the ground when she woke up on Thursday and went downstairs with her thick robe wrapped around her to put the coffee on. She could hear that Dean was up, so she went over and stood at the closed door. “Morning,” she said to it.
“Morning.” He sounded barely awake. It made her smile.
As she scooped coffee into the filter basket, the door opened. “You want coffee?” she asked.
“I do,” he said, coming into the kitchen and settling in one of her chairs. “I was at Kell’s way too late last night. My parents’ plane was delayed, so I didn’t get them over there until midnight.”
“They’re settled in?”
“Yeah. They have about ten years of small talk to catch up on. Five boys between them, I’m sure they’re keeping busy.”
“It was nice of them to come all this way.”
“I think my mom wanted to see for herself that I wasn’t doing quite as badly as she kept reading that I was. How about you? Are you excited? Turkey? Family? Football?”
She gave a little “hmm” that wasn’t quite a real laugh. “I don’t know about excited, but it’ll be good to see everybody. I didn’t do last holiday season.”
“Understandable,” he said, rubbing his shoulder.
She poured in the water, pressed the button, and listened to the coffeemaker go ffft-ffft-ffft while she put away the clean dishes. The plates she’d gotten when she got married, which she still used every day, were white with a neat row of little yellow flowers around the edges. They’d always felt to her like dollhouse furnishings. “I can always tell I’m in a bad mood when I get annoyed about these dishes,” she said.
“Oh, boy. Why?”
“They’re not my style. There’s something about registering for wedding presents that makes people think they’re going to turn into other people. Like I was going to turn into a little-yellow-flowers person when I got married.”
She put away the glasses, the flatware, the glass mixing bowl. They’d spent so much time sitting in her kitchen in the last two months that even with her back turned, she knew what Dean was doing. He was watching her work and listening to everything with a periodic narrowing of his eyes or tilt of his head. When she first met him, she’d thought he listened like a therapist, but now she thought he listened like a journalist. Everything she said, he treated like it ended in a semicolon. “I did not turn into a little-yellow-flowers person,” she added. “I wound up with all this stuff I didn’t pick, because there’s this wedding-industrial complex, and you have to buy ugly dishes and not-soft towels and people get angry if you don’t come up with pressure cookers and blenders and shrimp forks that you promise them you really, really want, and then you’re stuck with them. I’m stuck with these flower dishes for the rest of my life.”
“Why are you stuck with them?”
Evvie closed the dishwasher and turned back to him. “Oh…you know. I have them and everything. I mean, they’re fine.”
“But you’re not stuck with them.”
“Right, but I have them now.”
“They’re dishes.”
“Right.”
“So you could get other dishes.”
“I have these, though.”
“But you’re the only person who lives here.”
“You live here.”
He tossed his head back toward the apartment door. “I live there. You live here.” He tapped his index finger on the table. “You”—tap—“live”—tap—“here.” Tap. “They’re your fuckin’ dishes. You’re the person who eats off the dishes.”
“I know that.”
“So if you don’t like them, get new ones. Diane could give you a whole box of them for a buck fifty. She’d probably throw in a set of salad tongs.”
“Why are you mad about dishes?” she said, crossing her arms over her chest.
“Why are you?”
“I’m not!”
This silence was different. Ffft-ffft-ffft from the coffeemaker. “There’s a lot of things you don’t get to decide,” he finally said. “I think you can decide about this and you’re talking like you can’t.”
She thought about the too-delicate wineglasses, the undersized table, the too-big house, the big shower she ended up with in place of the tub she wanted, and whether she’d ever chosen to live here at all. “I’ll get different dishes. I promise.”
The coffeemaker beeped, and she filled two mugs and brought them to the table. “My father will be happy to spend some time with you. He likes baseball, but I’ve made him promise not to mention it, and if you’re curious about lobsters, he can tell you everything you want to know.”