The Slap Two Days After Our Wedding
I cooked anyway. I want to be honest about that, because it matters to the rest of this story. I did not storm in refusing to lift a finger. I made chicken, mashed the yukon golds extra buttery exactly as instructed, steamed green beans, and set two plates at our dining table, the one Dustin and I had picked out together, a little scratched already from the movers.
“Dinner’s ready,” I said, loud enough to carry over the television.
Kayla waved one hand without turning around. “Bring it here.”
I stood there a second, the plate warm in my hands, and something old and stubborn in me simply would not do it. “You can eat at the table,” I said. “It’s right there.”
The room went quiet except for the television, still laughing at its own jokes.
Dustin’s chair scraped back so fast I felt it before I understood what was happening. “What did you just say?”
“I said she can eat at the table,” I told him. “I am not going to carry dinner to someone glued to the TV like I’m hired help.”
Kayla finally turned her head, her face twisting into something ugly and almost delighted. “Wow. Two days in and she already thinks she owns the place.”
Dustin crossed the kitchen fast enough that I stepped back out of pure instinct, some animal part of my brain registering danger before my mind caught up.
“Apologize,” he said.
“No,” I said.
His hand hit my face before I even saw him move. I felt it more than heard it at first, a white flash at the edge of my vision, my ear ringing, the whole kitchen going strangely silent except for the television’s laughter, which did not stop, which kept going exactly as if nothing in the world had just changed. For one long second nobody moved. Kayla’s mouth hung slightly open. Dustin stood there breathing hard, his hand still half raised, like he was as surprised by it as I was.
Then something in me that had stayed quiet my whole life stopped being quiet.
I shoved the plate off the counter. It hit the tile and broke into three jagged pieces, chicken and green beans sliding everywhere, the bowl of potatoes toppling and spilling across the floor between us. I looked my husband of two days directly in the eye, my cheek already starting to throb, and I said the only true thing I had in me at that moment.
“You just made the biggest mistake of your life.”
He laughed. It was not a real laugh, more a short, disbelieving bark, the laugh of a man who plainly did not think the woman standing in front of him had any ground to stand on. Kayla laughed too, from the couch, pulling her blanket up a little higher, as if I were the unreasonable one, the hysterical bride who couldn’t take a joke, as if the two of them had already agreed, somewhere along the way, exactly how small I was supposed to make myself in that house.