“Take a guess.”
“Cheating, I hope. Make sure you leave evidence for me to find.”
His smile bends. Dries that way. I pick up a stack of junk mail and flip through Super Saver coupons, hmm-ing approvingly over discount items. My favorite soap is two for one this week. Frozen pizzas are five for ten dollars. Nicholas is going to strangle me with his Toothless tie.
“What are you making for dinner?” he asks. Not What are we having. It’s What are you making. The laugh is gone from his voice.
I don’t glance up. “It’s in the oven.”
I hear him pivot. There’s no timer on. No red light. He pulls down the oven door and it’s just as he suspected. “There’s nothing in here.”
I allow myself a tiny smile. I deserve it, after the day I’ve had. Not knowing what my fiancé is up to. Being let go from the best job I’ve ever had. The dreadful bangs that don’t look anything like Amélie’s. “That’s what I made. A whole feast of nothing, just for you.”
He grumbles all the way into his study. The lock clicks. Thirty minutes later, he emerges and stands at the front door.
“What are you doing?”
Nicholas casts me a disdainful look, like I’ve just asked the nosiest question. I hear a car door shut and seconds later, he’s got a box of pizza in his hands. Pizza for one. Well played, Nick.
He kicks the door shut and goes back to the study. I hurry to hide all the paper plates, hoping to inconvenience him, but he doesn’t care. He takes one of the good plates down from the cabinet and smiles at me as he rolls up a slice of pizza and eats half in one bite.
When he’s finished, he leaves his unused plate in the sink for me to wash.
Nicholas and I are one for two. I won Sunday, ruining the Roses’ dinner. He won Monday by making me think I was going to die, even if that wasn’t his intention. He won again yesterday by forcing me to smell his pizza through the wall and not offering to share.
It’s fitting that today happens to be Halloween, because I’m so focused on breaking this man’s spirit that my scary eyes are like those little electricity balls in science centers that make your hair floof when you touch them. I’m going to zap everybody in a fifty-foot radius.
When a Jeep Grand Cherokee sidles into Nicholas’s parking spot, I’m settled on the porch, clutching a plastic cauldron of goodies for trick-or-treaters. Nicholas climbs out of the Jeep and wears a smug expression as he trots up the walkway. He’s hoping I’ll ask what the hell he’s up to, but I’m committed to figuring it out on my own. Last night I found his keys and noticed that the Maserati fob was missing. I plugged an unfamiliar key into the Jeep experimentally and sure enough, it’s Nicholas’s. What a bizarre purchase for him. According to the Carfax in the glove compartment, the Jeep’s not even new—it’s like ten years old and has had two previous owners. Harold would be rolling in his tanning bed.
Where’s the Maserati? I have no idea. I’m dying to know but I would rather lick a fiberglass lollipop than ask and give him the satisfaction of not telling me.
There are a couple things amiss about Nicholas today. For one, he’s wearing his old glasses instead of his contacts. I like the glasses because they fit his face well and they make him seem sophisticated and down-to-earth at the same time. Whenever I tell him this, he scrunches up his nose and shakes his head self-consciously.
Also, he’s wearing jeans and sneakers, which are outlawed at Rise and Smile.
“Skipped work again?” I surmise.
He just pats me on the head and skirts around to go inside the house. Cool. I have no idea what my fiancé has spent the past couple of days doing. He’s lording his secrets over me like a Scrooge. This is a totally normal, functional relationship we’re in.
I think about Seth and a dental hygienist going at it in the back of his car and my eyes narrow to slits.
Nicholas joins me on the front porch right as the trick-or-treaters start to arrive and doesn’t say a single word in relation to my latest effort to tick him off: I’ve added his business card to every single Ziploc bag of candy with the highest sugar content I could find. Pixy Stix. Sour Patch Kids. Candy corn. Fun Dip.
The concept of a dentist handing out teeth-rotting substances to children will look vulgar to the parents rummaging through their kids’ bags and buckets tonight. What a gross move, they’ll mutter. Turpin Family Dentistry, here I come.
But Nicholas isn’t fazed as he passes candy into tiny hands, bowing to the princesses and pretending to be scared of the monsters. Maybe he doesn’t notice the business cards because he’s too busy remembering a romp in his back seat with a dental hygienist. In my mind she looks like the hot nurse from that old Blink-182 album cover.
I look at him and think I’ll kill you. It shows on my face.
He raises his eyebrows and smiles. I recognize it straight away as his polite liar smile, the one he puts on when we visit my parents twice a year and they ask how well we’re liking living in sin. The smile he gives my brother when Aaron corners him for a presentation of Please Give Me Rent Money; I’ve Spent My Paycheck On Another PlayStation. The smile he gives my sister, Kelly, when she stands too close and stares too long, winding a lock of hair around her finger in a way she imagines is seductive.
I want to hiss Where were you all day. I grind my teeth together to keep the words trapped. Don’t ask, don’t ask, don’t ask. It’s what he’s waiting for, lounging in jeans and glasses, hands interlocked behind his head. That’s the beginning and end of his focus right now: Ask, ask, ask. I hear the telepathic chant.
Children come and go in thin herds, makeup smeared, half their costumes covered up with coats and hats. The temperature drops with the sun, and I go inside to get myself a throw blanket. As I pass him, traces of some aroma I’ve smelled before greet me. The answer to my déjà vu sits in a locked drawer, just vague and faded enough that I can’t pinpoint where I’ve come across it in the past. I wouldn’t ask him even if he tortured me. When I return, he exhales loudly, then goes inside for his own blanket.
What’d you do with the Maserati.
Where in the hell have you been.
We ignore each other. I take keen stock of every virile man who happens by and wonder what else is out there. I’m surely settling.
I think maybe I’ve won this round, because I’ve decided on my own to hand out candy instead of asking him if he wanted to go to one of his friends’ parties. But he’s so at peace right here next to me in his chair, telling every kid he loves their costume and increasing the odds that their parents will pay him to drill holes in their small mouths, that you’d think this was his plan instead of mine. He has a way of making me feel like that, like I’m just tagging along.
“I have a surprise for you,” he says finally. I look over to see that his eyes are closed. The tips of his ears and nose are red from the cold, and I watch his Adam’s apple work down a swallow.
He’s going to say something nasty next, so I don’t reply.
“Did you hear me?”
“Mm-hmm.” I stand up. I don’t want to hear what his surprise is. It’s a horse head in the sheets. He’s put asbestos in the sandwich I’m taking to work with me tomorrow. He’s gotten the dental hygienist pregnant. He’s breaking up with me. I’ve won, but he’s still kicking me out of the house. I have five minutes to gather my things before he calls the police.