Everything happened at once.
First, Nick lost his job at the greeting card company. Which wouldn’t be a big deal in itself, except now all Nick does is sit around the house all day watching porn. He says he’s going to become a porn reviewer because that’s the big new industry. But I never see any actual reviews. I asked him about this once, and 20 minutes later he came up to me holding a wet, crumpled kleenex and said, “Four stars.”
Next, I lost my job at Yelp. Rather than being sympathetic like a decent husband should, Nick kept saying asshole-y things like, “That wasn’t a job,” completely inventing false bullshit just to annoy me.
Third and finally, my parents stopped by because we needed to have a “talk.” Turns out that over the past several years, they’d invested all of their savings in an Idiotic Amy theme park, “Idiotic Amy’s Idioting World.” They saw how much money the Harry Potter park was making and figured they could cash in. “It was gonna be so fun,” said Marybeth. “We’d built an exact replica of the school library where you crapped your pants.”
But they’d wildly miscalculated how many $1,500 season passes they could pre-sell (they’d assumed it’d be more than zero) and run out of money. Idiotic Amy’s Idioting World now stood half-built and empty. Equally empty was my parents’ bank account. That’s why they were here: they’d come to ask us to give back some of the money they’d given us over the years.
“How much do you need?” I ask.
“Oh not that much,” said Rand. “$650,000 should do it.”
It was almost everything we had.
“Plus $300,000 more,” said Marybeth.
“We don’t have that much,” I said. “We’ll have to sell the house.”
“Well since we’re technically on the deed, we saved you the trouble and sold it yesterday,” said Rand. “But don’t panic, you have until midnight to be out.”
Wonderful. And to top it all off, Nick suggested we move back to his hometown in Missouri.
Missouri.
That killing myself idea is sounding better and better.
