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DESPITE THE WICKED weather outside, the car was warm. The drive was long, but not dangerous, and the snow swirled, but it wasn’t sticking. The route was clear, empty—no one else was crazy enough to be driving this late on Christmas Day. The girls were dead asleep in the back; even our twelve-year-old, who never usually conked out on long drives, was out, like her eight-year-old sister.
His profile was the same, older, more ingrained. We’d lost our youth, but we’d gained so much more—a whole life I never imagined. I never knew how deep feelings could run beneath the surface of our everyday: school, lessons, hockey, volleyball, piano, his work, my work, the house, the dog, this world we had created together, ours.
“Are you sure?” he asked me quietly as we turned off the highway.
“Yes,” I replied. “I want to go, and we could see all the family back east too.”
“All right,” he said. “But only because I’ve missed your mom’s cookies, and I bet she and your stepfather would take the girls for a few days, and we could side trip to Montreal.”
“Now that’s an idea.”
We were silent the rest of the way home, with the snow and the sleet, the sound of the tires on the road. How had we gotten here, of all places? All these years later. Here. And now we were going back. School reunions, sure. I’d avoid those like the plague. But the years I spent at work in Toronto were different. I missed the friends I’d made, and we could afford the trip. So why not? Sometimes life doesn’t go in a straight line and doubling back makes sense. Right?
Christmas 2005
Chapter 1
FRIDAY MORNING MEANT I was running late. Since it was the morning after the company holiday party, at least I had a good excuse. Still, it would be dishonest not to admit that I was always late, and managing to get out of my condo this morning had taken a herculean effort. My one chance to make it to the office on time was the streetcar approximately two minutes away. I had called the automated number, which was surprisingly accurate, and even though I couldn’t see the car yet, it was on the way. Here was the problem: I was not at my stop, but three hipsters deep in line at the French café down the street from my condo.
Hipsters never ordered plain coffee. It was mixed, whipped, and then openly mocked before being poured into their stainless-steel mugs. My stomach churned and my hands trembled. I could blame the cold (December in Toronto is never kind, and I was stylishly underdressed), but the truth? I was desperately hungover. A caffeine fix was essential, so abandoning my place in line to race to the streetcar stop was not an option. Plus, I worked in the publicity department of an entertainment company, so the occasional late arrival was almost a rite of passage.
While waiting for my turn, I poked my head out of line and peered out the giant window to see if there was still a pile of people on the sidewalk. There was. If the streetcar was delayed by a stop or two, I was saved. I prayed for snow. A gale. Some unforeseen weather to throw the schedule off the tracks.
The line moved faster than expected. It was my turn to order, and I was still fumbling around in my purse for my wallet.
“The regular, Kelly?”
“Morning, Max,” I replied. “Please.”
The tall, heavily tattooed barista-slash-owner was the first person in the neighborhood I had introduced myself to after Rob, my boyfriend, and I moved in. I couldn’t go ten feet without a coffee. Max was a very important person in my life.
“My mug was filthy. I didn’t have time to wash it, so I’ll have to pay for a cup today. And I’ve only got my bank card. Color me the jackass who holds everything up today. I’m sorry.”
“No worries,” Max said.
He turned his back to me to grab a dusty, slightly battered paper cup from the cupboard behind him. As he did, no lie, the entire linegasped. He poured in the morning blend, something fair trade and Ethiopian, and handed me the cup. For environmental reasons, he overcharged heftily for disposables. It was a dollar a cup, and all the regulars took it seriously. You can guess where this is going—I often paid for my cups, and it added up.
Last month, Rob had sat down with me to help me sort out my finances. He created a giant spreadsheet for me entitled “Kelly’s Expenses” and showed me how to enter the information to keep track of what came in and what went out. Every. Single. Penny. Rob explained that budgets were the ice-cream cone holding up the treats in our lives. And since, after almost eight years together, he knew how bad I am with money, I finally caved and let him into the chaos. It wasn’t the fact that Rob was good with money or that he came from a family that had it—it was more he was organized in ways I wasn’t.
After I had handed over my bank statement and the little notebook that he’d told me to note my daily cash spending in, Rob was shocked to see how much I paid for coffee each week.
“Why don’t you make coffee at home?” he said. I asked him how much it would cost for one of those fancy espresso makers. “Thousands of dollars,” he replied. “It’s not that bad when you look at it that way. I can’t make a latte at home.”
“What about a reusable mug? In the last two weeks alone you’ve spent ten dollars at Max’s in paper cups. That’s one for every day of work.”
“Look at it this way: that would mean washing it, making sure I haven’t lost the lid, remembering to switch it over when I switch bags or purses, buying a backup mug or two, and then making surethoseare clean, and soon our entire kitchen would be overflowing with mugs whose tops don’t match.”
He laughed. “Let’s enter an extra twenty bucks a month in mad money for you, for coffee. At the end of the day, it’s your money. Spend it how you want.”
I lasted about six weeks remembering a travel mug before ending up in the same place—spending way too much money on coffee cups. Still, I carried around that damn notebook, even if I was always forgetting to write down what I’d spent. The perks of having a boyfriend who worked in finance meant that I was lucky he understood how to automate payments and the concept of pay yourself first. That meant my bills were covered, and my half of the mortgage was always sorted. But while I was paying my way, I wasn’t making much headway in terms of savings—I was trying to go back to school,in theory, but never really making any progress because, well, coffee. And shoes. And new sweaters.
“Dude.”
Max had noticed my hands shaking.
“Rough morning.” I wrung them together. “Trust me, this will cure all that ails.” I took a sip of the hot, rich coffee before putting it down on the counter and trying to find my bank card, which was, of course, not in my wallet. “Just a sec, it’s in here …”
