Растущий лес. Владимир Мясоедов

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      Until he asks, “Do you want your tomato?”

      I watch him poke his fork into it without waiting for a reply.

      He has some nerve! Aside from the fact that he just sidestepped the issue at hand, everybody knows the tomato is the best part of a salad, and that restaurants and caterers are for some reason notoriously skimpy with them.

      Then again, maybe everybody doesn’t know. Or care.

      But I do, and I do. It’s like tomatoes are some rare, expensive delicacy not to be squandered. When I make a salad, I cut up a couple of them so I can have some in every bite. But perhaps I’m alone in my passion. Maybe most people don’t like tomatoes, and they’re only in a salad for a splash of color to liven up the aesthetic.

      Who knows?

      Who cares?

      Me. I care. Because the fact that Jack would blatantly help himself to my lone tomato just shows what kind of human being he is.

      “I thought you had no appetite,” I manage to spit out between clenched jaws.

      “It came back. Can I have your cucumber?”

      It, too, is already on his fork, en route to his mouth.

      “Take the whole thing.” I shove the salad bowl in his direction.

      “Don’t you want it?”

      “I lost my appetite.”

      He laughs, with nary a care in the world, damn him.

      “Really, Trace? Did you kiss the bride, too?”

      No. I just realized I’ll never become one if I stay with you.

      But I don’t say it.

      What’s the use?

      It’s all out there on the table. Now all I can think is that if you love something, you’re supposed to set it free. If it comes back to you, it’s yours. If it doesn’t, it never will…or never was. Or whatever.

      Goodbye, Jack, I think sadly, watching him gobble the rest of my salad as though he hasn’t a care in the world.

      Chapter 3

      Call me a hypocrite, but in the broad light of Sunday morning, the major confrontation Jack and I had at Mike’s wedding doesn’t seem quite so dramatic.

      For one thing, Jack was apparently too drunk to even realize we’d had a major confrontation, which goes a long way toward diffusing any post-fight tension. Thus, it was particularly hard for me to stay angry at him, especially when he requested that the band play “Brown Eyed Girl” and dedicate it to me.

      I guess he was oblivious to the fact that he’d been set free, because he asked me to dance. What could I do but say yes?

      I guess I could have said no. But when “Brown Eyed Girl” is playing and it’s been dedicated to you and you happen to be a brown-eyed girl, well, you get your ass out on the floor and you boogie.

      At least, I fully intended to boogie. But for some reason, Jack seemed to think that particular song called for a slow dance.

      If you’ve ever tried to stay angry at somebody while slow dancing with them to “Brown Eyed Girl” at a wedding—and really, who hasn’t?—then you’ll know why I wound up more or less forgiving the poor lug. At least, for the duration of the night—which, in the end, actually turned out to be kind of fun.

      The band was great, the food, when I recovered my appetite, was decent, and Mike and Dianne eventually made a reappearance. They had apparently reconciled, although she did seem to take perverse satisfaction in smushing the cake in his face when she fed it to him.

      I found myself thinking that I would never smush the cake in my groom’s face when I got married; then remembered that I probably wasn’t going to be getting married.

      Not to Jack, anyway. Not unless I was willing to wait for years. Which I wasn’t.

      But I couldn’t dwell on that all night, could I?

      Sure I could. And I guess, in the end, I did.

      Jack slept the entire drive home while I listened to the day’s news over and over again on 1010 WINS, the only radio station I could get on the car’s crappy stereo without static, and tried not to hate him.

      Now, here it is, Sunday morning, and Sleeping Beauty is still blissfully snoring in the next room.

      Normally, I love our cozy apartment, especially on mornings when the sun is streaming in the window and we don’t have to be back at our desks for forty-eight more hours.

      But today, the place seems a little too…Ikea. Probably because that’s where all our furniture comes from. Jack really likes that Scandinavian, boxy, functional style. My taste is more cottage chic.

      Since the apartment is strictly boxy/functional without a hint of cottage, let alone chic, his taste won. I was so grateful to be jointly buying anything more significant than dinner that I didn’t put up much of a fight. Now here I am, over a year later, feeling like I should change my name to Helga and learn to make pepperkaker so I won’t clash with the decor.

      Back when we moved in, the apartment seemed spacious compared to my old studio…at least for the first five minutes. Today, it seems positively claustrophobic. Probably because one can cross the living room in three giant steps, the bedroom in two, and touch all three kitchen walls with one’s fingertips by standing on the center parquet tile.

      Plus, the place is cluttered.

      Everywhere I look, there are piles of stuff. Not just his; it’s my stuff, too. But his is more annoying.

      Like the twelve novels he’s in the middle of reading, and the stacks of freebie magazines he gets as a media supervisor and is definitely going to read as soon as he finishes the twelve novels.

      Then there are the suit jackets draped over the backs of every chair. All right, we only have two chairs, but both are draped in suit jackets.

      Don’t even get me started on the shoes, the CDs and DVDs, the stuff that comes out of Jack’s pockets every time he comes home.

      It’s not like I’m FlyLady, or Will, but at least I’m neater than Jack, and his clutter is starting to bug me. It’s so tempting to start tossing it, which, don’t worry, I won’t do, because Will once threw away a magazine I was reading when I set it down to go to the bathroom. I’m serious; in the space of time it took me to unzip, sit, pee, zip and wash, he not only threw it into the garbage, but carried the garbage down the hall and dumped it into the garbage chute. He didn’t do it on purpose, he said, seeming shocked by my disbelief.

      Yeah, and he didn’t do Esme Spencer, his summer-stock costar, on purpose, either.

      Anyway, here I am, curled up on the couch with my second cup of coffee, trying to read the Metro section of the Times while pondering my non-future with clutterholic, marriagephobic Jack, when the phone rings.

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