Page 10 of The Devil You Know
“I got yelled at by Mila,” I tell him.
Ben settles back down into his chair. “For what?”
“The nightgown. I told you she’d go crazy over that.”
He raises his eyebrows. “Seriously? She yelled at you because Leah was wearing a nightgown?”
“Itoldyou she’d freak out.”
“Mila is completely nuts,” he mutters. “Why do we send Leah there? We should have sent her to that other place. The one with the gourmet lunches. Where they teach kids Japanese.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
I notice that Ben is doing a crossword puzzle on his computer. He’s a crossword puzzle addict. Back before we had Leah, we used to spend our Sunday afternoons at Starbucks, drinking coffee and doing crossword puzzlesfrom theNew York Timeson his laptop. For those of you who don’t know aboutNew York Timescrossword puzzles, they get harder as the week goes on. So the Monday puzzle is fairly easy, whereas the Sunday puzzle is damn near impossible.
Ben can do the Sunday puzzles. He’s the Crossword Puzzle Master. But he used to save the earlier week puzzles for the two of us to do together at Starbucks. I remember shoving him out of the way to take over the computer because he would fill in the blanks too quickly—he would tease me for being too slow.
After months of doing crosswords, one Sunday we decided to write our own. We learned something that day. As Ben said, “Writing a crossword puzzle is freakinghard!” It really is.
Even though crossword puzzles are something that Ben has always done and will likely always do, it irritates me to see him doing it now. I mean, I’ve been working all day and then I picked up Leah (and got yelled at because of him). And what has he been doing? Sitting here in his underwear, eating peanut butter, and doing crossword puzzles.
“Did you put away the dishes in the dishwasher?” I ask him.
He lifts his brown eyes from the crossword puzzle. “No. I’ve been working all day.”
“You’re not workingnow.”
“I’m taking a break.”
I stare at him.
“Iam.” He frowns at me. “You know, just because I’m home all day, that doesn’t mean I’m not working hard. You can’t expect me to do chores around the house just because I’m here. Doyoudo dishes while you’re working?”
No. But I did clean about three examining rooms.
“I’m just saying,” I mutter, “it would be nice if when I get home after a long day of work, the dishes would be put away. I’m the one who cooks, so you should handle the dishes.”
He rolls his eyes. “I’ll do it later, okay?”
“When?”
“I don’t know.Later.”
“But I need the dishesnow.”
“So take out the dishes you need and I’ll put away the rest.”
“Never mind,” I say. “I’ll just do it myself.”
I stomp over to the kitchen, where I fling open the dishwasher. Ben and I never seemed to fight over things like the dishwasher when we first got married. I’m not sure why because we obviously used dishes back then. But somehow, in the early days of our marriage, we were like a well-oiled dishwashing unit, in which I would load up the dishwasher and he’d empty it without coaxing. Somehowduring Leah’s first year of life, our dishwashing unit disintegrated.
I remember when Leah was about ten months old, I exploded at Ben because I could not find one even one of those plastic multicolored baby spoons that was actually clean. And that was no small feat, considering we owned no less than two million of those spoons. (I was constantly finding them in the crevices of the couch, caked with dried mashed peach cobbler.) Ben’s excuse was always something along the lines of, “I was about to do it.”
That’s his excuse for everything. He’s constantly on the precipice of doing every single chore in the house. Meanwhile, how am I supposed to feed my family with zero clean dishes?
After a few minutes of putting dishes away, making as much noise as I can possibly manage, Leah comes into the kitchen to watch.
“Why are you being so noisy, Mommy?” she wants to know.
