Free If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon by Jenna McCarthy Page B

days at a stretch, I could whittle my time in the kitchen down to a reasonable two or three evenings a week.
    What I failed to factor into my brilliant plan was the fact that Joe doesn’t like leftovers. Actually, that’s not technically true. He likes leftovers, he just prefers to eat them all on the first night you cook them.
    “Take this away from me,” he’ll say, pushing the serving bowl toward me.
    “Just stop eating,” I reply.
    “I can’t,” he says with a shrug, pulling the serving bowl back toward himself.
    “Are you still hungry?” I ask him, this time reaching for the bowl myself.
    “Actually, I’m stuffed.” He groans, leaning back and rubbing his annoyingly flat abdomen for effect.
    “Then stop eating ,” I growl.
    “Wish I could,” he replies sadly, dumping the entirety of tomorrow night’s dinner on his plate.

“At Least You’re Not Married to Him”
    I have never heard someone chew a sandwich the way my husband
does. I promise that you have heard it from your home and you were
probably thinking to yourself, Gosh, what is that sound? It’s my husband
eating a PB&J. Every time he does this, I instantly think of the look on
Nick Lachey’s face in the first season of Newlyweds when Jessica Simpson
asks if it’s chicken or tuna. I firmly believe his sandwich sounds are
the reason I have lines on my forehead, because I make that face every
single time.
    AMANDA
     
     
    Worst of all would be when he would walk in the door at the end of the day with a grocery bag, because invariably—and I am talking roughly 127 percent of the time here—it would contain nothing but beer.
    “Would it ever occur to you to call me and tell me you were stopping at the store and ask if we needed anything?” I’d rage. At any given time I have no fewer than four different shopping lists going, one each for the farmer’s market, the “regular” grocery store, Costco, and the super expensive mostly organic specialty market. And even when I go to each of these places, I forget stuff all the time, even stuff that was on my stupid list! I don’t care if you saw me unloading $600 worth of consumables just this very morning; the odds are that we still need something . And even if we don’t, I’m going to make you pick up something heavy—like the thirty-two-pound tub of kitty litter or a case of water bottles—just to make it worth your while.
    It was a long and exceptionally random string of events that finally led to my kitchen salvation. Unbeknownst to me at the time, it began when I was pregnant with my first daughter and we bought a new house that happened to have a pool. It was a balmy ninety-nine degrees the day of the open house, and that pool glistened like a cartoon hero’s oversized front tooth. I am fairly certain that if you look up “How to Hook a Sweaty, Hormonal Home Buyer in the Summertime” in any real estate manual, you’ll find a photo of that piece-of-shit, owner-built, godforsaken pool.
    The ballooning hose running nonstop into the corner of the thing should have been a tipoff, but it wasn’t until we got our first $500 water bill that we realized if pools were ships, we had the fucking Titanic docked right in our backyard. Well, we’d just have to get it fixed, that’s all there was to it. Immediately. In a big, fat, pregnant-lady panic I called every pool repair company in a hundred-mile radius and started scheduling estimates. To my horror, after a cursory inspection every single one of them systematically refused to touch the thing.
    “We don’t know when it was built or what it’s made out of or if it even has a proper foundation,” was the general consensus. (To their shared credit, for the price of a fleet of Range Rovers, several were willing to have the existing pool removed and replaced with a brand-new model.) In other words, Good luck with that colossal money-sucking hole in your yard, chubs.
    The bulldozers showed up the next week. I stood in the kitchen, sweat