Their lair smells like a postapocalyptic Bath & Body Works that has been stagnating in dust for ten years, with base notes of Aqua Net. The dusty odor has always confounded me, since I’ve never managed to find any actual dust. Each room is heavy and rich, trying hard to evoke French castles with Louis XV chairs while hoping you don’t notice the stained pink carpet. If you’re under twenty years old, you’re expected to take off your shoes. There’s one single television in the “salon”—a relic of the seventies that is never turned on and whose sole purpose is to reflect your shock that such a mammoth television set is still in someone’s house.
Absolute silence falls over you like a hood once you cross the threshold into an Agatha Christie murder set and makes you want to speak quietly, which is translated through Mrs. Rose’s human emotions processor as admiration.
It’s her ode to a gilded age gone by, when children suppressed all their thoughts and emotions to make life easier for their boozy parents. Cherry wood, thick fabrics, onyx-on-charcoal damasks. Thousand-dollar bourbon, cork undisturbed, and crystal candy dishes that have nothing in them.
Ornate frames of gold rope and eighteenth-century ashtrays you can Look At But Not Touch, enshrined behind backlit glass. A museum of Rose history that no one cares about except for the withered old Roses who grow here, and maybe me, the unwelcome and unsightly weed, if I end up having to marry into this mess.
Nicholas’s honor roll ribbons from high school hang framed at the head of the dining room. Evidence that they have a daughter is scrubbed from everywhere except a tiny room they call “the paaah-lah,” which contains one grand piano, a horde of porcelain cat figurines, and Heather’s senior portrait. There are laser beams in the background and she’s wearing braces with black rubber bands. Her mother sometimes talks about her like she’s dead. Nicholas has told me that she’s an EDM deejay, and just for that she’s my favorite member of this family.
“Naomi! My dear! So very good to see you,” Deborah cries, swinging forward to air-kiss one cheek, then the other. She learned from her own mother-in-law (a truly terrifying individual I got to meet only once before Satan called her home) how to be frigid and passive-aggressive. Honestly, this woman has no inkling where she is. We live in Morris, for crying out loud. Half our population has fur and nibbles on berries in the forest.
Meeting Deborah in person for the first time was jarring. She’s persistently written in to the Beaufort Gazette with so many complaints about life in general that they gave her an advice column, Dear Deborah, where she doles out pearls of wisdom to loyal readers all over the county. I know Deborah’s pearls for the costume jewelry that they are, because she’s never come up against a problem that she didn’t run to Nicholas to fix.
The picture that accompanies her rants is at least fifteen years old. She’s still got the same feathered bob, now with more highlights, but the skin around her eyes is stretched tight even though the eyes themselves seem to have shrunk to half their original size. The earrings she wears are so weighty that the lobes are stretched to two inches long.
She clasps my face between her soft, cool palms. I’m not sure she has blood. Sometimes she gets a little red in the face but that’s only because she was left plugged in for too long and the outlet overheated.
“Goodness, Naomi, you cut your hair! And right before your wedding!
What on earth were you thinking? Give me the name of your beautician and I’ll have her fired for what she’s done to you.”
I ruffle my woefully short bangs and Nicholas hides a smile, pleased that he’s got his mother insulting me for him. “It’s a style. Like Amélie.”
Amélie’s going to be my go-to reference with this hack job. I’ll draw comparisons every chance I get.
She looks like she’s holding back a mouthful of bees. “It really doesn’t suit your face shape. Although I’m sure you already know that, and you’ve got an appointment booked to get hair extensions.” She doesn’t wait to hear a confirmation, eager to dive into her analysis of my appearance. It’s what she does every time she sees me. “You’re looking wretched all over, my dear. So washed-out and puffy. Are you ill?”
“Yes,” I reply gaily. I hug her, which I’ve never done before (look at me trying all these fun new things!), and her bones shift and crunch under her prim clothes. Her clavicle protrudes so far, it’s like someone buried her bones too shallow.
She skitters back, covered in my imaginary sick germs.
