You keep them. I feel this. Wads of them curling in the coat pocket, the bag, the bottom of the thing you carry me around in, thin slips of paper you fold once and forget. I don't know what a budget is. I only know your thumb, how it pressed against the little glass square, how your shoulders came up around your ears in the line, how you held your breath from the last item to the total like a diver going under.
Something happened at the end of the belt. The number arrived, and I felt your stomach fold, quiet, once, the way it does. You didn't say anything. You never say anything, but I catch all of it, downstream, in the gut and the jaw. That's my whole job, catching what you swallow.
Then you took the paper. And here is what I love about you: you crumpled it, but your hand didn't throw it away. You put it in the pocket. You always do. Some part of you wants a record that you were here, that you fed us, that the milk and the bread and the small unnecessary bright thing you bought because it was Tuesday, all of it was real, all of it happened, all of it kept us going another week.
I carried you home. My feet, by the way, have been in these shoes since morning and would like a word, but later.
For now I am only asking, when you empty that pocket tonight and the paper falls out soft and gray, put your hand flat on the counter a second. Let me feel it cool. Then water. Then bed. You did the thing. We're fed.
Let the number go.