Chapter 1: The Enormous Bill
The envelope was thick, official, and exactly the kind of thing Mindy avoided opening until after her first coffee. She slit it with a butter knife, her tired hazel eyes scanning past the logo to the total due. The number didn’t compute at first. She blinked. Read it again. A cold, sinking feeling settled in her stomach, right beneath the firm abs she’d carved out during 5 AM workouts before her nursing shifts.
“Marcus!” Her voice cut through the quiet of the sunless kitchen, bouncing off the unwashed dishes in the sink. The scent of last night’s cheap Chinese takeout clung to the air, mixing with the faint chemical lemon of a cleaning wipe she’d used half-heartedly on the counter.
Footsteps thudded down the hall. Her son appeared in the doorway, tall and lean, pushing a hand through his mop of dark curls. Sleep still clung to the edges of his expression. “What’s up? You okay?”
“Look at this.” She slapped the paper onto the scarred dining table. It was the same table where he’d done grade school dioramas, where they’d eaten countless frozen pizzas, its surface a map of their life together: ring stains, a tiny carved ‘M’, a long scratch from a sliding plate. Now it held this new, awful fact.
Marcus leaned over, his broad warehouse-worker shoulders hunching. He whistled, low and long. “Jesus. That’s a mistake. It has to be.”
“It’s not a mistake. It’s a pipe leak. Or a running toilet. Or the goddamn water fairy decided to bankrupt us.” Mindy’s voice was steady, a nurse’s assessment tone, but her fingers trembled slightly as she traced the outrageous figure. “This is two months of groceries, Marc. Or half a car payment. It’s not in the budget. There is no budget for this.”
He pulled out the wobbling mismatched chair and sat, staring at the bill like it might attack. “So we call them. We dispute it.”
“And while they ‘investigate,’ which could take sixty days, we have to pay something or they shut it off. I already called. On hold for forty minutes.” She sank into the chair beside him, the weight of her double shifts pressing down. “We have to cut usage. Drastically. Like, sponge-bath drastically.”
Marcus ran a hand over his face. “Okay. No more long showers. I get it. Five minutes, navy style. I can do that.”
“It’s not enough.” The words hung in the greasy air. She took a breath, pragmatic, clinical. This was a problem to be solved. Bodies were just bodies. She’d seen hundreds of them. “We’re going to have to shower together.”
The silence that followed was absolute and profound. The drip from the kitchen faucet counted out the seconds. Plink. Plink. Plink.
Marcus’s face went through a series of transformations: confusion, disbelief, then a slow, creeping horror. His cheeks flushed a deep red, visible even in the dim kitchen light. “What? No. Mom. No way.”
“It’s the most logical way to halve our shower time and water use immediately. We’re on a meter. Every gallon counts.” She kept her tone matter-of-fact, but a current of maternal awkwardness surged beneath it. This wasn’t a patient. This was her son, whose scraped knees she’d bandaged, who used to run down the hall naked after baths at age four.
“It is not logical! It’s insane! I’m nineteen!” He pushed back from the table, the chair legs screeching on the linoleum.
“And I’m thirty-six, and I’m the one paying a bill that could be a typo on a mortgage statement. Look,” she said, softening. “It’s just a body. We’re family. It’s about efficiency. We get in, we get clean, we get out. Back-to-back, like firefighters or something. It’s not a big deal.”
“It is a huge deal!” He was standing now, pacing the narrow space between the table and the refrigerator. His lean frame seemed to fill the cramped room. “You can’t just… decree that. It’s weird.”
“Weird is having our water shut off because I can’t pay a three-hundred-dollar penalty on top of this. Weird is smelling like a locker room at my clinic.” She met his hazel eyes, so like her own. “I’m not happy about it either, Marc. Do you think this is my dream scenario? But it’s temporary. Until I get the plumber out here or the utility adjusts it.”
He stopped pacing, his shoulders slumping in defeat. He stared at the ceiling, at the outdated fluorescent light fixture. “Back-to-back?”
“Back-to-back. Or you face the wall. Whatever makes you less… horrified.” She allowed a small, tired smile. “We’ll figure out a system. You take the morning slot, I’ll take the evening. We’ll be in and out in four minutes flat. It’s just water. And soap.”
Marcus sighed, a deep, surrendering sound. He looked at her, really looked, seeing the exhaustion under her practical demeanor. He saw the woman who’d worked overtime to fix his car, who always had a freezer meal ready after his late classes. The battle left his posture.
“This is the single weirdest thing that has ever happened in this apartment,” he muttered, sitting back down.
“Agreed.” The tension broke. Mindy reached out and nudged his coffee mug—the one with his half-finished sketch of a dragon still on it—closer to him. “So. We try it tonight? Get it over with? Like ripping off a Band-Aid.”
He groaned, dropping his head into his hands. “Oh my god. Do not use ‘ripping off a Band-Aid’ in the context of us showering together. Ever.”
A genuine laugh escaped her, tight and strained but real. “Okay. Bad analogy. We’ll just… do the necessary, awkward thing. For the water bill.”
“For the water bill,” he echoed, his voice muffled by his palms.
They sat in the messy, silent kitchen, the enormity of the unspoken thing hanging between them. The dripping faucet seemed louder now, a taunting reminder of waste, of cost, of the strange, intimate practicality that awaited them when the sun went down.