“Naomi’s joking,” Nicholas says plaintively. “She said she was fine in the car.”
She pats her chest as though she’s having palpitations, and we follow her to the living room so we can see her new coat rack (giant sequoia wood, twelve hundred dollars) and compliment it. I smell food cooking, and the promise of a free meal is the only reason I don’t immediately impale myself on the coat rack.
When Mrs. Rose goes to check in with “the woman” about dinner, I pull out my phone and start tapping. “Potpourri,” I say aloud. “Scribbly paintings. Creepy Hummel figurines of peasant children doing chores.”
Nicholas gives me a wary look. “What are you doing?”
“Taking notes on how to make our house more enticing to you. You adore this one so much that you never want to leave, so I’m working out how to replicate the magic.” I resume my phone tapping. “Bouquets of flowers bestowed by loved ones. Hmm, I’ll have to find some loved ones.”
He points to a crisp brown bouquet of last week’s just because present.
“You want that?” he whispers sarcastically. “An ugly handful of forty dollars?” He points next at a gaudy emerald brooch in a glass display case.
“What about that? Would impractical jewelry make you happy, darling?”
If I hear one more word from him about impractical I’m going to stuff him in the trunk.
“Steal it and we’ll see.”
His lips mash together. Knowing I’m under his skin makes my heart sing.
Mrs. Rose wafts back into earshot, so I pick up a vase that used to belong to Harold’s mother and say, “I like this urn.”
“That’s a vase, dear.” She pronounces it like vahz. There’s no way she doesn’t hate this vase, since legend has it that she and her mother-in-law once got into a physical brawl over where Harold would be buried—next to his wife or next to Mommie Dearest. Nicholas comes by his issues honestly.
“I’m surprised an urn this lovely isn’t already occupied,” I say as if I didn’t hear her. “Although I suppose one day it will be.” I give Deborah a contemplating look, up and down slowly from the top of her head to the tips of her pristine white shoes. “You have the nicest heirlooms. It’s humbling to think that someday I’ll have them all in my own home. Nick, can’t you just see this pretty urn sitting on top of our fridge someday?”
His eyes sharpen when I call him Nick, but he doesn’t have room to reply because Mrs. Rose says, “Nicky, what do you think of dear Naomi’s new hairstyle?”
The only reason he keeps a straight face is that he’s standing directly in front of a window. It’d be too easy for me to push him through it. “Naomi always looks great.” Then he steps three paces off to the side before adding, “She has a large enough forehead that she can get away with short bangs.”
They cover their bitchy grins with their hands in identical gestures.
Nicholas notices and drops his hand. He looks a little shaken. I smile at him to confirm his worst fears.
Yes, Nicky, you’re turning into your mother.
“Aren’t those roses so nice?” I say to Deborah, gesturing at the dead brown ones from last week. “Very considerate of your adult son to bring you flowers all the time.”
“Isn’t it?” she croons. “Nicky spoils me so; he’s such a wonderful boy.
He does the same for you, I’m sure.”
My smile twists at the corners and Nicholas has found something in the carpet to captivate him.
“Come look at these fresh ones!” she tells me, waving for us to follow her into the salon. Another forty dollars of Nicholas’s regret stares mockingly at me from a small table. He’s peeled the gas station sticker from the plastic wrap, and I muse that with cold weather approaching roses are going to be harder for him to find. He’ll be forking out a hundred bucks a week for 1-800-Flowers.
“Aren’t they precious?” Deborah thrusts the bouquet under my nose. I lean in and inhale.
“So that’s what flowers smell like! I never get the opportunity to see them up close, so I had no idea.”
Nicholas sighs at the ceiling.
“Look what else my Nicky got me.” Deborah pops the lid of a small black velvet box, showcasing a glittering band of chocolate diamonds. I have never understood the appeal of brown diamonds. I don’t want this
monstrosity. If someone gave it to me I would never wear it. And yet I’m almost nauseated with jealousy.
