He took the shaker, entirely missing the sarcasm, and set it back down without adding any salt, because of course he had no actual interest in salting the dip, he had only wanted to render a verdict.
“When are the ribs going to be ready?” he asked.
“They’re in the big pot,” I said. “The heavy one. I need you to move it to the stove for me. I can’t lift it on the crutches.”
He glanced toward the patio doors, toward the pool, toward the morning that was waiting for him.
“I can’t really disappear into the kitchen when I’m the one hosting, Tals,” he said. “People are going to start showing up.”
“Neither can I, apparently,” I said. “And yet here I am.”
He made an irritated sound and crossed the kitchen and lifted the pot and dropped it onto the stovetop hard enough that sauce slopped up over the rim and splattered across the counter I had just wiped down. Then he turned to leave.
“I need help plating all of this,” I said to his back. “There’s no way I can carry it all out. I need you to help me get it to the tables.”
“It’s my birthday,” he said, without turning around, the words landing like a door closing.
“And it’s my broken leg,” I said, for what felt like the hundredth time, into a room he was already leaving.
He grabbed a handful of chips from an open bag on his way out and disappeared through the patio doors, and a moment later I heard music start up outside, something loud and upbeat, and under it the first sounds of arriving guests, car doors and greetings and laughter, the party beginning without me, around me, on the other side of a wall of glass, while I sat in my desk chair in a wrecked kitchen with frosting under my nails and my leg on fire.
For the next hour, the kitchen was a thoroughfare. The door swung open and shut, open and shut, as guest after guest came through looking for things. Ice. Where’s the ice? Napkins? Is there a bottle opener? Do you have more cups? Each of them found me there, sitting in my chair, working, and most of them said something kind and vague, oh this all looks amazing, you must have been busy, and then took what they needed and went back out to the pool. And every single time that door swung open, in the gap before it closed, I could see out into the backyard, and every single time, I saw Donald. Laughing. Holding court. A drink in his hand, sunglasses pushed up on his head, the sun on his shoulders, entirely in his element, surrounded by people who thought he was wonderful.
Not once, in all those times the door opened, did I see him look toward the kitchen. Not once did he glance back to check on me. His wife was thirty feet away doing the labor of his entire celebration on a fractured leg, and he did not turn his head.
And then, through the open door, I heard a man’s voice call out over the music, “Talia, this food is amazing!”
And I heard Donald laugh, that easy generous laugh of his, and I heard him say, “She insisted on doing everything herself. You know how she gets when she has a project.”
I stopped slicing the tomatoes in my hands.
I heard another guest, a woman, say something warm and teasing, “She must really love you, making all this.”
And I heard my husband, my husband, say, “Oh, she loves hosting. Honestly, I couldn’t have stopped her if I tried.”
My hand tightened around the knife until my knuckles went white.
He had not simply abandoned me in the kitchen. That, I could almost have understood, could have filed under the long list of his ordinary selfishnesses. What he was doing out there was something else. He was rewriting it. He was standing in the sun telling thirty people a story in which I had chosen this, in which I had insisted, in which my broken-legged labor was a quirk of my personality, a hobby, a thing I did for love and could not be dissuaded from. He was taking the truth, which was that he had trapped me into this through a series of broken promises and manipulations, and he was inverting it in real time, turning himself into the indulgent husband who simply couldn’t rein in his enthusiastic wife. He was not just letting me suffer. He was building an audience that would remember me as having suffered voluntarily.
The kitchen door opened again. This time it was Misha, the wife of Donald’s oldest friend, Theo. She came in carrying an empty ice bucket, and she stopped just inside the door, and she looked, really looked, in a way none of the others had. She took in the counters covered in the wreckage of hours of cooking. She took in my desk chair. She took in the crutches leaning against the cabinet, and the flour on my shirt, and the sweat in my hair, and the cast on my leg propped up on a second chair.
“Why are you in here, Tals?” she asked. And there was something in the way she asked it, something that was not vague and was not kind-and-moving-on, but was direct, and a little bit angry on my behalf, that went straight through the wall I had built to get through the day.
“Because the food refused to cook itself,” I said, trying to make it light.
She did not smile. She set the ice bucket down on the counter.
“Donald told everyone you wanted to handle everything,” she said. “He said you turned down catering because you wanted to do it all yourself.”
I couldn’t answer. Something had closed up in my throat.
