to your father anyway.”
“Well, I thought it was a novel approach,” he said. “It was certainly the path of least resistance. Maybe we could ask your parents?”
Claudia gave him a weary look. “My parents make a religion out of clipping coupons and hitting the free-sample tables at Costco, remember? They’ve been meticulously planning their retirement for years. I doubt they want to spend tens of thousands of dollars bailing out their irresponsible daughter.”
“It was just an idea.”
Claudia brushed hair out of her face with the back of her hand, releasing a shower of pixie dust to the floor, and then sat heavily on the couch. “We need to talk, Jeremy. I’ve been thinking a lot about what Tamra said. About being realistic about our financial situation. About starting to act like grown-ups.”
Jeremy sat down on the edge of the armchair across from her, dreading where this was going. “Define grown-up?” He threw in a smile, hoping to lift the heaviness he felt descending on the room.
Claudia threw him a baleful look. “Look. We got ourselves into this mess because we acted like silly children, jumping in headfirst without a good backup plan. We’ve been waiting for our ship to come in for three years now, but you know what? I’m not sure it’s coming anymore. We’re stuck. Did you notice that the house down the street has been on the market for six months now? And it’s nicer than ours. The real estate market is in free fall and we probably couldn’t sell this place quickly if we tried, let alone get what we paid for it in the first place.”
“So we declare bankruptcy. Or just walk away. Why not?”
“Because,” she said, and he was alarmed to realize that her eyes were starting to pink over with tears, “I just can’t fail like that. Think about it. I already lost my movie—and now the house, too? And what, we just tell our friends and our families that oops, we were stupid? We screwed up but hey, it’s not our problem, we’re just walking away? It’s too humiliating.” She rubbed at her watering eye with a dirty hand, succeeding only in transferring plaster dust to her cornea. Her left eye blinked convulsively with irritation. “Look, I’m just not ready to give up on our life. This”—and she gestured at the room around them—“we made this. Together. If we give it up now, what if we never have another chance again? What if this is the apex of our lives and it’s all downhill from here?”
Jeremy couldn’t stand to see her cry or, even less, to be the one making her cry. “OK, OK,” he said, reaching out to squeeze her shoulder. “Don’t cry. I was just trying to find the path of least resistance. Make it easier on us.”
“There is no path of least resistance, Jeremy. Our best bet is to buckle down and dig ourselves out like responsible adults. And if that means making some sacrifices, so be it.”
“So I guess this means you’re not interested in a pet lion, then,” Jeremy muttered, not liking this talk of sacrifices at all.
“A what?” Her voice was larded with impatience. He thought of his father’s words—S for square—as he tasted dust in the back of his throat.
“Nothing,” he said. “Forget it.”
“Can you be serious for just a second?” She took a deep breath. “First, I took out an ad for a roommate this afternoon, on Craigslist. The way I see it, we can rent the spare bedroom out for at least eight hundred dollars a month, which means we only have to come up with another fourteen hundred to cover the mortgage. Plus a few grand to cover the payments we missed already.”
Jeremy was nauseated. “A roommate? You want a stranger to live with us?”
Claudia offered him an apologetic look. “It doesn’t have to be forever. Just until we get back on our feet.”
“But you use that room as your office!”
Claudia jumped up and turned back to the crack. She stood in front of it with her hands on her hips, as if challenging it to break open again, and then attacked the spackle with renewed aggression. “Yeah, about that.” Her voice was low and congested. “I think the other thing we have to face is that my career is not going as planned. My film tanked, Carter doesn’t return my calls—he’s basically dropped me as a client—and, let’s be honest, I’m probably not going to get another directing job for a