“You’re one lucky lady.” I keep my gaze fixed on Nicholas. My tone rings so false, I know we all hear it. “What was the occasion?”
“Harold’s and my anniversary.” Harold is snoozing in a chair, hunched and lopsided. She wakes him up by yanking on his collar until he’s straightened out. “What was it he got for you, dear? Golf clubs?”
Harold jumps and snorts. He’s adept at speaking through his nose.
“Lucky, lucky, lucky,” I sing. “So lucky that your adult son buys you diamonds and golf clubs to celebrate an anniversary that isn’t even his! I can’t imagine to what lengths he’d go for his own anniversary.” This time, I don’t dare glance at Nicholas. He’ll want me to catch his eye so I’ll know that he’s seething, and not looking at him deprives him of this.
Conversation with Mrs. Rose is fifty percent listening to her swoon over Nicholas and fifty percent listening to her gripe, so it’s about time for her to swing the other way. She asks why no one has received a wedding invitation yet, since she already had the type of invitation and wording ready to go. I stay silent while Nicholas puts together a reply, leaving him to twist in the wind.
The truth is that Nicholas and I can’t agree on which engagement photo to attach to the invitations. Most couples attach engagement photos to their save-the-dates, but since we didn’t send those out Deborah says we Absolutely Must Include Them With The Invitations.
The one I want to use has captured me at a magical angle. It gives the illusion that I have long eyelashes and fuller lips. My chest looks larger.
I’ve absorbed all of the photogenic magic and left none to spare for Nicholas, whose right eye is shut entirely and his left is halfway there. We had the photos taken on a chilly day and the first thing you notice are his nipples pointing through his shirt. I laugh every time I see it.
The photo Nicholas wants to use makes him look like a GQ model, and my hair’s blowing all over my face. Nicholas tells his mother, “Oh, I thought we sent those out already. My bad.”
“You’d better do it,” Deborah says warningly. “Or no one will show up.”
Nicholas’s ears perk up at this. He looks inspired. Those invitations are never going out in the mail. I have no right to be offended that he doesn’t want to marry me, since I don’t want to marry him, either, but I am. I console myself with the knowledge that I don’t want to marry him even more than he doesn’t want to marry me.
But when we’re alone for a minute, the smiles fade away and he mutters in my ear, “Why don’t you ever have my back? You always abandon me.”
“You always abandon me first,” I hiss.
“The woman” has fixed veal. Veal makes me cringe and Mrs. Rose knows it; it’s why, up until now, she’s offered an alternative dish if veal was going to be on the menu. Not tonight. It’s a creative reprisal, I’ll give her that.
She’s watching me closely, craving a reaction, so I look her right in the eye and take an enormous bite. I don’t care about my moral convictions tonight. I’ll eat a bloody half-formed cow fetus with my bare hands if it’ll get Nicholas to dump me in front of his mom like a total chump. What has my life come to, if that’s my goal now?
Nicholas pins me with a glare. The angrier he gets, the more I feel like dancing. He’s giving me so many nonverbal cues and they’re fine encouragement that I’m going in the right direction. Muscle twitches.
Clenched jaw. Fisted hands. Someone’s got to teach this man about poker tells or he’ll get his pockets cleaned out. Probably by me, in the inevitable divorce. My brilliant lawyer and I will ride into the sunset with everything he’s got.
“Nicky just loves veal,” Mrs. Rose purrs.
Nicky just does not, but he won’t argue with her. “What else does your adult son love?” I ask. “You spend more time with him than anyone else, so you’re the one to ask.” I heave a dramatic sigh. “Even after all this time together, there’s still so much I don’t know. Our Nicky is surprisingly mysterious.”
At that, his gaze snaps to mine, and there’s a glimmer of amusement lurking there. “Don’t sell yourself short, Naomi,” he replies. “I think you’re starting to figure me out.”
“Yes, I believe I am. It’s taken some time.”
“We can’t all be quick learners.”
I swirl my glass of cranberry juice as we watch each other through narrowed eyes. “You should tell your parents our special news,” I say at last, one corner of my mouth ticking up.
