Gone Girl(31)

‘Not really, nope,’ he says. He grins at me.

I have never been a nag. I have always been rather proud of my un-nagginess. So it pisses me off, that Nick is forcing me to nag. I am willing to live with a certain amount of sloppiness, of laziness, of the lackadaisical life. I realize that I am more type A than Nick, and I try to be careful not to inflict my neat-freaky, to-do-list nature on him. Nick is not the kind of guy who is going to think to vacuum or clean out the fridge. He truly doesn’t see that kind of stuff. Fine. Really. But I do like a certain standard of living – I think it’s fair to say the garbage shouldn’t literally overflow, and the plates shouldn’t sit in the sink for a week with smears of bean burrito dried on them. That’s just being a good grown-up roommate. And Nick’s not doing anything anymore, so I have to nag, and it pisses me off: You are turning me into what I never have been and never wanted to be, a nag, because you are not living up to your end of a very basic compact. Don’t do that, it’s not okay to do.

I know, I know, I know that losing a job is incredibly stressful, and particularly for a man, they say it can be like a death in the family, and especially for a man like Nick, who has always worked, so I take a giant breath, roll my anger up into a red rubber ball, and mentally kick it out into space. ‘Well, do you mind if I hang these up? Just so they stay nice for you?’

‘Knock yourself out.’

His-and-her layoffs, isn’t that sweet? I know we are luckier than most: I go online and check my trust fund whenever I get nervous. I never called it a trust fund before Nick did; it’s actually not that grand. I mean, it’s nice, it’s great – $785,404 that I have in savings thanks to my parents. But it’s not the kind of money that allows you to stop working forever, especially not in New York. My parents’ whole point was to make me feel secure enough so I didn’t need to make choices based on money – in schooling, in career – but not so well off that I could be tempted to check out. Nick makes fun, but I think it’s a great gesture for parents to make. (And appropriate, considering they plagiarized my childhood for the books.)

But I’m still feeling sick about the layoff, our layoffs, when my dad calls and asks if he and Mom can stop by. They need to talk with us. This afternoon, now, actually, if it’s okay. Of course it’s okay, I say, and in my head, I think, Cancer cancer cancer.

My parents appear at the door, looking like they’ve put up an effort. My father is thoroughly pressed and tucked and shined, impeccable except for the grooves beneath his eyes. My mother is in one of her bright purple dresses that she always wore to speeches and ceremonies, back when she got those invitations. She says the color demands confidence of the wearer.

They look great, but they seem ashamed. I usher them to the sofa, and we all sit silently for a second.

‘Kids, your mother and I, we seem to have—’ my father finally starts, then stops to cough. He places his hands on his knees; his big knuckles pale. ‘Well, we seem to have gotten ourselves into a hell of a financial mess.’

I don’t know what my reaction is supposed to be: shocked, consoling, disappointed? My parents have never confessed any troubles to me. I don’t think they’ve had many troubles.

‘The fact of the matter is, we’ve been irresponsible,’ Marybeth continues. ‘We’ve been living the past decade like we were making the same kind of money we did for the previous two decades, and we weren’t. We haven’t made half that, but we were in denial. We were … optimistic may be a kind way to put it. We just kept thinking the next Amy book would do the trick. But that hasn’t happened. And we kept making bad decisions. We invested foolishly. We spent foolishly. And now.’

‘We’re basically broke,’ Rand says. ‘Our house, as well as this house, it’s all underwater.’

I’d thought – assumed – they’d bought this house for us outright. I had no idea they were making payments on it. I feel a sting of embarrassment that I am as sheltered as Nick says.

‘Like I said, we made some serious judgment errors,’ Marybeth says. ‘We should write a book: Amazing Amy and the Adjustable Rate Mortgage. We would flunk every quiz. We’d be the cautionary tale. Amy’s friend, Wendy Want It Now.’

‘Harry Head in the Sand,’ Rand adds.

‘So what happens next?’ I ask.

‘That is entirely up to you,’ my dad says. My mom fishes out a homemade pamphlet from her purse and sets it on the table in front of us – bars and graphs and pie charts created on their home computer. It kills me to picture my parents squinting over the user’s manual, trying to make their proposition look pretty for me.

Marybeth starts the pitch: ‘We wanted to ask if we could borrow some money from your trust while we figure out what to do with the rest of our lives.’

My parents sit in front of us like two eager college kids hoping for their first internship. My father’s knee jiggles until my mother places a gentle fingertip on it.

‘Well, the trust fund is your money, so of course you can borrow from it,’ I say. I just want this to be over; the hopeful look on my parents’ faces, I can’t stand it. ‘How much do you think you need, to pay everything off and feel comfortable for a while?’

My father looks at his shoes. My mother takes a deep breath. ‘Six hundred and fifty thousand,’ she says.