My mother-in-law pulled a ruler out of her purse.
Not a small one. A full twelve-inch wooden ruler, the kind they used to give out in elementary school. She marched past me into my kitchen, opened my spice cabinet, and started measuring the space between the jars.
“Linda,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“Paprika is a quarter inch out of line,” she said. “And your cumin is facing backward. How do you expect to find anything?”
“I usually just look at the jar.”
She turned and gave me the look. The one that said I’d been raised by wolves.
“Sarah,” she said, very slowly, the way you’d talk to a toddler. “A woman’s kitchen tells the world who she is.”
I stood there in my own kitchen, still holding my laptop bag, still wearing the blazer I’d worn to a three-hour client presentation, and watched my mother-in-law turn my cumin around.
That was a Tuesday.
By Friday, I had a plan.
My name is Sarah. I’m twenty-eight. I’m a marketing manager for a mid-sized company that makes outdoor gear. I manage a team of six, two budgets, and roughly four hundred emails a day.
My husband, Marcus, is thirty. He’s a financial analyst at a bank downtown. He’s smart, funny, and very good with numbers. He can explain the stock market to you in a way that makes it sound like a good mystery novel.
He cannot, as I would eventually discover, identify a toilet brush.
We met at a friend’s wedding four years ago. He spilled champagne on my shoes during the toast, and instead of just apologizing, he got down on his knees in the middle of the reception and tried to dry them with a cocktail napkin while everyone watched. I laughed so hard I snorted. He looked up at me from the floor and said, “Was that a snort?”
“No,” I said.
“That was definitely a snort.”
We got married eighteen months later.