His eyebrows knit together and his mother is all aflutter. She probably can’t believe something’s happened in his life that she wasn’t the first to know about. “News? What news? Tell us, Nicky.”
“Tell them, Nicky,” I parrot.
Deborah divides a stricken look between us. Clearly, she’s terrified I’m pregnant. An out-of-wedlock baby! What would Pastor Thomas say? Just to scare her a little more, I absently drape a hand over my stomach. She makes a dry, rasping sound like the leg of a chair scraping across a wood floor.
Nicholas sees my game.
“Darling, I don’t think I know what news you’re referring to.”
“It’s unexpected news.” I’m relishing this. “We weren’t planning on it happening quite yet, but that’s the way life goes.”
“If you do have news,” he grates, “I know it’s not mine.”
I tilt my head. “We haven’t had anything newsworthy happen in quite a while, have we?”
“Speaking of news!” Deborah interrupts, dying to pivot the spotlight back onto herself. “I’m coming up on my fifth anniversary at the newspaper.”
“We know,” Harold mutters, spreading a cloth napkin across his lap.
Deborah stares at him pointedly until he tucks a second napkin into his collar. I give it a year before she’s got him wearing a bib. “We all know.”
Deborah spoons more artichoke hearts onto his plate, much to his dismay. “They might not know.”
She texted Nicholas three times this week about it, hinting that if he wanted to take her out for a celebratory lunch she’s upholding boycotts with Ruby Tuesday, Walk the Plank, and Applebee’s because of spats with the staff.
“Congratulations,” Nicholas says automatically.
“Yes, it’s quite an achievement, isn’t it? I think I’ve solved more problems than the mayor! Lately I’ve been rescuing marriages left and right, but when you read tomorrow’s column you’ll see that even I can’t save the lady who recently wrote in begging for my help.” Deborah smiles like the cat that ate the canary. “She’s having an affair with the handyman.”
“I wish Nicholas were handsier—I mean handier,” I say, stealing the spotlight right back. “I’ve been performing maintenance duties by myself.
But I’ve been getting better results, interestingly enough.”
Nicholas’s stare is dehydrating. “Sounds unlikely.”
“Maintenance duties?” Deborah repeats, turning to him. “Has something broken? Naomi shouldn’t be trying to fix anything. She could make it worse.”
“I have no choice,” I tell her in a low, conspiratorial voice. “It’s a desperate situation, and Nicholas won’t use his tools.” I tap my mouth with a fingernail, watching him go rigid.
“Nicholas has no use for tools,” Deborah says emphatically, unaware that we are speaking in encrypted hate. “If something isn’t working, call a professional.”
“Good thinking. Do you know which handyman that lady was writing in about?”
Nicholas is fed up. “Being handy is unsatisfying when your fiancée is so obviously distracted and barely pitches in,” he tells me with thunderclouds sweeping over his expression.
His hands are hot and sweating. I can tell by the way the fork in his grip fogs up. This is what he gets for calling me a doll on the shelf. I don’t engage with his parents enough at dinner? He’ll regret saying that.
“Harold,” Deborah barks.
Harold jumps.
“What?”
“The kids are living in a broken-down hovel. Make them call a repairman.”
The idea of Harold making Nicholas or me do anything is ludicrous. He can’t make himself stay awake for the duration of a commercial. Harold only gets up from his chair if it means walking to another chair. He and his wife are presently wearing matching burgundy sweaters, fur from his back and shoulders creeping around a Peter Pan collar in a way that has me side-eyeing how Nicholas will age. He stopped having an opinion of his own in 1995 and lives for the moment he’s told he’s allowed to go to bed.
Trust this: you don’t want to know more about Harold. He’s like three-month-old lasagna left in the back of the fridge. With every layer it gets worse.
He drinks seltzer water with every dinner and his white hair sprouts from the top of his head in short tufts of cotton, same as his out-of-control eyebrows. If you’re sitting directly opposite him, his hair is see-through and colors everything behind it with whimsical fuzz. He communicates chiefly through snorts, grunts, and belches. Once, I walked in on him while he was leafing through a Playboy and he said, “Have you ever been with an older man, Nina?”
