Page 6 of Engineering a Love Story

Now I understand. With forced brightness, she’s minimizing, attempting to right things for one of her children.

And it’s so tempting to let her. Boops has been married for more than thirty years. She understands how these things work—how all things work—better than I do.

“Would you consider counseling?” Boops tells me of her friend Dilly from the club who nearly divorced a few years back. “They saw a woman.” She pulls a piece of stationery from her quilted handbag and places it on the table. “I called Dilly this morning. I have her woman’s name right here.”

I look at the paper. Every grain of my being wants to appease Boops, to go along with whatever she suggests.

Part of me also thinks: maybe? I’ve never seen a therapist. Maybe this one can give me some sort of diagnosis. And if there’s a diagnosis, maybe there can be a cure, a remedy for this persistent feeling that what I have isn’t enough.

But my lapse was more significant than selling shoes. Walter didn’t matter, but there will only be some other Walter waiting for me down the line. And if those Kelsey children come to be?

For a moment, I can see it clear as day, me sitting here with Boops at some future point when I’ve done another terrible thing. Leaving Ash, I don’t know who I’ll be, but at least I won’t be that person. And those children won’t have that mother.

“I’m so, so sorry,” I say with a gaspy inhale, pushing the paper back to her. “I can’t.”

In the cold moment that follows, Boops assesses me. “Ashton is really someone who needs a partner.” She holds my eyes and I understand she’s making a request. Her tone is calm but forceful, one she’s never used with me before. Perhaps she thinks I owe her for all her generosity.

Because honestly, I can’t be who she envisioned for Ash, no matter her kindness. This has to be true, even if none of the Kelseys ever said anything, at least as far as I know, when Ash and I got serious. Still, they must’ve been at least a little alarmed by who I was and where I came from. Ash never even should have been at the state school where we met. He only attended due to some misguided notion he might sneak onto the lacrosse team, which he never did. They should’ve insisted on a Brown-Bowdoin-Bates alternative where he wouldn’t have been exposed to the likes of me.

Now this?

“Don’t you love him?” Boops asks, an unfamiliar pleading in her voice.

My mind bobs and weaves. Of course, I love Ash—I love all the Kelseys. But while I can barely remember what I was thinking when Ash and I married on that overcast June day five years ago, surrounded by his joyful family and my scraggly one, I’m pretty sure I knew even then I wasn’t in love with Ash. Somehow, I thought we were in on the same pact: it was good enough. We were sorted, onto the next phase, and all the messiness and instability would be behind me. In the long run, friendship is more important. Isn’t it? Passion fades for everyone.

But looking at Boops now, I have to admit Ash, who comes from a place of abundance and love, never made any sort of pact.

“No,” I say, nearly whispering. “No, not like that.”

Boops pushes herself upright—not that she’s been slouching. She stands and walks briskly to the door, and I hesitate. I’m never sure if I’m acting appropriately in Kelsey situations, but I’m at a total loss now. Wiping tears, I follow her.

At the door, Boops turns, one hand on the knob. “You need to know that if you do this thing, there won’t be money. I think my father-in-law was right on that front. Any … assets Ashton held prior to your marriage, anything only in his name.” Her gaze is steady. “I know you understand. You signed the agreement.”

At her words, heat rushes to my face, just as it had when Ash’s Uncle Monty, who serves as the Kelsey family attorney, presented me with the prenuptial agreement before Ash and I were married. We’d gone to Monty’s office the week before our wedding, and he had all kinds of paperwork for us to sign: healthcare proxies, wills, estate documents, I don’t even know what else. The prenuptial was in the pile.

“Just standard,” Monty said as he pushed that particular document across only to me.

The whole scene felt plucked from one of the soaps my mother used to watch, but I didn’t know how anything worked. Maybe this was how things worked. I quickly put my name down.

I nod, humiliated to think Boops might believe—maybe has always believed—that money was the reason I married Ash.

Besides, even though Boops might disagree, with my job at Gilroy, I’m not poor anymore, if that’s even the word for what I used to be. It’s not one I ever heard growing up. My father always had a job, working at the same brush factory, and my mother, before she passed, worked nights in the kitchen of a hospital. There was never enough of anything, but that was true for everyone I knew. It wasn’t until years later, when Clinton was running for his second term and I caught him in a news clip waxing on about the challenges faced by the working poor, that I thought: oh.

Boops leaves, and the house is utterly silent.

Four

After that, I know it’s done. Maybe it’s meaningful, that I broke up with my mother-in-law instead of my husband, but I don’t have time to analyze now. Boops will tell Ash what I admitted—she might even be doing so now from the car with her new cell phone.

My energy surges. After lolling all weekend, I find my laptop and attempt to assess my financial situation—separate from Ash’s. I wonder how quickly we might be able to sell this house, which is on the outer edge of what he and I can afford on our own without regular help from his parents. Getting out from under our mortgage is my most immediate concern, though I also strategize where I’ll live, what I can afford. This will be an unanticipated return to a precariousness I haven’t known for years, and I can’t let it all slip-slide out from under me and end up back where I started.

One thing is clear—I have to hold onto my spot at Gilroy. I’m certain none of the threats Boops made about my future financial situation were idle, though my desire to keep my job isn’t only about money, as surprising as this might be. It’s not like I dreamed as a child of being a tech industry analyst—who would do that? It’s still difficult sometimes to explain my new profession to adults.

The conversation I had with my father when I took this job at Gilroy was an extreme example. Even though he hadn’t exactly understood when I went to college to study computer science, he still bragged to his brothers when I graduated and took my first programming job at BayBank.

When I quit that job two years later, my father was incredulous. “All that money they’re paying you?”

I hadn’t ever told him about Donny Allen, my manager at BayBank. Donny and his cronies didn’t like it when I suggested off-the-shelf compilers, and they were unimpressed when I whipped out sections of code more efficiently than a lot of the older guys there—that was actually part of the problem, and I realized this more slowly than I should have.