He doesn’t even know what he’s agreeing to before his attention is back on his phone.
“I hope you all enjoyed your meals. We chose to go with the roast duck since it’s Mom’s favorite.”
I blow her a kiss, and Meghan pretends to grab it from the air and paste it to her cheek.
“Speaking of favorites, here’s a story for you all,” Meghan continues. “Now, Shanice, Daddy, and I all spent weeks going over the details for this surprise, right?” She pauses. “Well, truthfully, Shanice and I.”
A few chuckles from the audience.
“We finally got Daddy to come to Sandra’s Bakery with us to test out cakes for tonight.” Meghan pauses for dramatic effect, placing her hand on her hip.
“Do you know the first thing he wanted to try was chocolate cake?” she blurts out, voice incredulous.
“What?” Wanda, Rick’s younger sister and my best friend, calls out, making others laugh.
“That’s right, Aunt Wanda,” Meghan continues. “Everybody knows that Mom’s favorite cake is coconut. And when I reminded him, he looked at me like I was crazy. Tried to argue with Shanice and me that it was chocolate.”
My stomach twists, and I try to laugh along with others in the room.
“Ridiculous,” Wanda calls out.
There’s a playful note in her tone, but the best I can do is manage a smile that feels more like a grimace. I barely notice as the waitstaff begin passing out plates of the coconut cake my daughters chose for my birthday celebration.
My daughters.
Not my husband.
I look over at Rick to see he’s now writing a work email on his phone, completely oblivious to everything happening around him.
The pit in my stomach that, if I’m honest, I’ve been feeling for months, maybe years now, can no longer be ignored.
Not as I look down the table and watch my eldest daughter, pregnant with her first child, on her feet once again, to switch out her husband’s dessert.
“I think chocolate would’ve been better for tonight’s party,” Rick suddenly says after finally placing his phone down. “Don’t you?”
It’s not the question that sends a frightful chill down my spine.
It’s the sincerity with which he asks it. He genuinely doesn’t see any issue.
My husband of over a quarter of a century doesn’t see anything wrong with not knowing my favorite dessert since I was a child.
I can’t push words past the lump in my throat. So, I nod instead of giving a real answer, and then proceed to stuff a forkful of cake in my mouth.
I taste nothing as I swallow.
For the rest of the evening, there’s a buzzing in my ears. A knowing that I’ve fought hard to ignore or convince myself that I’m feeling something other than what it truly is.
With each passing moment, down to waving goodbye to our final guest, seeing Shanice and her husband off, followed by Meghan departing to spend the night with a friend of hers, and finally, Rick and I’s silent thirty-minute drive home.
I don’t say a word.
Nor do I get out of the car once he turns into our driveway.
Rick makes it all the way to our front door before he’s realized I haven’t followed him. I ignore him when he calls from the doorway a couple of times. I don’t open my mouth because I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that the next words out of it will alter both of our worlds forever.
“Ellyn, what are you doing?” Rick asks, after returning to the car sometime later.
I look over at my husband leaning into the driver’s side door. I take in the handsome man that I’ve been married to, the lack of emotion, save for impatience, in his eyes.
