“We’re all here waiting for you to make breakfast. Hurry up!”
I read the text message standing in the cereal aisle of the grocery store, holding a box of oatmeal in one hand and my phone in the other.
It was from my mother-in-law, Linda.
There was a picture attached. Our living room. Our couch, with Linda sitting in the middle of it with her feet up on our coffee table. Two kids on the floor in front of the TV. A man’s legs stretched out on our armchair. Suitcases. A lot of suitcases.
I counted the people in the picture. Then I counted again.
Six people were apparently sitting in my apartment, waiting for me to feed them.
I put the oatmeal back on the shelf and called my husband.
He picked up on the fifth ring. He sounded out of breath.
“Patrick,” I said. “Why is your mother in our apartment?”
“Because they’re visiting,” he said. “I told you.”
“And I told you we didn’t have room!”
There was a grunting sound, like he was lifting something heavy. Somebody laughed in the background. A kid yelled.
“Clarissa, I’m carrying luggage right now,” he said. “Can we talk about this later?”
He hung up.
I stood there in the cereal aisle, staring at my phone.
Then I left my shopping cart half-full in the middle of the aisle, with a gallon of milk and a bag of apples and two cans of soup still in it, and I walked out to my car.
By the next evening, Patrick would be the one standing in our kitchen, shouting and demanding answers.
And he’d have no idea how much his own words had cost him.
My name is Clarissa. I’m thirty-four years old.
I’ve been married to Patrick for six years.
We met at a friend’s wedding. He was a groomsman. I was a guest who didn’t know anybody except the bride. He asked me to dance during the slow song, and he stepped on my foot twice and apologized so many times that I started laughing, and then he started laughing, and we never stopped talking for the rest of the night.
He was funny and warm and a little nervous. He was close to his family. He talked about his mother like she was the sun.
I thought that was sweet.
I thought a man who loved his mother that much would know how to love a wife.
We live in a one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a brick building on the east side of town.
It’s small. There’s no other way to say it. The living room fits a couch, an armchair, a coffee table, and a TV, and if you put anything else in there, you have to walk sideways. The kitchen is a narrow hallway with a stove at one end and a refrigerator at the other. The bedroom fits our bed and one dresser and that’s it. If I want to open the closet door, Patrick has to move his feet.
We’ve lived there for four years.
We’ve been saving for something bigger for almost two of them. A two-bedroom. Maybe even a little house someday, with a yard. We had a joint savings account at our credit union. Every month, we each put in what we could. Patrick put in more than me, because he makes more than me. He’s an operations manager at a shipping company.
We had an agreement. We’d made it at the kitchen table, the day we opened the account. Anything over a hundred dollars from that account, we’d talk about first. Both of us. Together.
It was a good agreement. We’d never broken it.
But lately, Patrick seemed more interested in impressing his family than in moving.
He’d paid for his brother Kevin’s birthday dinner at a steakhouse in March. He’d bought his mother a new tablet for Mother’s Day, the expensive kind, because she said hers was too slow. He’d lent Kevin four hundred dollars in June when Kevin’s car broke down.
None of it came out of our savings. I’ll give him that. It came out of his paycheck.
But it was money that wasn’t going into our savings. And every time I brought it up, he’d say the same thing.
“They’re my family, Clarissa.”
I work at a dental office. I’m the office manager. I handle the scheduling and the billing and the insurance companies and the patients who show up forty minutes late and want to be seen right away. I’m good at solving problems. Quickly. Calmly. That’s my whole job.
But at home, I let things slide.
Because Patrick hated disappointing his mother.
And I hated watching him hate it.
Two days before that text message in the cereal aisle, Patrick came home from work on a Thursday night and announced it.
I was sitting at the little kitchen table eating leftover pasta. He came in, dropped his keys on the counter, and opened the refrigerator.
“So my parents are coming this weekend,” he said, with his head in the refrigerator.
“Okay,” I said. “That’s nice. Are they staying at that hotel by the highway again?”
“And Kevin and Kylie,” he said. “And the kids.”
I put my fork down.
“All six of them?”
“Mom says they need a break from their place,” he said. He came out of the refrigerator with a beer. “Kevin’s having some work done on his house. And Mom and Dad want to see everybody.”
“Patrick,” I said. “Where is everyone supposed to sleep?”
He shrugged. He opened the beer.
“We’ll figure it out,” he said.
I looked at him.
“Did you ask me,” I said slowly, “before you invited them?”
He took a drink of his beer.
“I already told them yes,” he said.
I put down my coffee.
“Then call them back,” I said. “Tell them we don’t have room. Tell them there’s a Hampton Inn ten minutes from here. I’ll even look up the number for them.”
His face changed. That look he gets. Like I’ve said something unreasonable. Like I’ve insulted somebody.
“Don’t start,” he said. “They’re my family.”
“And I’m your wife,” I said. “I live here too. This is my home too.”
He didn’t answer.
He just picked up his beer, walked into the living room, and turned on the television.
I sat at the kitchen table for a long time, looking at my cold pasta. 