Chapter 44

The best way to get to know someone is to live with them, I’d once read, and boy, that was the truth. I quickly came to understand why marriage was a fifty-fifty proposition as I fell in and out of love with Mathias a hundred times a day. He annoyed me with comments about the size of our water heater—“Good thing I am always in need of a cold shower”—or about a lack of food—“There’s no wheat bread?” When he went to the store to get some, though, he came home with flowers for my mom and my favorite gum. We’d never talked about gum, but he must have noticed, and that made me fall in love with him again, at least until he went and asked for half-and-half.

“This milk is all you have?”

Um, yeah. We bought 2 percent by the gallon. That was what my parents put in coffee and I put on my cereal and mixed with Hershey’s syrup for chocolate milk.

“I’ll add it to the shopping list,” my mother said.

“Oh. Don’t go to any trouble, Mrs. Watson,” Mathias told her. “This is fine.”