Ben didn't say she was cheating, didn't tell me to get angry, and didn't make a joke about marriage. He asked whether I had told her exactly that. I said I'd tried, and he asked what happened when I did. By the time I finished describing our conversations, the answer was hanging between us.
"You can't fix a conversation alone," he said.
I shrugged, because there was no easy response. On the other side of the fence, a neighbor's wind chimes clicked in the breeze. Inside, Natalie woke and started playing music while she got ready for another work function. I remember wishing I had the kind of problem a person could solve with a screwdriver.
The first major argument happened on a Thursday in November, almost a year after Natalie received the promotion. It was the evening of our wedding anniversary, and I had booked a table at the same little Italian restaurant where we'd celebrated our fifth year together. Nothing expensive or elaborate, just a place with red booths and an owner who still remembered that Natalie liked extra lemon in her water. I'd left work early, something my department rarely made easy, and changed into the shirt she had once told me made me look handsome.
At five thirty she texted that a client meeting had moved. At six fifteen, she said she wasn't sure when she'd be finished. At seven, the restaurant called to ask whether I still wanted to hold our table, and I found myself apologizing to a stranger for a situation I didn't understand. Natalie came home a little after ten, wearing a fitted jacket and smelling faintly of perfume that wasn't the one she'd left with that morning.
"I'm sorry," she said when she saw the flowers on the kitchen counter. "I completely lost track."
I could have accepted an honest apology. What I couldn't accept was how quickly she moved past it, putting her bag down and reaching for a bottle of water while the untouched reservation card sat beside the vase. I asked whether the client meeting had really lasted four hours. She said there had been drinks afterward, and I asked why she hadn't told me when the plans changed.
"Because I knew you'd make a thing out of it," she said.
"You missed our anniversary," I told her. "I think I'm allowed to be hurt."
"We can eat dinner another night. It's a date on a calendar, Randy. Stop making it sound like I committed a crime."
There it was again: my hurt turned into unreasonable behavior before she'd spent even a minute understanding it. I put the flowers in water, threw away the food I'd brought home from the restaurant, and went to bed while she watched television downstairs. When she finally came up, she kissed my shoulder as though that settled the matter. I lay awake for hours wondering when we had become so good at avoiding the truth.