My boss, Mr. Howard, says he knew Harold when they were younger and Harold’s “work trips” to Nevada in the eighties were actually stints at Bella’s Gentleman’s Club. Like the innocent, naïve sunbeam that I am, the words gentleman’s club conjured up genteel images of men playing cards and smoking cigars. Then Zach told me what it actually was and it left me equal parts traumatized and enthralled.
I still haven’t let Nicholas in on this discovery. It’s a pulled punch I’m saving for after I’ve already knocked him down but need to make sure he can’t get back up again. I’m getting my goddamn lemon cake and your mom is uninvited to the wedding. Roundhouse kick. I’m wearing a tuxedo and we’re eloping. Jab to the throat. We’re never naming our daughter after Deborah. High kick. I haven’t flossed in a year. Uppercut. Your dad goes to brothels.
“Call the repo man,” Harold advises. “Tell him he’s not taking anything unless he’s got a warrant. Then go stash it at your vacation home.”
I wish I could exist in whatever world Harold is in right now, holding an entirely different conversation parallel to ours. “Actually,” I say, “our news is that we’re thinking about getting a dog.”
“We are not.” Nicholas’s grip on his fork tightens.
I sip my cranberry juice. It’s revolting. “Something small, that yaps a lot. Maybe a terrier or a chihuahua.”
A muscle in his cheek jumps.
“Maybe we’ll get a cat, too,” he suggests.
Deborah looks at me, frowning. “Isn’t Naomi allergic to cats?”
“Is she?” He smiles at his clean plate. He’s finished all his food, even the bits of creamy mushroom that I know he doesn’t like. What a good little boy. I bet his tail is wagging in anticipation of being petted.
Nicholas pretends to consider. “Two cats, maybe, so the one won’t be lonely.”
“I’ve been thinking,” I interrupt. Our dysfunction is growing increasingly evident. Even Harold is paying attention now. “About keeping my maiden name. It’s what a lot of women are doing now.”
This doesn’t bother Deborah in the least. She’s glad to hear it, I’m sure.
Fewer women to share her name with. Unfazed, I change tacks.
“Actually …” I tease out the word. “Nowadays, sometimes it’s the man who changes his name. Nicholas Westfield has a certain charm to it.”
“He can’t change his name!” Deborah cries.
“Why not? Women do it all the time. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”
Nicholas doesn’t dignify this with a retort, shaking his head at me.
“That’s ridiculous,” his mother huffs. “He has a lovely last name. Not that yours isn’t … nice … but it’s not quite as special as Rose, now, is it? Dr.
Rose is how he’s known in this community. He can’t change it now. And I’m sure he’ll want his children to carry on the family name, too.”
“We’re not having children,” I declare. “I’m barren. I lost my uterus in a Ponzi scheme.”
Nicholas throws his fork down with a clatter and stands. His business of moving around is loud, but not loud enough to disguise his mother’s startled cry. “It’s getting late.” He scowls at me. “Come on, Naomi.”
I wave a hand over my plate, feigning incomprehension. “But I haven’t finished yet.”
He grabs my hand. “Oh, you’re done.”
Nicholas all but throws me over his shoulder to get me out of that house. I can feel that my face is flushed with triumph and I know my eyes are bright and shining. A complete basket case. This is how I want to look in the picture we use for invitations. I wish I could fall down and laugh until my ribs crack, but he drags me out the door. Every muscle in his body is tense.
“Thanks for dinner!” I crow behind me. “Your adult son and I are so grateful!”
“Stop saying that,” he snaps, tugging my arm when I try to dig my heel into one of the flowers in the yard.
“Stop thanking them for dinner? That’s not very nice manners, Nicky.”
He and I suffer each other in silence on the car ride home, preparing our arguments in our heads. As soon as we pull up under the halo of our streetlight we get out and round the car, doors slamming with hurricane force.
