After they looked at the house, the first thing she said in the car was, "If my mom sold her house and lived with us, maybe we could do it." She was turning in the cul-de-sac and going back down the oak lined street. The house was beautiful, but they'd known that before going. Their friends, M and B, had lived there once. They'd been a perfect couple and everyone loved them. In fact, when his own mother had met them four years ago, she'd made a point of saying what a great couple they were. "I really like them. That's a great house," his mother said like she was comparing two things without naming the second thing. But now M and B were divorcing. M had gotten her breasts enlarged and she called his wife regularly to debate going "hard wood" with waxing jobs and to regurgitate her dating stories that sounded horrible and attractive at once. His wife would sometimes tell him these things in bed at night, leaving him unsure what to say. Every once in a while, when they made love, he'd picture himself licking M's long legs.

He glanced at the paper he held in his lap that the realtor had made in advance for potential buyers. It outlined what the house would cost per month with 25% down in fixed rate loans of 30 years and 15 years, as well as a 5/1 ARM. It was the kind of spec sheet realtors passed out when they don't want to crap around with the unserious. 

"Is that really what you want to do? Live with your mom?" he asked.

She drove with a strange smile on her face. A deep shadow fell over her as she guided the car through the highway underpass. Then they were in the bright sunlight and she turned the wheel onto the road that went through the little town where everyone seemed to know everyone and the Audi was the unofficial car brand of choice.

"It's such a beautiful house," she said. "If we could get what Zillow says we could get for our house...."

When she had said she wanted to see the house earlier that day, it had been with a breezy voice. A lark. He'd loved the house himself when they'd been there before, in better days, when M and B still smiled at each other. But this quick mapping out of a path to living in the house took him by surprise.

He shifted and swallowed. He was still coming to terms with the house they were living in for the last two and a half years. It was a first house. It was a million-dollar house. It was a house that he was still discovering the meaning of. He thought she understood how much he was committed to getting rid of the second loan they had on it. He thought she understood how much more than money he felt he was putting in the mail every month with the mortgage check. The job that had recently begun to leave a residue of resentment on everything; the anger that seemed to come out of nowhere at his children; the legs that were not hers that parted in the darkness of his mind at night as she lay sleeping next to him.

They drove on in silence, putting miles between themselves and the ever-expanding open house.