Joint Account

"What's Miscellaneous?" "It's miscellaneous." "Sam. It's eleven hundred dollars." Sam did not look away from the laptop. This was the third Sunday in a row they'd done this, sat at the kitchen table with the joint account open, and Lena had noticed that each Sunday the column for Miscellaneous got a little wider, like a river in spring. "It's things that don't fit the other categories." "We have twenty-two categories. One of them is literally called Other." "Other is for things that are other. Miscellaneous is for things that are miscellaneous." Lena put down her coffee. Outside, the neighbour's kid was practising trumpet. The same eight bars. It had been the same eight bars since March. "Read me three things from Miscellaneous." Sam scrolled. "Hardware store, forty-two dollars." "That's Home." "It was a specialty screwdriver. It didn't feel like Home." "What else." "Uh. Mick's Bar, sixty-eight." "That's Eating Out." "It was drinks with Dev after his dad's thing. It felt like it should be its own category. Like, Grief Adjacent." Lena looked at her husband, who she loved, who had once explained to her the difference between a Roth and a traditional IRA on a second date and she had found it, bafflingly, attractive, and who was now hiding a bar tab in a category he'd invented for the purpose. "And the third?" Sam went quiet. "Sam." "It's a surprise." "Eleven hundred dollars of surprise?" "No. Eight hundred of surprise. The rest is genuinely miscellaneous." She thought about it. Her birthday was in six weeks. Their anniversary was in nine. There was also a possibility, which she was choosing not to entertain, that the surprise was a specialty screwdriver of some kind. "Okay," she said. "Here's the deal. Miscellaneous gets a cap. Two hundred a month. Anything over goes in a real category with a real name." "What about the surprise?" "Make a category called Surprise. I won't open it." "You'll open it." "I will absolutely open it. But I'll feel bad about it, and that's the important thing." He made the category. She watched him move the eight hundred into it. Then he moved the bar tab into Eating Out and the screwdriver into Home, and Miscellaneous shrank to a reasonable size, and something in the kitchen relaxed. "Can I ask you one thing," Sam said. "Go." "What's Personal Care? Three hundred and ten dollars." "That's miscellaneous." The trumpet started up again next door. The same eight bars. Lena reached over and closed the laptop, gently, and they left the rest for next Sunday.