They should have been able to live on her salary, with him doing the kind of half-time work he’d done in Alabama. Houston had plenty of universities that needed tech support.
But in Houston, Rebecca turned out to be a spender in a way he hadn’t understood before. Maybe she hadn’t either. She’d always made fun of her parents for the way they lived above their means, the way they’d let her grandfather subsidize them.
But now that she was into her thirties, the way Grandpa Jerome had paid for stuff didn’t bother her as much. She made sure Brian knew how much she missed the trips to Jamaica, the vacations on Cape Cod.
Unfortunately, Jerome wasn’t writing checks anymore. And so now, instead of asking him for help, Rebecca asked the friendly bankers at Wells Fargo. If she saw something she wanted, she bought it. Including a BMW. Worst of all, she didn’t even tell him about the car until he saw it in the driveway.
“You’re an FBI agent, not a stockbroker,” he said that night, the kids asleep. They kept it together in front of the kids.
“No one says stockbroker anymore, Bri.”
She had that tone in her voice he heard more and more. That superior tone. Ironic. Maybe she didn’t even know she was doing it.
He waited for her to say more, to at least justify the Bimmer. I’m in the car all the time, I got a great deal, we’ll both drive it. She didn’t even bother. Because she didn’t have to, right? She paid the bills. If she wanted to blow forty grand on a car she would.
“It’s a sedan,” she finally said. Throwing him a bone. “I can take the kids.”
“No, it’s cool.”
During their first years together, Brian had found Rebecca’s confusion about her class privilege endearing. She genuinely viewed her law school loans as a massive problem—when she had no other student loans to pay off and would be headed for a great job as an associate. She had no idea what it was like to be middle class, much less poor.
Now he had a darker view. The misunderstanding felt intentional, a way for Becks to get what she wanted without admitting her privilege. In fact, sometimes he felt he had to play along, to overestimate his own spending, just to hide the gap in their habits. Yeah, he took Tony to Rockets games in Houston a couple of times. But guess what? If you sat up high and didn’t buy merch, you could get in and out for fifty bucks. Less than a pair of Rebecca’s Lululemon pants.
Even so, he was afraid to call her on her bullshit. The subtext of any talk about the money she was spending would be the money he wasn’t making. He worked in software, at a time when Silicon Valley was minting the greatest fortunes ever seen. So how come they weren’t rich? At least rich enough for her to be able to buy a car without worrying?
* * *
He didn’t argue about the car. Instead he went to work for ConocoPhillips. In Birmingham no one cared if he was five minutes late or wore sandals. He could at least pretend he hadn’t turned into a total drone. Conoco wasn’t a university. It was an oil company. It had a top-down, hop-to-it culture. But he didn’t have a choice. Conoco paid better than an academic job would, and they needed the money.
Only good part was that his shift started early and ended by four. On the way home he could stop somewhere for a beer. After a while it was usually a beer and a couple of shots. Not more, though; he didn’t want to be drunk when the kids got home from their after-school stuff. He usually picked places like Hooters. His hair was slowly walking back from his forehead, but he was still in solid shape. And he hadn’t entirely lost his game. The waitresses liked him.
Still, he made sure to wear his ring. He wasn’t ready to go past flirting. Not yet. He wasn’t exactly sure why. Wasn’t like he had any big moral problem with screwing someone else. If he did he could always think of that three-hundred-horsepower middle finger in their driveway.
But the kids were still too young, both in elementary school. Divorce messed kids up. As much as he’d hated seeing his parents fight, he’d hated bouncing between them even more. He’d told his mom once, Just pick.