Working 9 to 5

Today is my husband's first day at his new job in the big city. As I kissed him goodbye and surveyed the shrinking pile of boxes in our house, I thought back to the last time he started a new job -- shortly after his business imploded -- and marveled at how far we'd come.

It was almost a year-and-a-half ago; we left early for a long weekend, and were out of town the Friday his partners locked him out of his office. He took several frantic calls from his assistant while we were on the road, but all I heard on my end was his reassurances: "Calm down. Help them find the records they're looking for." When I asked him what was up, he said that the partners were doing an audit and were having trouble navigating his filing system. If only...

Though I knew that there had been friction between them over business practices, he didn't tell me that things had sunk quite as low as they had. I knew that he suspected from the beginning that his partners were running unrelated expenses through his business to keep earnings -- i.e., his share of the profits -- non-existent. I didn't know that he had started keeping his own records after he realized the profit and loss statements from their accountant were wrong. I did know that he was using income from a side venture to supplement The Other Woman's salary after they cancelled her health insurance, to cover the cost of a cleaning service, and to pay his kids for their part-time work. He didn't tell me that the side venture violated provisions in his employment contract limiting related business income, even though he'd been doing it long before he started up with these guys. I knew that his partners were nickel-and-diming him on expenses, but I didn't realize that they had frozen his Office Depot and Sam's Club accounts because they thought he was spending too much on toner and toilet paper. And I knew that he had concerns about the way these guys did business, but even he didn't realize until it was too late that they were setting him up to take the fall in case anything went wrong.

I stayed over an extra night that weekend to have dinner with friends, and cashed in some miles to fly back early the next morning. By the time we talked Sunday night, he was back in the small town and discovered that they'd changed the locks on his office. He only told me that he was worried that things were falling apart in ways that he couldn't stop, but said not to worry, that we'd talk about it when I got home the next day. He met me for lunch on Monday, and as he was telling me how he'd basically lost his job, his capital investment, almost two years worth of sweat equity, his reputation, and -- because they were threatening him with criminal charges -- possibly his freedom, it was all I could do to hold it together. The closest I came to losing it was when he said, "This was all for you, baby."

"No," I reminded him, "This was all about you."

Even before he started his affair with The Other Woman, this business consumed him. More than his kids, his "life-long dream" was the reason I left the big city in the first place. The irony was not lost on me that if I'd stayed put for another six months, if I could have waited until we got married to move, if it hadn't seemed so important to be with him THAT VERY INSTANT, I wouldn't have had to leave at all. He would have come to me, albeit as a failure.

Rather than dwell on what could have been, I made him sit down and sketch out a plan to deal with what was. After doing a little research, I assured him that the police were not going to knock on our door until they investigated the company's books and records -- something he knew his partners would prevent at all costs. I drew up a very austere budget based on my income, calculated how much we could supplement it if he kept the side venture going, and then encouraged him to call a few people in his network. He did not want to pick up the phone for fear that he would be a pariah in his community. Far from it: the next day, his phone rang with a tentative job offer that one of his contacts recommended. He had the position sewed up by the end of the week, and started mid-week the next week, just a month before our wedding. His reputation, it seemed, was intact.

As I kissed him good by the morning he left for the new job, I remember breathing a huge sigh of relief. The salary was good, the hours were predictable, The Other Woman was not a factor, and we could deal with everything else in its time. It seems funny to me that, despite the vast differences in circumstances, I breathed pretty much the same sigh of relief when I watched him drive away today.


The Wife Who Knows