“Good news,” he said. “I finished the guest list.”
I lowered the ice pack. “What guest list?”
“For my birthday.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The pool party. Next Saturday.” He beamed at me. “Thirty guests. I kept it reasonable, Talia.”
I looked at him. Then I looked, very deliberately, at the cast resting across two couch cushions, at my leg that a doctor had told me to keep off the ground, at the ice pack in my hand. Then I looked back at him.
“Reasonable for whom?” I asked.
“For the house,” he said, missing it entirely, or choosing to. “It’s not a huge crowd. Half of them barely eat, honestly.”
“Great,” I said. “Then maybe the other half can cook.”
His smile faltered for the first time. He had come in expecting me to be delighted, or at least to acquiesce, and something in my tone was not cooperating with the script.
“I was thinking,” he said, recovering, pressing on, “appetizers, ribs, a couple of salads, some cocktails. And your layered cake, obviously. Everyone always asks about your cake.”
“Need,” I repeated slowly, because he had said the word need, he had said I need appetizers, I need ribs, as though these were requirements the universe was imposing on both of us equally rather than desires he had decided I would fulfill.
“It’s my fortieth, Talia.” His voice took on a wounded edge, the practiced injury of a man who has learned that hurt feelings are a currency. “Can’t I want something special? Especially from my wife?”
“And this,” I said, lifting the ice pack an inch off the cast and setting it back down, “is my broken leg.”
He glanced at the cast as if he had genuinely forgotten it was there. As if it had slipped his mind, in the week since he had sat beside me nodding at a doctor, that his wife could not stand for more than a few minutes without her leg shaking.
“You can sit while you prep,” he offered, as if this were a generous accommodation, as if he had thought hard about my comfort and arrived at a solution. “I’ll get you a chair in the kitchen. You won’t even have to be on your feet much.”
I put the ice pack down entirely and turned to face him as much as my leg would allow.
“I suggested,” I said, keeping my voice level, “a quiet dinner. You, me, and your mother. Something nice. I offered that days ago. And instead you invited thirty people without asking me a single question.”
“A quiet dinner sounds depressing,” he said, and there was real disdain in it, a curl of the lip. “It’s my fortieth birthday. I don’t want to spend it eating pot roast with my mom.”
I pushed the guest list back across the coffee table toward him.
“Then hire someone,” I said. “Order food. Or cut the guest list down to something that doesn’t require a full catering operation from a woman on crutches. Those are your options. Pick one.”
“Catering costs a fortune,” he said immediately.
“Then order prepared trays. The grocery store does whole spreads. It’s easy, it’s cheap, people love it.”
“I don’t want my birthday to look cheap,” he said, and there it was, laid bare, the actual heart of it. Not that he wanted good food. Not that he wanted a celebration. That he did not want it to look cheap, that his concern was the appearance of the thing in the eyes of thirty other people, and that he would rather that appearance be purchased with my broken body than with his own money.
I held his gaze for a long moment.
“You’d rather your injured wife cook all day,” I said quietly, “than let your friends see store-bought food.”
And he said the thing he always said, the thing he reached for whenever he wanted my effort without having to ask himself what it cost.
