I asked Iris for forty minutes, not an afternoon. I told her I had a proposal and figures she could keep, and that no answer was required while we sat together. She chose my kitchen rather than the room where I taught. I understood that she wanted a table, not a piano between us.
I put my teaching ledger beside two cups and a plate of crackers. There were no fresh flowers, no prospectus, none of the things I might once have used to make a meeting feel like a celebration before agreement had been reached.
"This is what came in," I said, opening the ledger. "This is what went out. Travel, materials, canceled lessons I didn't charge for. I'm not calling the difference all available money. I still have my own bills."
She read the figures with a pencil in her hand. "You used to tell me you were doing fine."
"Some months I was. That wasn't a useful budget."
I had found an existing room available by the session, with a piano we could use and chairs we would have to arrange ourselves. I gave her the rental terms and my notes from looking at it. No lease, no deposit for months ahead, no promise that it would become ours.
"One introductory workshop," I said. "Adults who want to start again. We take fees in advance, and we don't confirm it until enough are paid to cover the room and our agreed work. If it doesn't fill, we refund and stop."
She looked at the proposed date, April 8. "Who's answering inquiries?"
"I thought we both could."
"That's usually me." She turned the paper over. "Registration, reminder messages, the list, cancellations. That isn't just helping because I'm faster with a computer."
I had written teaching time into the figures and left the rest as blank space around it. I took out my own pencil. "Then we price it. Tell me how much time you expect."
She listed the tasks, refusing my first estimate of half an hour. We talked through a late payment and a person who wanted to bring a friend without registering. She wasn't making trouble. She was describing work I had been prepared to notice only after she had done it.
"Preparation is paid work too," she said. "And if you want me there early to move chairs, that counts. We aren't splitting what's left after you decide which bits were lessons."
"Agreed." I wrote it down.
She studied me. "You don't have to agree to a rate you can't afford because you're trying to show you've changed."
That caught me. I checked the arithmetic again. With the minimum enrollment I had proposed, her terms left no sensible allowance for supplies or an unforeseen cost. I said so. We raised the minimum number, then reduced the handouts to what we actually needed. She crossed out a set of folders I had planned to buy.
"People can bring a pencil," she said. "We don't need to look established. We need to run the session."
We agreed that the Thursday evening before the public workshop would be a preparation commitment in the room: test the piano, walk through the exercises, settle who led which section. That time went into the budget too. I wrote March 30 beside it rather than promising we would fit it in somewhere.
At the bottom of the page we set out who would be paid for what and how we would handle any surplus. Iris would keep her clinic job. Neither of us would spend anticipated workshop receipts before the threshold was met. Additional sessions required another look at the figures, not an automatic booking.
"I want a copy tonight," she said.
"You can take this one. I'll copy it first."
She stayed while I did, eating two crackers and checking a sum I had reversed. When she left, she said, "I can try one on these terms." She did not hug me, and I didn't reach for her. I put my copy beside the ledger. There was less on the page than in our old plan, but everything on it had a source.