Ada's Rules by Alice Randall Page B

giant house way across town where she lay beside her kidney-shaped pool wearing a knit suit with bright brass buttons. The light turned green just as Ada began to wonder if she was going crazy.
    She decided to stop at the little black Episcopal church that had been an armory during the Civil War, Holy Trinity. And pray herself back to peace.
    Bathed in the light coming through Holy Trinity’s stained glass, she tried to clear her mind. Worrying about money was the one thing that really panicked Ada. Growing up in a family that had no salary, that lived by its wits and its instruments, had given Ada a permanent precarious feeling when she had to figure out how to pull together economic ends that wouldn’t meet. She hoped the calm of the little church would help.
    She wanted a treadmill. She wanted a trainer. She wanted a week at a spa. None of that was happening. Ada knew that.
    But she also knew a diet was a war, and a war required a war chest. She would need time and money. She was scared she didn’t have the time or the money to make the change she needed.
    The real problem with bariatric surgery (aside from Ada being wary of needles and having some superstition that she was more likely to have complications than most people) was that it was just too expensive.
    Ada didn’t have extra time or money. Ada didn’t have great insurance. And she didn’t have a heart for any more administrative duties.
    Ugh. She hated to write down what checks she wrote out, and never balanced her checking account. That’s why she loved debit cards and online banking. And Preach was worse thanshe was when it came to their personal funds. He carried their tax files to the accountant in ziplock bags and a grocery sack.
    She added another item to her shopping list. Buy a Dave Ramsey book. She liked listening to Ramsey, a sort of crazy conservative personal finance guru, on the radio. He talked radical change but made common sense.
    Ada wanted to be the Dave Ramsey of weight loss. Somebody who got it all wrong, then got it right and shared the info about The Way. Except she wouldn’t charge.
    Ada had an idea about what was keeping her—and a lot of folk—from the success they wanted. Ada had her own idea about what was hobbling America by hobbling black America.
    Blutter.
Black clutter. Blutter was destroying black America—blutter in the bankbooks, blutter in the body, and blutter in the basements and attics. Disorganized finances, disordered eating and exercise, and disorganized homes.
    Blutter.
There. She had given it a name, and it was still driving her crazy.
    She forced herself to keep good books at home. She did manage to look at the numbers, and every so often she would catch a mistake. Usually it was something she had returned that didn’t get charged back. She was going to figure out how much money she needed, and she was going to figure out where she could get that money from in her budget.
    She was going to spend wisely and exuberantly, as if she was buying a pair of shoes, or a vacation. Well, not like that, because she didn’t really spend money on fancy shoes or vacations. Like a new roof for the Manse. No way a house of her own was on the horizon.
    The night before she had looked her budget up and down and could hardly get anywhere with it. She ran a fairly tight ship on the domestic financial front, so there wasn’t a lot of room for belt tightening.
    The care, feeding, exercising, and dressing of her half-century self was an expensive proposition for someone who lived on a combination of a minister’s and a day-care director’s salaries, especially if the only way you could balance the day-care center’s books was to pay yourself eight dollars an hour—less than you paid the man who mopped the floor.
    Sometimes all that kept her going on the economic-hope front was her secret project. She was writing a book.
Home Training.
Right now it was just a loose-leaf