“Don’t slam my car door.” As if he didn’t do the same.
He’s in love with his status symbol of a car and would probably marry it if it were socially acceptable. “Your car isn’t that good-looking and didn’t even win the J.D. Power award. I hope a bird craps on it every single day for all eternity.” Right on the windshield in front of his face, a big white splat.
“You’re just mad because you drive a woolly mammoth.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my car.”
“I’m sure it was in top form once. In 1999.”
Listen to this man’s privilege. He’s probably never driven a car that was more than two years old. “I buy what I can afford. Not all of us have rich parents who paid our tuition at swanky New England schools.”
“You want to go to college? Then go to college! Don’t punish me for being successful enough to buy a nice vehicle.”
And we’ve come to the crux of it. Naomi doesn’t have a college degree.
Naomi doesn’t have a fancy car. How do we measure her value without these must-haves? I think about my parents saying I should have worked harder and applied for scholarships. I think about Nicholas’s remark at game night that I don’t need a job, and how no one believes in me. I wish I could go back in time and slam his car door twice.
I let his stride overtake mine so that I enter the house second; this way, I get to shut the door as hard as I want. The walls vibrate, floorboards shifting like tectonic plates. The ceiling fractures apart into a road map of jagged black lines. He and I square off, battle-ready, the room hazing crimson and pulsating with animosity.
“There’s nothing wrong with your gas gauge,” I tell him. It’s one of the meanest things I could ever say. “You can’t admit you didn’t notice your fuel was low.”
His eyes are crazed. At game night, I realized they change colors, and right now his eyes are the color of four horsemen heralding Armageddon, riding forth on beasts whipped from storm clouds. I can practically see the lightning flash, illuminating a rain of locusts. He drags a hand through his hair and messes it all up. A colorful wheel of insults cranks through his head and notches on one I didn’t expect.
“I don’t like your spaghetti. It tastes like nothing.”
Whatever. He’s just giving me an excuse not to cook. “I don’t like your dumb How to Train Your Dragon tie.”
He’s so proud of that tie, because it features Toothless the dragon. A clever pun when you’re in the teeth profession.
Rage burns a red rash across his cheekbones. “You take that back.”
I shrug, smiling inwardly. It’s a malicious smile all for myself, but I think he sees it because of the look he gives me.
“Sometimes I don’t know why I try with you.”
I agree. “Yeah, why do you?”
He combusts. “Giving me shit about my mother constantly, like I don’t already know how difficult she makes our lives. You harping on me, and throwing me to the wolves all the time, doesn’t make it any better! You’re not such a peach yourself, Naomi. You think there aren’t things about you that drive me insane? You think I don’t feel held back from realizing my true potential?”
His chest is heaving and he looks like he might run out the door and never come back. To make him even angrier, I let out a pop of laughter.
“Please enlighten me, Nicholas, as to how I am holding you back.”
Oh, he’s riled. He’s hands on hips, tie yanked loose, so upset I can see his skin retracting as a shadow of stubble breaks through. His mouth is a slash of contempt. His eyes dip to the Steelers logo on my hoodie and he clenches his jaw so tight I know there’s a hairline fracture there with my name on it. An X-ray technician will be astounded to see the word Naomi etched into his bones one day.
“For one, I hate this house.”
My eyebrows arch so high, they nearly touch my bangs. “You picked it.”
After eleven months of dating, we packed up our solo lives and came here to be one unit. It was the first rental house we looked at. We were dripping with vitality and butterflies, making grand plans. We’ll build shelves. Maybe the landlord will let us retile the bathroom. Doing projects together will be so fun! Recalling happier times is like trying to remember a dream I had a hundred years ago—it’s all a warped blur that no longer makes sense.
When we toured the house, we were so dreamy over our love nest that we didn’t take into consideration that the limited street parking would make it a pain to accommodate two cars. We didn’t notice the floors weren’t level, which means every time I drop my ChapStick I have to chase it before it rolls under the furniture. We didn’t think about the fact that there was only one spare room that could be turned into an office.
