For four years my husband’s family called me the walking credit card and ordered lobster every time I was at the table. At my father-in-law’s birthday dinner I smiled, let all nineteen of them order, and then a waiter came out carrying a tray of nineteen separate checks.

Family

She said one thing on that call that I have kept.

She said, “You were the only one at that table who was actually looking at the prices.”

You don’t need to look at the prices, do you?

She said that in front of nineteen people while she folded my menu and passed it down the table, and most of them laughed, and my husband laughed.

Marriage

I was looking at the prices because I was the only one who was going to see them.

And the figure at the bottom of the page in my husband’s drawer said he had been looking at them too, for two years, on his own, in a spreadsheet he never showed anybody.

Two people at that table knew exactly what it cost.

Neither of us said it out loud until a waiter carried out a tray.

Family

THE END