Main Dishes

PART 1: I want to tell you upfront that I am thirty-four years old. I have been thirty-four for seven months. Before that, I was thirty-three, and before that, thirty-two, and so on in the orderly progression that time uses to move a person from their twenties to wherever they are now. I have a…

PART 1: Sleep deprivation does things to a person. I want to start there, because by the time I did what I did, I was operating on somewhere between four and five hours a night for four consecutive months, and I want the record to reflect that my judgment was being made by a person…

PART 1: Let me tell you about Ivy. Ivy Caldwell is twenty-five years old, which is the same age I am, because our father, a man with the romantic fidelity of a golden retriever who had found a second family in the next neighborhood over, decided approximately nine months before we were both born that…

PART 1: My bags are packed by the door. My phone is charged. And in exactly six hours, every person in my mother’s life is going to receive a folder that took me two years to build. She always said justice is better served cold. I’ve had two years to get it exactly right. I…

PART 1: A store manager called me ten days after I placed a $10,000 order I never intended to pick up. She asked, very carefully, when I was coming to collect my 238 bottles of Tito’s. I told her I’d gone to the other location. She hung up. I’m still thinking about her having to…

PART 1: THE BINDER AND THE ASK I am not the kind of person who has a system. I want to be precise about this before I describe the binder, because the binder is going to come up and it needs context. I am the kind of person who answers emails when I find them…

PART 1: THE FOUR WEEKS THAT BECAME FOUR YEARS The house on Larkspur Avenue had belonged to Vera Malone for twenty-six years. Not in the abstract way that people said their house was theirs — meaning they owed it to a bank and had arranged the furniture as they saw fit. In the way that…

PART 1: My stepdad texted me to say I was letting my mom down on the biggest day of her recovery. I told him I’d be in Mexico. He called me an asshole. I told him to ask her NA sponsor why pressuring an addict’s victims for forgiveness is on the list of things you’re…

PART 1: My fiancé told me I wasn’t allowed to pick my own wedding dress. Because I’d been married before. Because, in his logic, a woman who survived an abusive first marriage has already used up her right to an opinion. I left my ring on the kitchen counter and walked out. And while I…

PART 1: My future mother-in-law sent me dozens of texts telling me she knew I was never right for her son. My fiancé told me my beliefs were dumb. And all of it started because I said no to a pair of rings from a marriage that ended in divorce. We’re getting married in October….