“Sometimes my judgment’s hasty,” he shoots back, making it clear he’s talking about proposing to me. “I don’t like the street we’re on, or this neighborhood. Morris is actually a scenic town if you’re in the right spot, and we moved smack-dab where it’s ugliest. There’s nothing here.”
He can see the question mark on my face. “I’d rather be closer to nature!” he blurts. “All these woods, all this countryside around us, and here we sit with a backyard so small you could spit across it.”
“So, what?” I prompt. “You want to be one of those guys in a Nature Valley ad? Sitting on a mountain with your Labrador retriever, getting a hard-on over the smell of trees?”
“Yeah!” he nearly yells. “I want that. I think that’s how I’d thrive. But you’re not going to let me thrive, Naomi. I can already tell. You’re content right here in your cement prison—”
“Oh god.” I roll my eyes so hard, I see the spirit realm. “Take up hiking.”
“—begging to get seasonal depression by locking yourself in a dark room and never going outside. Going to work doesn’t count because you’re still sitting in a car during transit. And I see you, Naomi. I see you never looking at the sky or taking the time to stop and smell the—” He sees how excited I am for him to finish that sentence and he kills it abruptly. “You’re barely living, you know.”
“I had no idea you were so thirsty to be one with nature.” I use air quotes around one with nature. He hates it when people use air quotes.
“What the hell kind of YouTube videos have you been watching in there on your computer wife? Seriously, where is this coming from?”
“MY HEART,” he roars, and he’s so sincere and agitated that I double over in a fit of laughter. “Shut up! Stop laughing.” He’s pacing now. He’s been putting some deep thought into this. Who is this man in my living room with Armageddon eyes and a yearning desire to skip rocks across a lake?
“I want a helmet with a flashlight on it,” he’s raving. “I want a fireplace.
A shotgun in case of coyotes. I want shovels and a shed to put them in. I want a canoe.”
“Don’t let me stop you from getting a canoe,” I say, dead serious.
“Nicholas, I’m here to support all your dreams. Please, go get a canoe. I’d love nothing more than to watch you paddle out into the middle of a lake.”
“I think what you need is a granola bar and maybe a trial run with the Eagle Scouts.”
“I knew you wouldn’t take me seriously. That’s why I haven’t said anything. But I’m not keeping it bottled up anymore, Naomi, I swear to god. I’m going to start living the way I want. I’m going to have the life I want, everything I want, no matter what it takes. I don’t have forever; I’m already in my thirties.”
“You’re right, you’re practically an old man. Your time is now! Start living your best life.”
“I’m serious.” He pinches a nickel that’s sitting on the TV stand.
“Heads, we start doing things my way. Tails, we stay the same.”
“You want to plan our lives based on a coin toss? That sounds about right.” I wish he’d flip a coin to decide the fate of our relationship while he’s at it. Heads, we break up. Tails, we flip the coin again. We could quit each other right now and blame it all on the coin.
He flips the nickel. It lands on the back of his hand. Nicholas stares at the glimmer of silver.
“Well?”
“I guess you’ll find out.”
“Fabulous, be sure to keep me in the loop.” I sprawl out on our three-seater, arrowing a lazy smile up at him. “Good night.”
“Good night? If you want me to go to bed, then you’re going to have to move. I’m taking the couch tonight.”
“No, you can have your bed full of Skittles. I’m staying right here.”
He storms back to the bedroom and closes the door with a barely audible snick that’s somehow even worse than if he’d shut it violently. I hear the lock turn, and then it’s just me alone in the silence.
We’ve never yelled at each other before. We’re usually so wary of rocking the boat that we’re maybe only eighty percent honest with each other. We’ve both dialed it up to one hundred for once, and logically I know I shouldn’t feel better now but I kind of do. As the minutes tick by and I listen to his dresser drawers close, our mattress springs compressing as he rolls over them as furiously as he can manage, I have an intriguing revelation.
We’ve been together for almost two years, and this is our first real fight.
