As Mark ate a spoonful of eggplant dip, she swallowed hard and wondered if at some point was now. Wondering, too, why she felt anything besides joy and exultation and triumph, with, perhaps, a hint of gloating: You see, Mom? Someone loves me, even though I’m fat!
“What’s up?” she asked. Mark put down his spoon and picked up his phone.
“I got my schedule for the next six weeks, and I want to talk through the calendar.”
“Sexy,” Abby murmured, and opened up their shared calendar on her phone, watching as Mark entered the weekends he’d be on call, as large chunks of the next month went from blissfully empty to shaded red.
“We’ve got Elizabeth’s wedding the first weekend in September,” she reminded him.
“I know, I know. I asked to be off. And your mom’s doing break-the-fast this year?”
“As always. Yom Kippur is her Super Bowl.” The Day of Atonement, which observant Jews spent fasting, was, of course, the holiday Eileen Stern Fenske would choose to host. Eileen would have plenty of company as she starved herself all day, and, when the sun went down, she would set out the traditional bagels and platters of smoked fish, help herself to half of a poppy seed bagel, ostentatiously scoop out its inside, and consume it in tiny bites, frowning if Abby dared to even glance in the direction of the full-fat cream cheese.
“And then it’s October.” Mark paused and gave her a meaningful look. Abby raised her eyebrows.
“You want to figure out our Halloween costume? I was thinking Machine Gun Kelly and… Kourtney Kardashian? Is that who he’s with?”
Mark refused to be distracted.
“Always happy to discuss Halloween,” he said pleasantly. “But I wanted to remind you that your lease is up in October.”
“Oh, right. Yes. Of course. Right, right right.” Abby’s mouth felt unpleasantly dry, and her heart was beating painfully hard. When she noticed that she was tapping her fingernails on the table, she made herself stop.
“I know you love your place,” Mark was saying.
“I do.”
“And I know you think my place is…” Mark paused.
“Terrifyingly neat?” Abby offered. “Slightly sterile? A Marie Kondo fantasy? Basically an operating room with a couch and a TV?”
Mark looked at her fondly. “You can redecorate.”
“We can redecorate.”
“We’ll merge.”
“And you’ll be okay with it if I leave dishes in the sink?”
“I’m not making any promises,” Mark said. “But I’ll do my best.”
Mark smiled at Abby. Abby smiled back, even though the truth was she couldn’t picture a dish reposing in Mark’s sink… or, really, anything she owned in Mark’s place. Mark lived on the nineteenth floor of a high-rise on Rittenhouse Square, a one-bedroom apartment with views of the Walt Whitman Bridge. Her comfortably worn blue velvet couch wouldn’t look right in Mark’s living room, with its glass coffee table and glass-and-metal shelves. Her brightly colored kilim rugs would look weird layered over his beige wall-to-wall carpet. Nor did Mark have any interest in the vintage Weight Watchers cookbooks that Abby had collected over the years and displayed in her kitchen.
Meals, Abby suspected, might also become an issue. Mark ate the same five dinners, in rotation: baked salmon, turkey burgers, tofu stir-fry, chicken breasts, and halibut. Food is fuel, he liked to say, and just as a car didn’t complain when you filled its tank with the same gasoline every single time, Mark didn’t mind eating the same meals over and over and over again. At least, that’s what he’d always told her, and why was Abby thinking about food right now? Why was she thinking about sofas, or rugs, or meal planning? This was big. A big step. Moving in together meant an engagement was coming, and an engagement meant marriage. A life with Mark Medoff. She should have felt happy. Ecstatic. Overjoyed. And she was! Only…
Mark was looking at her strangely. She must have missed something; a question, a statement. She opened her mouth to ask when the waitress replaced their basket of pita with another basket of fresh bread, still steaming from the oven.
“Careful, they’re hot,” she said.
Abby lifted a triangle of bread, blistered light brown on the outside, pillowy-soft on the inside, and swiped it through the hummus, popping it in her mouth and chewing blissfully.
Mark’s smile looked a little tense as he scooted the basket across the table, so it was closer to Abby. He’d told her, over and over, that it didn’t bother him to watch her eat the foods that he couldn’t. She still wondered if he could smell the warm bread, if the scent bothered him, if he ever dreamed about a feast of carbs, pita and bagels and soft cinnamon rolls slathered in icing.