Chapter One
The Ranch Dressing Incident
I was sitting at the kitchen island watching my husband eat a salad, and I had the sudden, vivid, cinematic urge to launch the bottle of ranch dressing directly at his forehead.
He was just chewing. Just normal, human, mammalian chewing. But the sound? The wet, rhythmic crunch of it? It was a war crime. It was an acoustic assault. It was a bag of gravel being slowly macerated in a swamp next to my ear.
I looked down at my hands to make sure I wasn’t actually gripping the bottle, and realized two things simultaneously: one, my right hand was indeed hovering near the glass bottle, and two, I was sweating through my cardigan.
I am forty-six years old. I have been married to this man for nineteen years. I have packed his lunch, birthed his children, and sat through his company holiday parties where I pretended to care about passive-aggressive emails about the breakroom fridge. I have never once hated his salad. I have never even hated ranch dressing.
But on Tuesday at 6:14 PM, my body decided it was either him or me, and frankly, I have better life insurance.
“Honey,” Greg said, oblivious to the fact that he was currently surviving on borrowed time. “Did you take the chicken out of the freezer?”
I stared at him. The word chicken bounced around my brain like a screensaver. Chicken. Freezer. I was supposed to do something involving chicken. I was almost certain of it. But the only thing happening in my head was a dial-up modem noise and a flashing red light that said DANGER: PERIMETER BREACHED.
“Claire?” He crunched another crouton.
Crunch. Crunch. Slurp.
“Do not,” I said, my voice coming out in a low frequency that I didn’t even know I possessed, “do not slurp the dressing.”
That is the first few pages. The rest of the chapter is in the book.
