You Deserve Each Other(22)

“He can’t change his name!” Deborah cries.

“Why not? Women do it all the time. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

Nicholas doesn’t dignify this with a retort, shaking his head at me. “That’s ridiculous,” his mother huffs. “He has a lovely last name. Not that yours isn’t … nice … but it’s not quite as special as Rose, now, is it? Dr. Rose is how he’s known in this community. He can’t change it now. And I’m sure he’ll want his children to carry on the family name, too.”

“We’re not having children,” I declare. “I’m barren. I lost my uterus in a Ponzi scheme.”

Nicholas throws his fork down with a clatter and stands. His business of moving around is loud, but not loud enough to disguise his mother’s startled cry. “It’s getting late.” He scowls at me. “Come on, Naomi.”

I wave a hand over my plate, feigning incomprehension. “But I haven’t finished yet.”

He grabs my hand. “Oh, you’re done.”

Nicholas all but throws me over his shoulder to get me out of that house. I can feel that my face is flushed with triumph and I know my eyes are bright and shining. A complete basket case. This is how I want to look in the picture we use for invitations. I wish I could fall down and laugh until my ribs crack, but he drags me out the door. Every muscle in his body is tense.

“Thanks for dinner!” I crow behind me. “Your adult son and I are so grateful!”

“Stop saying that,” he snaps, tugging my arm when I try to dig my heel into one of the flowers in the yard.

“Stop thanking them for dinner? That’s not very nice manners, Nicky.”

He and I suffer each other in silence on the car ride home, preparing our arguments in our heads. As soon as we pull up under the halo of our streetlight we get out and round the car, doors slamming with hurricane force.

“Don’t slam my car door.” As if he didn’t do the same.

He’s in love with his status symbol of a car and would probably marry it if it were socially acceptable. “Your car isn’t that good-looking and didn’t even win the J.D. Power award. I hope a bird craps on it every single day for all eternity.” Right on the windshield in front of his face, a big white splat.

“You’re just mad because you drive a woolly mammoth.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my car.”

“I’m sure it was in top form once. In 1999.”

Listen to this man’s privilege. He’s probably never driven a car that was more than two years old. “I buy what I can afford. Not all of us have rich parents who paid our tuition at swanky New England schools.”

“You want to go to college? Then go to college! Don’t punish me for being successful enough to buy a nice vehicle.”

And we’ve come to the crux of it. Naomi doesn’t have a college degree. Naomi doesn’t have a fancy car. How do we measure her value without these must-haves? I think about my parents saying I should have worked harder and applied for scholarships. I think about Nicholas’s remark at game night that I don’t need a job, and how no one believes in me. I wish I could go back in time and slam his car door twice.

I let his stride overtake mine so that I enter the house second; this way, I get to shut the door as hard as I want. The walls vibrate, floorboards shifting like tectonic plates. The ceiling fractures apart into a road map of jagged black lines. He and I square off, battle-ready, the room hazing crimson and pulsating with animosity.

“There’s nothing wrong with your gas gauge,” I tell him. It’s one of the meanest things I could ever say. “You can’t admit you didn’t notice your fuel was low.”

His eyes are crazed. At game night, I realized they change colors, and right now his eyes are the color of four horsemen heralding Armageddon, riding forth on beasts whipped from storm clouds. I can practically see the lightning flash, illuminating a rain of locusts. He drags a hand through his hair and messes it all up. A colorful wheel of insults cranks through his head and notches on one I didn’t expect.

“I don’t like your spaghetti. It tastes like nothing.”

Whatever. He’s just giving me an excuse not to cook. “I don’t like your dumb How to Train Your Dragon tie.”

He’s so proud of that tie, because it features Toothless the dragon. A clever pun when you’re in the teeth profession.

Rage burns a red rash across his cheekbones. “You take that back.”

I shrug, smiling inwardly. It’s a malicious smile all for myself, but I think he sees it because of the look he gives me.

“Sometimes I don’t know why I try with you.”

I agree. “Yeah, why do you?”

He combusts. “Giving me shit about my mother constantly, like I don’t already know how difficult she makes our lives. You harping on me, and throwing me to the wolves all the time, doesn’t make it any better! You’re not such a peach yourself, Naomi. You think there aren’t things about you that drive me insane? You think I don’t feel held back from realizing my true potential?”

His chest is heaving and he looks like he might run out the door and never come back. To make him even angrier, I let out a pop of laughter. “Please enlighten me, Nicholas, as to how I am holding you back.”