Chapter One #2
"The chicken thing you like. From the place in Tuscany, technically, though I've butchered the recipe so many times it's basically its own dish now."
"I love your version better anyway." He kissed my neck, quick and easy, and for a moment we were simply two people who loved each other in a kitchen, nothing more complicated than that.
"I want to open with the folding table," he said, pulling off his tie at the kitchen island while I finished dinner.
"Rhodes thinks it's a cliché at this point, everybody's heard the folding table story, but I think that's exactly why it works.
People like an origin story they already know by heart. "
I didn't say anything about the invoices.
"Talia's setting it up so I walk through the whole arc," he went on, sitting now, loosening his collar. "The near miss in year two, obviously. The first real contract. Then straight through to where we are now. I want people to feel how close it came to not happening."
"It did come close," I said, and I meant it as agreement, an easy thing to say while I stirred a pot on the stove.
"It really did." He shook his head like he still couldn't quite believe it, and there was real feeling in it, which was almost the hardest part.
"I think about it sometimes, what would've happened if I hadn't found a way through that year.
If the company had just folded like everybody expected it to. "
I thought about my grandmother's ring, sold not for the money in the stone but because I couldn't stand to keep something that reminded me of a woman I loved while my husband sat across the table doing math that didn't work.
I thought about the account that had been mine and then, within a season, was simply ours in the sense that it no longer existed as anything separate at all.
"You found a way through," I said.
"I did." He smiled at me, easy and warm, a man who loves his wife and believes every word he's saying. "God, those were hard years. I don't think people understand what that kind of pressure does to you. Every morning waking up wondering if today's the day it all falls apart."
"I remember," I said.
"You had it easier, though," he said, not unkindly, reaching past me for a glass. "You didn't have your name on the loan. You didn't have four employees looking at you every Friday wondering if there'd be a paycheck."
I turned the heat down under the pot so it wouldn't stick, because it needed doing, and because it gave me a reason not to answer right away.
"No," I said finally. "I didn't have my name on the loan."
He didn't hear anything underneath that, and why would he.
It was true. My name had never been on any loan.
What had been mine was smaller and quieter and had disappeared so completely into the foundation of everything we built that even I sometimes had trouble remembering it had ever belonged to just me.
We ate dinner. He talked about Saturday, about the anniversary, about how far we'd come, and I listened and asked the right questions and refilled his water when it got low, the way I've done for fifteen years, competent and pleasant and completely unremarkable in the story he was telling about his own life.
He told me, over dessert, about a funny exchange with Merritt earlier that day, some mix-up over vendor contracts that had resolved itself into an anecdote, and I laughed at the right moment, because it was genuinely funny, because this is still, underneath everything, a marriage with real affection running through it, real jokes, real tenderness, a partnership that has simply narrowed, over the years, into a shape that fits Christian more comfortably than it fits me.
I remembered, watching him laugh at his own story, a Saturday morning a few weeks earlier, one of the rare ones where nothing was scheduled and no client emergency pulled him away before ten.
We'd stayed in bed late, something we almost never do anymore, and he'd told me, half asleep, about a dream he'd had where we were back in the apartment above the dry cleaner, except in the dream the company had never existed at all, and we were simply happy there, indefinitely, no folding table, no anniversary, no gala.
I'd asked him if the dream felt like a loss, waking up from it into the life we actually have.
"No," he'd said, pulling me closer. "It felt like a reminder.
That the apartment was never really about the apartment.
It was about you being there." I had believed him completely in that moment, warm and unguarded in the gray morning light, and some part of me still believed it now, even as another part of me had begun, almost imperceptibly, to wonder whether the sentiment survived contact with the rest of our actual life, the parts that weren't lazy Saturday mornings but ordinary Tuesdays full of small, uncounted labor.
Later, after he'd gone up to bed, I sat alone at the island with the box of photographs still open beside me.
I found the one from the folding table again.
I looked at it for a long time before I put the lid back on the box and carried it back to the closet, back to the dark, where it has mostly lived for fifteen years, taking up almost no space at all.