By the time we reached the checkout lane, my husband was red in the face, his voice echoing under the fluorescent lights, and a teenage cashier was pretending very hard not to make eye contact with any of us. “You want my mom to pay for groceries?” Daniel snapped, loud enough for the woman unloading dog food in the next lane to turn her head. I stood there with both hands resting lightly on the shopping cart handle and smiled the kind of smile people use when they’ve already crossed some invisible threshold and there’s no point in pretending they haven’t.
The cart between us was full of things I had not chosen.
Vacuum-sealed smoked salmon. Imported French cheese wrapped in waxed paper.
A bottle of olive oil that cost more than the shoes I wore to mow the lawn. Two bottles of aged balsamic vinegar that looked like they belonged in a locked case.
Hand-rolled chocolate truffles in a gold box.
A tin of something Patricia had described as “proper sardines” in a tone usually reserved for fine jewelry. And, like a jeweled crown perched among the milk and bread and eggs, a small black-lidded jar of caviar. Actual caviar.
My mother-in-law, Patricia, stood at the end of the belt with her reading glasses balanced halfway down her nose and her silk blouse crisp as a magazine page.
She looked serenely wounded, which was her best look. Patricia could make indignation resemble virtue in a way I had spent six years learning not to underestimate.
The cashier cleared her throat and looked down at the screen. The total glowed there in big digital numbers.
One thousand and twelve dollars and forty-six cents.
My actual groceries—the chicken thighs, sweet potatoes, Greek yogurt, coffee, olive oil I used for cooking, birthday card for my coworker Renata, a sack of onions, dishwasher pods—made up maybe a hundred and twenty dollars of that total, and even that felt generous. I had my card in my hand. I had been holding it for almost a minute.
Then I slipped it back into my wallet.
“I’ll pay for my items,” I said, and my voice came out calm, which seemed to make Daniel even angrier. “Patricia can pay for hers.”
The silence that followed lasted maybe two seconds.
Then Daniel turned to me as if I had slapped him. “What?”
Patricia’s fingers, already moving toward her purse with the unhurried confidence of a woman expecting to be indulged, stopped midair.
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