Page 59 of Here One Moment

When they put in their rental application for this apartment, they had to submit their most recent pay stubs. At that time Dom worked full-time at a warehouse and did personal training after hours. The warehouse laid him off after their application was approved, but they weren’t worried. The opposite. They were pleased. The plan was that Dom would expand his personal training business, and work on his fitness app, and make a lot more money. People sold fitness apps for millions!

He is getting more clients, but the problem is last-minute cancellations. Children seem to get sick a lot and cars often won’t start, which Eve finds suspicious, as Dom’s clients all drive better cars than they do. She thinks Dom should charge a cancellation fee if they send a So sorry, Dom! text when he’s literally on the oval setting up equipment, but Dom won’t even consider that. Often his clients say they don’t have any cash and ask if they can pay next time, and Dom, being Dom, always says, “Sure thing,” but he doesn’t keep records and he never chases up money. “Oh, it all works out in the end,” he says, but Eve knows that none of his clients pay twice. So it does not work out in the end.

Nothing has come of the fitness app.

Apparently you need a wealthy investor to get started. Dom isn’t sure where to find one.

She checks the balance of their joint account and whimpers. Their next rental payment is due on the twenty-sixth of the month. Their car payment is due on the twenty-seventh. Eve’s salary is deposited on the twenty-eighth of the month. Unless they deposit some cash into the account they will not have enough money for the direct debit.

She picks up her pen, draws a line down the middle of the page. and lists income on one side and expenses on the other.

Fifteen minutes later she pushes the notepad away and rests her forehead on her hands. She feels fearful, overwhelmed, but mostly she feels deeply embarrassed.

They literally cannot afford to live their lives.

They have miscalculated. Well, they never actually calculated in the first place. They just thought that if you worked hard most days then you could afford the kind of stuff that everyone else had. They have messed up big time.

How will she tell Dom?

She needs to handle this carefully. Dom is the sweetest, most loving, easygoing, and stable of boys, except for those times when he’s weird and complicated and stubbornly fixates on a wrongheaded idea.

The first time this happened was when they were seventeen and had been together for two years after they fell in love during a French lesson (so romantic, it’s like they met in Paris, ha ha, no it’s not).

It was all Dom’s dad’s fault. One night, after too much red wine, he delivered one of his famous after-dinner monologues about “life.” Eve wasn’t there. It was just Dom listening respectfully, like his dad was a priest delivering a sermon. The topic was relationships. Dom’s dad explained that most teenage relationships were destined to fail and it was “a tragedy” that Dom and Eve had met so young (he later denied using the word “tragedy”) because they’d most likely break up in their twenties when they realized they hadn’t experienced enough of the world or dated enough other people to know that they were right for each other.

Other boys would have said, “I’ll prove you wrong, Dad,” or just ignored it as the typical tipsy ravings of a clueless Gen X parent, but not Dom. He took it to heart and lay awake all night worrying about it, until he came up with a stupid solution.

Eve will never forget Dom’s cold, determined face as he broke her heart on the balcony outside the senior science lab. It was like he’d been body-snatched by aliens. “We need to break up,” he said. She kept sobbing, “Why? Why? What did I do?” He didn’t explain his reasoning because he knew she’d try to change his mind. It was the same kind of crazy no-pain-no-gain conviction that allows him to do an insane number of push-ups and chin-ups.

He seriously believed that if they broke up then, they could “quickly” have relationships with other people, get them over and done with, and be back together in six months, a year, tops. He said the breakup was like a vaccination.

Luckily Dom went home and told his dad, who was horrified that Dom had taken his ramblings so literally. He grabbed Dom’s arm and said, “But you might lose her, mate!” and then delivered another monologue, sober this time, about how you can’t trick destiny, you can’t strong-arm your life in a different direction, some things are meant to be and some things are not meant to be, and you don’t always get to choose, all you can do is enjoy the ride, and so on and so forth. (Dom’s dad talks a lot.)

In the end their breakup only lasted nine hours and twenty-three minutes. They were the worst nine hours and twenty-three minutes of Eve’s life.

Of course they were meant to be, and here they are, all these years later, happily married.

Blissfully happy!

So, so happy.

She takes a mandarin from the bowl, peels it, and chews on a piece. It’s kind of sour, but she pretends not to notice and doesn’t spit it out, not even the seeds.

Chapter 48

One sticky gray February day, a week after my tenth birthday, my father balanced a penny on his thumb and sent it spinning high.

He was thirty-two, a young man, although of course to me he was as grown-up as it was possible to be. His fishing rod in its smart canvas tube (Mum gave it to him for Christmas), his tackle box and swag were in the hallway next to the front door. He and his friends Ralph and Angelo were catching the train up to Gosford and then the bus to Avoca Beach, to camp overnight. The wives and children often went with them, but not this time because there was a school fete we didn’t want to miss. (Now that I think about it, the mothers probably would have been very happy to miss the fete.)

Dad caught the penny and placed it on top of his hand. “Heads or tails, Cherry?”

I said heads, and I said heads the next time too, and got it right.

The third time I said tails.

“Why do you say tails?” asked Dad.

I said, feeling kind of proud and knowing, “Because we just got two heads, Dad, so now it’s more likely to be tails.”

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