Their mother had left when Milo was eighteen months old. That is a longer story for another time, and most of it is not mine to tell. What is mine to tell is that I had stayed, and that the staying had required the construction of an entirely new infrastructure for daily life, one built on the neighbor’s schedule and the restaurant’s schedule and the school’s schedule, all three interlocking with the precision of gears in a machine where the failure of any one component affects every other. For the most part it worked. And then the washing machine died.
It was a Tuesday evening, and I was washing Milo’s bedsheets because he had had an accident the night before and was already embarrassed about it in the specific mortifying way of four-year-olds who have recently understood that accidents are embarrassing. The washing machine was an ancient Kenmore that had come with the apartment, a machine so old it sounded like it was processing gravel on a gentle cycle, and I had been listening to its various complaints for three years and tolerating them because the alternative was the laundromat two miles away, which cost money and time in amounts I did not reliably have. I added detergent, selected the cycle, pressed start. Water filled the drum. The cycle began. And then came a sound I had not heard from it before, a deep mechanical groan followed by a clank like metal striking metal in the machine’s interior, and then silence. Just silence, and a drum half full of soapy water going nowhere.
Milo appeared in the bathroom doorway and asked if it was dead. I said yes, it had fought the good fight, but this was the end. Nora materialized behind him and informed me that we could not not have a washer, that laundry was not optional, as though I had not in the preceding thirty seconds arrived at exactly this understanding myself. Hazel drifted in behind both of them clutching Professor Carrots and asked, in the small clear voice she used for questions she sensed were serious, whether we were poor.
The word landed differently than the practical problem of the washing machine. Kids should not have to worry about money. They should worry about the blue cup versus the green cup and whether they got window seat on the field trip bus. The fact that Hazel was asking that question, in that voice, at six years old, produced a feeling in my chest that I did not have a clean name for, something between grief and resolve.
“We’re resourceful,” I told her, which was true and also a dodge, and she seemed to accept it.
The financial picture was not complicated. My last paycheck had covered rent, groceries, Nora’s field trip fee, and the prescription for Hazel’s ear infection. I had approximately three hundred dollars in checking and another two hundred in savings that was not to be touched except for emergencies defined strictly as medical, not appliance-related. A new washing machine was four or five hundred dollars. Even a used one from an actual appliance store was two-fifty, three hundred. I did not have it.
