Member-only story
Money Can’t Buy Happiness
Or so they say.
The drive down to the lake was not supposed to be the end.
But the silence simmered, a rise and flow of tension cramping the space of the small rusting car they’d bought off her father a few months back. The muffler needed replacing, but James had promised a better car before the end of the year. Little gleams of hope like that — that maybe, just maybe, they wouldn’t be poor post-college adults forever — were perhaps the spot of glue that kept them together.
He was supposed to get a new raise at his cousin’s start-up tech company.
She was supposed to teach more classes at the local community college in the fall.
Their relationship wouldn’t always be riddled with the fuss of money, right?
(She tried not to think about what would become of their relationship if they didn’t have the mutual interest of money — and the acquirement of it — between them.)
The drive seemed especially long because the radio refused to work. She had fiddled with it for a good stretch, at least twenty minutes, before he had snapped at her that it was pointless and she should just leave it.
Problems. He had a tendency to shove them under the rug while she kept flinging solutions — or at least attempts at solutions — at the…