“You can’t seriously expect me to choose,” Nathan said.
He was standing in the doorway of our bedroom, his voice carrying that particular flatness he uses when he believes he has already won an argument just by framing it correctly. It was a Sunday evening, eleven days before our ten-year anniversary.
“I don’t,” I said. “You’ve already chosen. You changed the itinerary, you booked your mother, and you didn’t ask me. So I’m not asking you to choose now. I’m telling you that I won’t be attending the trip you arranged.”
He stared at me for a long moment. Then he walked back to the living room, and I heard the television come on.
That was the conversation. Or the end of it, anyway. The beginning took ten years.
## What We Had Planned
Nathan and I had been talking about an anniversary trip for most of the previous year. Not in a grandiose way — we didn’t have the budget or the time for anything grandiose. I’m an operations coordinator for a mid-size logistics company, which sounds more interesting than it is; Nathan manages the property portfolio for a small real estate firm. Between the two of us we make a comfortable living, pay our mortgage, and have just enough discretionary money that we can occasionally do something that isn’t strictly necessary.
For our tenth anniversary, something that wasn’t strictly necessary was the plan.
We had been to the coast once, early in our marriage, before his father died and everything with Elaine became what it became. A long weekend in a rented cottage, nothing fancy, but the particular quality of those days had stayed with me — the smell of salt air when we opened the windows in the morning, the long walks where we talked about things we never seemed to have time to talk about at home, the feeling of being a unit of two people rather than two people managing a complex system of obligations. I had held that weekend in my memory for nearly a decade, not with nostalgia exactly but with something like hunger.