Before Losing the Part That Would Have Stayed
The coffee hit my face before I understood we were fighting. One moment I was at the counter sliding scrambled eggs onto two plates, the radio on low, the kind of ordinary Tuesday morning that asks nothing of you. The next, a surge of burning liquid struck my right cheek, chin, and neck with such force and heat that I cried out and dropped the spatula, my hand flying up as if I could pull the pain back off my skin.
The mug hit the cabinet near the sink and broke into three pieces. Dark coffee ran in long streams down the white cabinet fronts and pooled on the tile. I turned around.
Ryan was still standing on the other side of the kitchen island with his arm extended, the motion not quite finished. He did not look horrified by what he had done. He looked like a man who had made a reasonable point and was waiting for it to be acknowledged.
“All this,” he said, “because I asked you for one simple thing.”
Nicole was sitting at the table. She had arrived at our townhouse at seven-thirty that morning, unannounced, her designer bag in her lap and a fidgeting quality about her that I had learned, over four years of being her brother’s wife, meant she needed something and had already decided she was going to get it. She had asked Ryan in a low voice whether he had talked to me yet.
I had heard it from the hallway. Ten minutes of careful conversation later I understood what she wanted, and ten minutes after that I had said no, and ten minutes after that I was standing at the kitchen counter with my face burning. Nicole’s mouth was open slightly.
She was looking at the broken mug and the coffee on the cabinets and her brother’s still-extended arm. She said nothing. Not a word to me.
Not a word of shock or protest or even the most basic human acknowledgment that something had just happened that should not have happened. Ryan lowered his arm and pointed at me. “She’ll come to the house later.
Give her your things or get out.”
I pressed the nearest dish towel against my cheek and felt the heat of the fabric against the heat of my skin. “My things,” I said, and my voice was shaking in a way I was not fully in control of yet. “You mean my credit card.
My laptop. My jewelry. The watch my mother left me.”
Ryan pulled a chair out from the table and sat down as though this were a meeting he was chairing.
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