I haven’t had any reason to go out to the warehouse for a while,” said Dean. “Not for a couple of months, anyway.”
“Well, I needed to check over some shit this morning,” said Cary.
Dean nodded. “What kind of shit?”
“Invoices that were misnumbered. A spares order for that new Pemex facility. Same problem we had with Bangalore last month, remember?”
“Of course,” said Dean. “Rajiv wanted to beat the hell out of me.”
“Well, different client, same clusterfuck. I’m telling you, Bittler’s doing some weird shit.”
“All appears yellow to the jaundiced eye,” said Dean.
“Jaundice didn’t re-key all the warehouse locks without telling anyone,” retorted Cary.
That got Dean’s attention. “What?”
“I went out there this morning,” Cary said. “Couldn’t get in the damn place. Setsuko says Bittler’s got the only set of new keys. And he’s conveniently in Houston all week. What the fuck, right?”
Dean thought this over.
“Come on,” said Cary. “Your wife should do some investigative reporting, here… 60 Minutes the guy a little. Right after she figures out who this arsonist is—”
“What arsonist?” asked my husband, turning toward me.
“Um,” I said, swallowing audibly. “The guy in my second article.”
Dean started shredding little bits off the edge of his napkin. “I thought you were writing about restaurants.”
I looked down at the table. “I got an extra assignment.”
“That you conveniently neglected to mention this morning?”
“Yeah, I was totally hiding it from you, Dean,” I said, crossing my arms.
Well, technically I had been, of course, but this whole cranky-husband-bullshit thing was starting to piss me off.
He looked up at me, having now destroyed his entire napkin.
I stared right back. I mean, when had he decided our marriage was a dictatorship, for fuck’s sake?
“Madeline’s really talented,” said Cary, smiling at me. “You have to read her stuff. It’s outstanding.”
“No,” said Dean. “Not outstanding. By any stretch of the imagination.”
Cary’s eyes widened and he turned toward Dean, but my husband was focused on me.
“Not even acceptable,” Dean continued, frostier with each syllable.
“Acceptable to whom?” I asked, looking him straight in the eye.
He leaned forward, nostrils flared just a bit. “Jesus Christ, Bunny, what the hell were you thinking?”
“What the hell do you think I was thinking? I’ve finally got a job again, doing what I’m good at. I’m making a little money, trying to do my bit for the familial finances.”
Okay, so not exactly in any big fat profitable way, yet, but still…
“Goddamn it,” said Dean. “You’re a mother now. Haven’t you put us both through enough of this shit already?”
Both my hands were clenched into fists now. “Enough of what shit, specifically?”
“Your morbid fascination with violence and mayhem. Your goddamn death wish.”
“I do not have a death wish.”
“Really?” He pursed his lips into an annoying smirk that made me want to kick him, under the table. “Let’s see… there’s the guy who was going to light you on fire, the woman who tried to push you off the fourth-story roof, oh… and the gang boys in Queens who were planning to shoot you, after they’d managed to run you over with a car and break your arm during a homicide investigation. None of that qualifies as a flirtation with your own mortality?”
“None of which I sought out,” I said. “Or even instigated. I mean, if anything, I have a life wish. Otherwise I wouldn’t still be here—”
Cary’s head swiveled back and forth between us, following these volleys.
“And now you’re jumping right back into it,” said Dean. “Putting yourself at risk. Putting our children at risk. Our daughters.”
“I am not,” I said, starting to tear up. “I am not.”
But my gut went cold with fear at what he was suggesting, like I’d just choked down an entire tray of ice, and the tray—the old aluminum kind with a ratchet-lever on one end to tilt the cubes out of their tinny rectangular partitions.
Hadn’t I thought the exact same thing myself, when I assured McNally the first day we met that I had no interest in anything other than restaurant pieces?
Yes. Of course I had.
“You need to give up this writing shit,” said my husband.
Cary blanched, turning toward me with such a tenderly crinkle-browed faceful of sympathy that I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to hug him or crawl out of the restaurant in shame.
Yes, Dean had been tantrummy for the last couple of months. But this was different. He’d never bullied me in front of a friend before, never in public.
I surveyed him through narrowed eyes: the pompous jut of his chin, the moue of entitlement twisting the corners of his mouth.
And suddenly I felt like I’d x-rayed through to what this was really about.
Not about danger for me, not even concern for the girls’ safety… at least not at the root of it all.
My father would’ve laughed, summarizing with the Marine Corps’s unofficial motto: Shit flows downhill.
Dean was at other people’s beck and call all day, every day. Bittler and the rest of them.
“Working for wages,” his father said, every time we visited the family farm—a mere three words to dismiss his son’s every achievement, out in the world.
Damn right it all comes downhill, and here I am, up to my waist.
“You need to give up this writing shit, Madeline,” Dean said again. “You’ve never made any money at it, and I want a homemaker.”
I was just about to tell him to get royally fucked and rot in hell when India knocked his water all over the table and the waitress arrived with our lunch.