Page 68 of I Love You, I Hate You
“I told you I would—”
“Then I have a confession to make,” Kimmy interrupted. She pushed back from the stool and retrieved her phone from her purse. She tapped at it for a few moments and set it down in front of Victoria expectantly.
Victoria frowned. “What’s with the two savings accounts?”
“One’s yours. One’s mine. Well, it’s in my name, but that top one? That’s every penny you’ve ever sent me.”
“But that’s for you! For the house.”
“No, it’s for you. I told you when you started sending me money that I didn’t need it, but I knew you needed to feel like you were taking care of me. So I saved it for you, and I started my own savings account.”
The two numbers were a fair distance apart, but closer than she thought they would be. “How did you save all this?”
“When I’ve got a steady job, I can budget. It’s not like you taught yourself how to make those spreadsheets, you know.” Victoria knew her mother’s earlier years had been eaten up by motherhood. Babies were expensive, and when you didn’t have reliable day care or a job that provided health insurance, they were even more expensive. Government assistance helped, but it only went so far. To paraphrase Eminem, you can’t buy diapers with food stamps. The only way to survive was to figure out exactly how to spend every penny.
“And you don’t have a kid to take care of anymore,” Victoria said quietly, and Kimmy shook her head.
“Don’t you do that. Don’t you think for one second you were a burden.”
“But I was. That’s just a fact.”
“No. I never once thought of you that way.”
“Not even—”
“Never. And I was never going to let you deprive yourself because you wanted to take care of me. So I started reading budgeting blogs and I’ve been doing a lot of research on FHA loans and I think I can buy that house on my own in the next few years anyway.”
“But if you used the money from me, you’d have it sooner. You could get a good mortgage and set up a 401k with—”
“I have one. I told you, I’ve been working on this for a while. I’m not rich, but I need to do this on my own. I won’t stand in the way of your dream.”
“But—”
“If you took the job with RJ, what would you cut? Aside from the money to me, of course.”
“It’d be hard to save as much. I’d probably have to cut back on that, probably significantly.”
“Would this money help? If you had it, would you take the job?”
Victoria blinked. She hadn’t seriously considered the gig, and it was entirely possible they had found someone else already. But with a bigger padding in her savings, she probably could take a lower paying job without stressing quite so much. So long as she could still pay rent and her loans she could do okay, and the savings would provide a buffer for any unexpected expenses that popped up. She might even be able to pay off one or two of the higher interest loans and lower her monthly payments. Her stress levels would be lower, just from the sheer fact of knowing that she wasn’t making the lives of people like her mom even worse.
“It’s probably not even available anymore.”
“That’s not what I asked. Would you take it?”
“I can’t, Mom,” she said quietly. Her heart was pounding, because she hadn’t let herself even consider this possibility, not really. She had responsibilities to her mom, and the pressure of not-going-back-to-being-poor was so integral to her identity she didn’t know how to think of herself without it.
“You could. And I think you should.”
“I can’t—”
Kimmy fixed her with a stern look. “I’m your mother. And if I say you can, you can.”
Owen arrived at the lake house at the same time as the pizza. He took the stack of steaming cardboard from the driver and slipped her an extra couple of bucks, just in case his dad was stingy on the tip, and then knocked on the front door with his elbow. Ashley pulled the door open and the girls immediately swarmed him, although less from enthusiasm for him and more because of the presence of pizza.
Charles was in the kitchen, pulling down plates. Normally, Owen only accepted Ashley’s invitations to come over for dinner when he knew his father was out of town, but this time she had persisted and he had relented, because, well, he didn’t have a lot else going on in his life. Losing Victoria hadn’t gotten any easier and he had taken to moping about his house, refusing any invites from his friends to meet them for drinks and spending most of his time watchingParks and Recfor the fifteenth time on Netflix. At least dinner with his father would be interesting, even if that meant a fight.
But his dad just glanced at him and frowned thoughtfully. “Everything okay there?” he said.