Page 62 of The Devil You Know
He doesn’t answer.
“Ben!” I say sharply. He looks up, like he’s surprised I’m in the room. “How about Chinese food tonight?”
“From where?”
“Chow’s?” In the entire year we’ve lived here, we have never once gotten Chinese food from a place besides Chow’s.
Ben groans. “Yeah, okay. Fine.”
I go to the kitchen and start fishing around in the drawer where we keep the fifty-thousand menus that we’ve collected, despite the fact that we only order takeout from like four places. “What do you want from Chow’s?”
“Christ, I don’t know.”
“How about chicken lo mein? You like that.”
“Yeah,” he snorts. “From adecentChinese restaurant. InManhattan.”
I let the comment slide. I don’t feel like having the “all the food in Long Island sucks” conversation right now.
“Maybe I’ll get chicken with broccoli,” he says. “They can’t mess that uptoobadly, right?”
“You know, Chow’s is actually not that bad,” I say. “I like their food.”
Ben shakes his head at me. “Sometimes I don’t even know who you are anymore.”
He says it like he’s kidding, but honestly, I wonder.
We eat the food with Dora on the television. Leah is eating her portion of the meal (white rice—that’s it… and God help us if a tiny droplet of sauce gets on her rice) while watching television. I’m sitting next to Leah, but I’m actually surfing the web with my phone. And Ben has his plate next to him and his laptop on his lap, killing all his sperm. Not that either of us have been interested in doing anything lately that would require the use of sperm.
I start typing an email on my phone, but I notice that the keyboard doesn’t automatically pop up. I switch windows and then go back to the email, but it’s still happening. Damn it.
I power down my phone and turn it on again, but it’s still not working right. That’s the only trick I know and now I’m out of ideas.
“Ben,” I say.
He doesn’t look up. “Yeah?”
“My phone is doing something weird.” I hold it up, even though he’s too far away to actually see the screen. “The keyboard won’t come up. I tried restarting it, but it’s still not working.”
Ben’s eyes are still pinned at his own computer screen. “Okay.”
I raise my eyebrows at him. “Can you fix it for me?”
Now I’ve got his attention. He lifts his brown eyes from the screen—he looks tired. “And you can’t fix it yourself because…?”
“I don’t know how to fix this!”
“AndIdo?”
I glare at him. “Ben, you write apps for smartphones. That’s yourjob.”
“Yeah, but you act like I know everything there is to know about these phones,” he says. “I don’t. How am I supposed to know how to solve every single problem with your phone?”
“Well, you could look it up.”
“Why can’tyoulook it up?”
“Because you’re better at looking it up than me.”
