The six most feared words in my world are: “I’m going to the paint store.”

If my artist wife and I have been together for two decades, the paint store has been a fixture in our relationship for just as long. And it stubbornly sat there between us for 15 years.

Every so often, she would take her one-hour round trip and come home with a car full of supplies. When she got home, I would ask the question I didn’t really want to know the answer to: “How much did you spend?”

Inevitably, my response to the dollar amount was, shall we put it mildly, incredulous.

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