SLUG: A04_power_bill_no_knot
SET: A
CONCEPT: Power bill day used to make her nauseous
HEADLINE: Watch the setup video
WORDS: 639

$438 was the number that used to make me nauseous on the 18th of every month.

Power bill day.

I would wake up on the 18th with my stomach already in a knot before my feet hit the floor.

I would sit at the kitchen table with a calculator and a stack of envelopes and move things around.

Push the water bill to the 25th.

Ask the ortho if we could split Emma's payment again.

Skip my own prescription for two weeks and hope nobody noticed.

Pray the reconnect fee didn't hit if I was three days late.

Because $438 owed on a nearly empty checking account is a math problem no calculator can solve.

I did that dance for four years.

Four years of the 18th feeling like a funeral.

I want to tell you about a Wednesday in March.

I was at the Kroger on Route 9 with a small cart.

A rotisserie chicken, a gallon of milk, off brand cereal, and a birthday card for my sister.

The card reader beeped at me twice and then said declined.

I stood there while the woman behind me shifted her weight and pretended to look at the gum rack.

I put the chicken back.

I put the milk back.

I kept the card because it was for my sister who has never had an easy year in her life.

I made it to the parking lot before I started crying.

Not the pretty kind of crying.

The kind where you are gripping the steering wheel because if you let go you might come apart.

An older lady from the register next to mine was loading her trunk two spots over.

She walked across the lot and knocked on my window.

I rolled it down because I did not have the energy to pretend I was fine.

She said honey I have been where you are sitting and you do not have to sit here alone.

She pulled out her phone.

She showed me a short setup video she had been running for about eight months.

She said the little phone thing runs off the house wifi.

Twenty minutes to set up on a Sunday morning and then you barely think about it.

She said her first month was quiet and then the deposits started landing and she almost missed the first one because she had stopped checking.

I set the thing up the following Sunday before church.

I forgot about it for almost three weeks.

Life got in the way like it always does.

Then a Friday came where the number that landed was $946.

I sat at the kitchen table holding my phone and I did not know what to do with my face.

The next Friday it was $1,317.

The Friday after that a little less, then a little more, and by the fourth week I was making coffee before I opened the phone because I already knew.

The 18th came around this month and I paid the power bill three days early.

$438.

Same number.

I tapped pay and I closed the app and I went and folded a load of towels.

That was it.

No calculator.

No shifting other bills around.

No praying about a reconnect fee.

It was boring.

And boring is the whole miracle I am trying to tell you about.

Boring is what I was praying for the whole time and I did not have the words for it until it showed up.

If you are the woman sitting at the kitchen table right now with a stack of envelopes and a knot in your stomach, tap the image below and watch the setup video.

Same one she showed me in the Kroger parking lot.

If you have a phone and wifi in the house, you can run it too.
