Eighth date: the home front

So what was happening at home, all the time that D and I were going to the movies, to the theater, to one restaurant after another, ... and of course all the time that we stayed back at the hotel in bed, whispering softly, kissing sweetly, caressing delicately, and fucking as if our lives depended on it?

I didn't get any horror stories of Wife falling asleep at the wheel (although come to think of it I didn't exactly ask). On the other hand, the boys were only in school two days that week before Thanksgiving Break kicked in, so I think the risk should have been minimized. But I did learn a few odds and ends when I got back.

The day of my return, Wife spent an hour and a half on the phone with Friend (who is, I am convinced, merely a role played by the same charlatan who spent so long claiming to be Boyfriend 5).

The day of my return, while the boys were home from school, Wife decided to make chocolate-chip cookies with them. She got as far as mixing up the dough, but never actually baked the cookies. "I ran out of time," she told me later. But then she didn't bake them Thursday morning, before we drove to visit my parents for Thanksgiving Dinner; she didn't bake them Saturday or Sunday,when we were home all day and doing nothing. Anyone who remembers the great saga of cleaning up the study will recognize that this is starting to look like many of Wife's other projects. When I got home from work today I realized that she hadn't baked anything, but there was visibly less dough in the refrigerator than there had been this morning. Aha, I see. "Baking with the boys" has come to mean "letting the boys make up cookie dough for me to scarf during the week." OK, got that.

And then she went to see an attorney. In fact, Wife was awake when I got home late, late at night, so that she could tell me what she had learned. The short version was, "You can't afford to divorce me, so you're going to have to learn to live with me."

Say what?

The longer version was that she had given this fellow some (inaccurate) figures purporting to be our monthly income, and she had gotten him to estimate child care and spousal support based on some other highly doubtful assumptions. Based on the outcome of this dubious calculation (garbage in, garbage out) she concluded that in case of a divorce, neither of us would have enough disposable income to continue to live in exactly the same neighborhood of the same city where we live today. And so she concluded that divorce is financially impossible.

That there are people on this planet -- and even in our state -- who somehow make do with these smaller sums she has in mind does not seem to have been a relevant consideration for her. She assumes that staying put is an overriding concern for both of us, so that anything which imperils that is financially unthinkable. I dunno, babe; I do have some financial priorities, but never moving for the rest of my life isn't at the top of my list -- even if it does kind of appeal to my native sloth.

Anyway, I'm not terribly worried. This attorney specifically says that all he does in family law is to give advice, not represent parties in litigation. I'm not sure where he makes his money, but apparently inciting expensive court battles ain't it.

And I don't think Wife was quite expecting me to reply, "Wow. Well, we're going to have to do some hard thinking to figure out how we can each of us get by on these numbers ...."
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There was one odd postscript to Wife's visit to the attorney: she got lost trying to find her way back to her car.

I should explain that his office is on the main street through downtown, and that we have lived here for some 19 years. She had parked a couple blocks up from his office and walked down to it, because parking on that street is often at a premium. She didn't tell me how far away she had parked, but she made it sound like it wasn't far. But when she left the office, the sun was going down and she couldn't recognize any of the landmarks. She didn't know where she was, and she couldn't remember if she had parked up the street or down the street. So -- again, entirely on her own account of the story -- she wandered back and forth up and down the street looking vainly for her car, more and more lost and finding nothing. Her feet started to hurt, so she took off her shoes and walked in her stocking feet. Finally she saw a store she recognized; she went into the store and asked how to find the cross-street where she had parked. They pointed her in the opposite direction from the one she had been drifting; and when she went that way she found her car promptly and came home.

And of course I have to wonder if events like this one have anything to do with her sudden reluctance to divorce?