PART 1 — NINETEEN
When I married Torren I married into a family of seven siblings and a number of nieces and nephews I have never successfully counted.
Marriage
There is something on most weekends. A birthday, a christening, somebody’s promotion, a Sunday because it is Sunday.
For about the first year I loved it. I am an only child and my mother died when I was twenty-six and that house was noisy in a way I had never had.
Then I started noticing the shape of it.
When the bill came, every single person at that table discovered something on their phone, or needed the bathroom, or turned to the person next to them with a story.
Family
I paid the first three times because I did not want to be the woman who made it awkward.
I have a good job. I assumed some of them were tight. I assumed it would even out.
It did not even out. It hardened.
By about the second year the joke had a name.
Briar, my sister-in-law, would say it before we had sat down.
“Don’t worry, this family’s got a walking credit card.”
And nineteen people would look at me and laugh, and Torren would do a small apologetic face and say, quietly, “It’s just dinner. It’s easier.”
Paying was not actually the worst part.
The worst part was that the menu changed the second they decided I was covering it.
Lobster. The forty-dollar steak. Cocktails before, wine with, dessert after, and a round of the good stuff at the end. Things nobody in that family orders when they are out on their own, which I know because I have sat with several of them when they were paying and watched them order a burger.
It came to a head at Orrin’s sixty-eighth.The Lantern House in Merrick Bay, nineteen adults, one long table at the back.
The waiter had not finished handing out the menus before the ordering started, and I watched my brother-in-law order a bottle of something at a hundred and ten dollars without opening the list.
Marriage
And that is when it finally landed properly.
They did not think I was mean, and they did not think I was generous.
They did not think about me at all. I was the mechanism by which the evening got paid for.
So I smiled, and I let every single one of them order, and I did not say one word.
