Correction: they both loved Mark.
This conversation was going to take a while. Sophie took a bottle of juice out of the fridge and settled on her living room couch, put her feet on the coffee table and looked out the window. Her studio apartment had a great view…of the apartment across the street from it. That was what you got when you lived in Seattle and worked not at Amazon.
“I’m sorry, Sissy,” she said. Sorry your man is turning out to be such a subpar husband.
Mark had a selfish streak that had been widening over the last four years. He was constantly frustrating Sierra by blowing their budget on expensive toys—a new car, that fancy watch he’d just had to have, pricey tickets to football games, which he attended with his buddies, a bigger and better TV. Sierra, the budget-conscious one, had tried to rein him in, but they were now five years into their marriage and the reins were pretty much broken.
Which made it all the more mystifying why he wasn’t moving heaven and earth to take this trip. It should have appealed to him, considering his family’s German roots and his love of extravagance. Sierra had been paying for the cruise for months.
“I swear if I wasn’t such a good wife I’d poison him,” Sierra said, the insecurity replaced with anger.
“Well, there you go. He senses danger and he’s afraid to be alone with you in a stateroom,” Sophie teased in an effort to lighten the moment.
“He’s afraid to be alone with me in the bedroom, for sure,” Sierra grumbled. “Afraid I’ll poke a hole in his condom.”
“TMI. Pleeease.”
“Sorry,” Sierra muttered.
“You guys talked about this stuff before you got married. Didn’t he say he wanted kids, or am I misremembering?” Sophie took a drink of her juice. Orange juice. A little extra vitamin C never hurt.
“Yeah, eventually. But I’m thirty-four and he’s thirty-five. Eventually is here.”
“You still have time. Thirty-four’s not that old.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, it’s not.” If thirty-four was old, then thirty was middle-aged, and Sophie wasn’t ready for that. “I’m sure you can convince him to change his mind.”
“I’ve been trying, believe me. He thinks we can’t afford a baby.”
Maybe not, with the way he liked to spend money. Poor Sierra.
“It seems like we’ve been arguing so much lately. I was really looking forward to us getting away. I thought he was going to love this.”
Sophie knew that Sierra had been excited to present her husband with the gift of a Christmas cruise the night before. She’d planned to make a recipe for Rouladen, a German dish she’d found online, and then serve him German chocolate cake for dessert as a warm-up for the big moment. She’d been so sure that this cruise was just what they needed to get back that honeymoon high.
“Not that things are that bad,” she insisted. “But we need more time together. We need to get on the same page.”
Sophie fumbled around for the right words. “Maybe he was just shocked. He needs time to process, figure out how to make it work.” Lame.
“He should have jumped at this.” Sierra’s voice began to wobble.
“What happened when you gave him the envelope?” Sophie asked.
“He stared at it and asked, ‘What’s this?’ Like I’d given him a raw onion or something.”
The rat. “That’s all he said?”
“No. He said he was really sorry. We can do something next summer. Blah, blah.”
Sierra let out a sigh. “Looks like this wasn’t one of my better ideas.”
It seemed that, lately, Sierra and Mark spent more time apart than they did together. He did have to work long hours. The price of success.
If you asked Sophie, it was priced too high. She loved her work—what was not to love about shopping for people?—but she also loved hanging out with family and friends. You had to make time for that. She could have understood Mark’s long hours better if he owned his own business or was doing something he was passionate about, but from what she could tell he was only a cog in the corporate wheel, working for a paycheck he could blow.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Throw out the leftover Rouladen.”
“No, I mean about the trip.”
“I’m going. I paid for this and I’m going. I can take the time off.”
“You’re gonna go without him?”
That sure didn’t seem like a good idea.