refrigerators, washers and dryers from three reputable vendors. We crunched the numbers into formulas that I remembered from Mrs. Russell in the 7th grade. First, the numbers were everything, then nothing. Sturdy doors were everything. Then numbers, then doors, then capacity, then numbers were everything all together factored by pie-shaped percentages based on priority. Pie shaped like wedges, and not half moons. Everything.

Amongst all the families enjoying their 20 dollar hamburgers, and in front of the attentive safari-khakied bartendress, I lost it. The stupid-ass-stuffed lemers flirted with plastic tucans in the rafters. The fake rainstorm started up, and then the phony thunder, and then flashing lights flickered to simulate lightening, and that’s when I lost it.

It wasn’t an epiphany, because I knew it would consume us. I didn’t really understand the extent: that the house is just almost as big as we are, and I can’t really visualize the end of it. It’s all we talk about, read about, work on, and consider. It’s alpha and it’s omega. Sometimes, I look up to make sure that I can still concentrate on Chris’ face in the dust cloud, and that he can still focus on mine through the safety goggles, and then I go back to my caulk, and he to his popcorn ceiling.

'Bubba,' I whisper. 'I'm moving to the country'
'Great. You've done everything else.'

‘no one carestohear, about your hardwood floors’ -Luna

Today he closes on the house in Keller. Old prophet friends dub me ‘Suburban Housewife’, and then I consider never talking to them again. The chances of me bumping into them are…never now… No! I AM ‘Suburban Housewife.’ I choose it. It is what I will be, so fuck you. And so I begin my 6th life, and my third move in one year. March 1, all of that stops. The Ides of March…

For the past two nights I have had dreamt the ghosts of boyfriends past. I am always disappointed to see them, and usually there is no escape route. They are working the counter at my favorite café, they are walking toward me on an empty street, they are always turning up in my way. I am dreading who will make a show tonight, but already the very worst is already behind me. The worst is behind me.

I am overhearing a co-worker work through his divorce. ‘I know the outcome isn’t what we wanted, but are you saying we should never have bothered trying?’ I hear him speak deeply into his work phone. I hear his second line buzz. He takes the call. Trying is over.

Since I have made this decision to ‘settle down’, to start on collecting things, and spend entire weekends in Home Depots…now it seems that I am flooded with advise… Single renting people get very little advise because no one can quite relate. You are either a goddess or a doormat, and either way unapproachable. Now, the refrigerator repairman thinks I should be married, and my co-workers think that I’d be a fool to buy my floors from anyone BUT Lumber Liquidators.
What I can do is take a deep breath, choose four earth tones from the Loft Line in the display and hand them over to the paint desk with directives on flat and semi-gloss. As I let go of the little cards I think aloud, ‘Under this light they seem a bit different somehow…’ The clerk snatches them up and turns away from me. She can spot my kind a mile away. She can’t be over 20.

At least Chris is here with me.