It’s fine—just eat it.” I believe that was the wrong thing for him to say at that particular moment. Never mind that the pickles were sour. Never mind that he brought home a two-liter bottle of root beer. Never mind that the rolls had garlic flavoring. My blood pressure and voice rose simultaneously. I no longer felt the desire to be reasonable.
“Whaddya mean ‘Just eat it’—why do we have to eat smoked turkey when we hate smoked turkey???” Frank responded with a passive-aggressive-quasi-spiritual-reverse- psychological comment in a calm, monotonal voice and once again, I looked like the one with the problem. I shot back one more objection and proceeded to eat my smoked turkey on a garlic roll (with a grateful heart, of course, due to Frank’s timely statistics concerning the population of the world facing daily hunger.) UGHHH!
The lunch “God provided” was eaten, the kids scrambled in three directions and Frank grabbed the paper and went for a nap. I cleared and rinsed and wiped and lifted the garbage bin to discard the paper plates. There they were; the wrapping of the cold cuts with the price tags and labels affixed. The first crunched bag: “Hard Salami.”—the second: “Smoked Turkey.” I descended the basement steps, bag in hand. Frank pretended to be asleep. I got close to his face.
“You lied about the smoked turkey and then you tried to hide the evidence!”
“I pointed to the home style turkey, the lady made a mistake.”
“But you saw the label.”
“Only after I got home and I knew you’d be mad so I did what I had to.”
“Did you think I would be fooled? Did you think you’d get away with it?”
“Okay, you caught me. Call the turkey police.” He rolled over.
“Is that it? Are we done? Aren’t you even going to apologize?”
“I apologize. Next time I’ll buy home style turkey because making you happy is my goal. It’s what I live for. Can you scratch my back?”
Completely unreasonable.
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