Tough Cookies

There are times when I almost feel sorry for Sean. We get along well and all, but I’m honest enough with myself to know I can be a pill to live with sometimes. Especially since, rather than buying a Ferrari or acquiring a twenty-five-year-old boyfriend on the side, I decided to work out my midlife crisis by writing about our little misadventures.

He never encouraged me to. He never even agreed to it.

He just quietly accepted his fate as a recurring character in my literary shenanigans.

All in all, he’s been a remarkably good sport about it, although he never reads a thing I write, and I don’t ask him to. He says it’s “too embarrassing.”

I suppose it’s better that way. It allows me to write less self-consciously and it keeps him from having to file for a restraining order. I am an incorrigible smart-aleck and he’s well aware of that fact.

Every once in a while, though, he gets off a really good one at my expense.

* * *

Not long ago, we were eating dinner one Saturday evening at Lieu’s Chinese Bistro in Greenville, South Carolina. When the bill arrived, I cracked open my fortune cookie, fished out the little slip of paper, and read it aloud to him:

“Your determination on Mondays will set the tone for a victorious week.”

I flashed him a small, self-satisfied smirk.

He paused for a beat, then looked at me without the slightest hint of a smile.

“But you don’t work on Mondays anymore.”

Mic drop.

It was a three-pointer and nothing but net.

Or, to put it in football terms, I could hear the announcer in my head: “Ooh! Kauzlarich never saw it coming! Zhou came untouched around the blind side, and the quarterback is down!”

Ordinarily, it would be me making a remark like this. I should have been embarrassed to have been caught so easily. Indignant, even.

Instead, I felt the pride of a Jedi master with his young Padawan.

“Good, good. You have learned the Force well. Let the snark flow through you.”

I suppose that is one of the realities of being married for as long as we have. Eventually, even the quiet one learns where all the buttons are located. He simply has the discipline not to press them very often.

But when he does, he can be one tough cookie.

And truthfully?

I had it coming.