“If this turns into a story where you called off your wedding over Red Sox waffles, you are going to be a New England legend.”
“I wish it were that exciting,” she said. “Anyway. Removable plates, all these different settings. You could make your waffle crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside. You could make it lightly toasted, or extra crusty, and I think there were settings for whole grain and gluten free, as if the waffle knows the difference.”
“That’s what makes it smart.”
“Oh, no. What made it smart was that there was an app. There was an app that you installed on your phone that would set the timer for the correct cycle. Then it would alert you when your waffles were done. So this whole thing is built on the assumption that making waffles is an operation you need to be able to monitor remotely. Who is ever that busy when they’re making waffles? Other than somebody working the brunch shift at a hotel buffet?”
“It seems excessive.”
“Can you guess what the app was called?”
He tilted his head. “I’m going to go with…GoWaff.”
“That’s impressively terrible and, in that sense, pretty close. It was called Waffle Me.”
He shook his head firmly. “I don’t like that at all.”
“No.”
Nick considered all this, then rested his coffee cup on the arm of his chair. “I’m not going to lie, I tend to burn waffles, so this might have won me over, too.”
“I’m not done, though. When your waffle is done, it sings ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.’ If you don’t like that, you can change it to ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ or—this is the truth—the world’s squarest version of ‘La Cucaracha.’ And the icing on the cake is that this thing costs 350 dollars. I am not making that up, it is a waffle maker that costs 350 dollars. He wants to put it on our registry and tell people that we want them to buy it for us. He wants us to say to our friends, ‘We are the kind of people who would like you to spend 350 dollars on a waffle maker that plays “La Cucaracha.”？’？”
Nick sipped his coffee thoughtfully. “That is a man who really respects the most important meal of the day.”
“Oh, no. That’s the genius part. Chris doesn’t eat breakfast. If I made coffee, he’d drink coffee and maybe eat a PowerBar. If I didn’t make coffee, he’d just eat the PowerBar. But he doesn’t eat breakfast.”
“Did you bring that up? I bet you did.”
“Oh, I did. Right there in Homes-N-Stuff.”
“I think it was Homes-N-Things.”
“Whichever. I also asked him where he was going to put it, since he had moved into my house and we were pretty much out of cabinet space between the actual dishes and the food dehydrator he had bought himself and then used to make jerky a total of two—as in ‘one, two’—times.”
“How was the jerky?”
“Wretched. It tasted like wet cigarettes. We could have used it to repel raccoons. And now he wanted us to find space for a 350-dollar waffle maker that sings show tunes and sounds like a Cinco de Mayo office party at a law firm. Do you hear my voice? I’m getting loud all over again.”
“I’m enjoying it.”
“Anyway, even though I didn’t call it off for another few months, I’m pretty sure that was when I knew it wasn’t going to work out. He kept saying that he wanted to use it to make brunch, which we never ate, or to entertain, which we never did. It was like he was describing some life, but not our life.” Laurie tried to take the tension out of her voice. “I know this sounds ridiculous as an explanation for breaking my engagement.”
Now Nick was quiet for a minute. The door opened and closed; a woman and a little boy came in and went up to the counter to order; a girl with a backpack slung over her shoulder walked out. “Nah. Believe me, you don’t want to get married if the marriage you’re going to have is not the same marriage as the one you’d like to have.”
“Boy, that’s it exactly.” She picked at the edge of her shirt. “Anyway, I called it off.”
“When?”
“Three weeks before it was supposed to happen.”
He whistled. “Whoa. I’m sure that was wrenching and everything, but undoing a wedding also sounds like the biggest pain in the ass ever.”
“Yeah. Once he took a couple of days to get drunk and hate me, Chris was very helpful, probably about half because he’s a genuinely lovely person and half because he wanted to see if we could get any money back. Spoiler alert, by the way: not much. I canceled the hall and the band and the flowers. He canceled the food and the bartenders and the minister. My mother made the cancellation calls to the guests. We divided up sending back the gifts. I had to deal with the dress, obviously.”