Page 56 of Canadian Boyfriend

“Yeah, OK, but let’s figure out something for lunch.” He rummaged around in the fridge. “More grilled cheese? Sorry. I’m a one-trick pony.”

“Will you stop apologizing and tell me your Things I Realized Too Late About My Marriage sob story?”

He chuckled as he pulled out some cheese. “OK, well, it’s not like I don’t know that it takes a certain amount of work to keep a household running. Cleaning. Cooking.” He reached up to a pot rack hanging above the island. He was wearing a heather-gray Henley, and a slice of his stomach peeked out as he reached for a pan. A slice ofmystomach did a little floppy thing, and not of the usual panicky variety. “I made a conscious decision to outsource as much of that as I could after the accident.”

“Right.” Groceries and pies and clean laundry magically appeared at the house, and I continued to be simultaneously delighted and appalled by how often and thoroughly his cleaner polished my basement bathroom to sparkling perfection.

He set the skillet he’d grabbed on his fancy-person six-burner gas stove. “I’m lucky enough to have the resources to do that, and I told myself I needed to focus on Olivia, on making sure she was OK. On making sureIwas OK.” He met my eyes. “Which, for the record, I was not for a long time.”

“Yeah,” I said, trying to infuse that single word with understanding. Not that I was agreeing he had been a basket case, but that it made sense a person in that situation would be not OK.

“I mean, I was functional on a day-to-day basis. Mostly. But also very much not OK.”

“Oh, I know what it’s like to be functional yet not OK. Believe me, I know.”

“Yeah.” He looked at me for a few beats before plopping into the pan a knob of butter the size of which would have alarmed me if I hadn’t been so riveted by what he was saying. “I’ve learned, though,” he went on as he moved the sizzling butter around with a spatula, “that there’s so much more to keeping a household afloat than cooking and cleaning. My psychologist calls it emotional labor.”

I wasn’t sure I got it, and my confusion must have been visible, because he said, “Here’s an example. Olivia’s school is always having these theme days. They’re supposed to be fun. Dress Like a Pirate Day. Pajama Day. Who doesn’t love Pajama Day? You get up, and you don’t have to change.”

“This feels like a trick question.”

He laid two slices of bread in the pan. “It turns out parenting is basically a series of trick questions. In order to prepare for Pajama Day, first you have to know it’s happening, which means you have to read the school newsletters. Which I do.” He held up a finger and stopped talking while he sliced the cheese, which wasn’t brie this time but some kind of hard cheese veined with green. I wanted to ask him what kind it was and also if a hoser would be in possession of that kind of cheese, but I did not.

He closed the sandwiches with a top layer of bread and resumed talking. “I do now. I didn’t before. These days, I read the newsletter and put everything in the calendar and feel very smug about how on top of things I am. But then, in the run-up to theme days, I forget. Because I don’t look at my calendar. Other than my hockey calendar. Which isn’t merged with the household calendar.Because apparently I can’t be bothered to take this single step that would solve half my problems. You know why? Because I can’t figure out how to do it on my phone, and I can never remember to sit down at a computer and google how to do it.”

Oh, Mike Martin. He was such a good person. He leaned over and rested his chin on his hands on the far side of the island, his body angled so he could talk to me but keep an eye on the sandwiches. “Anyway. Pajama Day. Which should be easy. But it turns out you can’t wear actual pajamas to Pajama Day. Last year, Sarah and Olivia went shopping for special pajamas. Which, in regrouping from the news that Olivia couldn’t wear the pajamas she’d slept in, I made the mistake of suggesting she wear again. But she can’t dothat, because someone might remember what she wore last year.”

“And you can’t be seen repeating pajamas,” I said, like I knew. Like I’d ever hit any of the right notes with my clothes or my hair or my entire self on any days at my school, themed or otherwise.

So maybe Ididknow.

“Exactly. They probably wouldn’t have fit anyway, after a year. So we had a huge scramble that morning. She wasn’t even mad at me. She was telling me the facts as she knew them, about reality as she perceived it. She ended up wearing leggings and one of my T-shirts, but it was clear she was settling.”

“Damn. How did you handle Dress Like a Pirate Day?”

He smirked. “I had a football jersey from my time in Florida—someone gave me a welcome package with all the major-league jerseys in it—so I gave her that and printed out an online thesaurus entry that listedbuccaneeras a synonym forpirateand told her to show it to any naysayers.”

I cracked up. “Brilliant.”

“I thought so, but she decided to sit out Dress Like a PirateDay.” He sighed. “The point is not dress-up days. It’s all this shit you have to keep in your head. I always thought I ‘did my part’”—he pushed up from his elbows and made air quotes with his fingers—“but I have come to realize that though I did a lot of individual tasks, I never had the to-do list in my head, and having the to-do list in your head is like…” He pressed his palms to his head and then extended his fingers to mime his head exploding.

I felt like he was telling me something real. It was about the mundane details of everyday life, but that made it feel all the more authentic, somehow.

“Anyway,” Mike Martin said, shaking his head and making a face as if he thought the proceedings had grown too serious. “The dog idea came from the old me. We had two dogs when I was a kid. But Sarah was right. My mom was the one walking them while my dad was at work and my brother and I were at school. Though that’s not emotional labor so much as actual labor. I think the two are tied up together.”

I sensed that he wanted to move on from the heavy conversation, though I was still not even close to done processing it. “What about a cat?”

“Yeah, maybe. I like big broods, though. Noise and mayhem. That’s how I grew up, and how I always imagined my life. Cats are cool, but they’re pretty chill, you know?”

I wanted to ask him why he and Sarah had never had another kid if he liked big broods and noise and mayhem, but I didn’t want to disturb the air of confession between us. This whole Christmas thing, now that we were past the fraught family parts, was beginning to feel like a vacation from reality. Like I’d always imagined slumber parties.

But with kissing.

He changed the subject as he poured his tea, signaling anend toTrue Confessions. “I can’t believe you grew up in Minnesota and you never went skating.” He gestured toward me with the kettle, asking if I wanted a cup.

I shook my head no. “You’ve met my mother. I’ve never done a lot of things.”

“Like what else?”

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