The Slap Two Days After Our Wedding

Monday morning I went back to work. I manage the front office at Driscoll Orthodontics, a job I love, mostly because Dr. Driscoll lets me run things my own way and trusts me with the books. I remember standing at my desk at lunch, still wearing my engagement ring and my wedding band both, still catching myself smiling at nothing, when my phone buzzed with a text from Dustin. A grocery list. Not a long one, just a few things, but at the bottom he’d added, make sure you get the yukon golds, Kayla likes her potatoes extra buttery.

I did not think much of it at the time. I bought the yukon golds.

He called twice more that afternoon, both times to remind me about the potatoes, like I might have forgotten in the ninety minutes since the text. I laughed about it with my coworker Robin, who said something about new husbands being nervous the first week, trying too hard to make everything perfect. I wanted to believe that was all it was.

I got home a little after six, my feet aching in the flats I’d worn to work, still in the blouse I’d put on that morning without thinking much about it, because two days earlier I had been a bride and now I was simply a wife on a Monday, and the strangeness of that gap had not worn off yet. I could hear the television before I even got the door open, some reality show blaring loud enough to carry through the screen, canned laughter rolling out into the driveway.

Inside, the sink was full of dishes that had clearly been sitting since breakfast. Empty soda cans stood in a little cluster on the coffee table. Kayla was curled under a blanket on the couch, scrolling her phone, laughing at whatever was on the screen, her bare feet propped on a cushion I had picked out myself three weeks earlier at a home goods store, feeling, at the time, like the luckiest woman in Kansas.

Dustin stood near the kitchen counter with his arms folded, the posture of a man waiting on something he felt entitled to. “You’re late,” he said, before I’d even set my purse down.

“It’s six fifteen,” I said. “Traffic on the highway bypass.”

Kayla did not look away from the television. “I’m starving,” she said, to the room in general, to nobody, the way you’d announce the weather.