Yes, but what are you bringing to the table?

And all those eternal and glorious moments in the cabin long ago, when they felt accepted in all of their shadows, entirely loved in their guileless openings to one another under the pile of quilts in a stick-built, off-grid, glacially, backdropped.

They’d spent an entire winter there without fighting, (or, so I’ve been told) chopping wood and melting snow, lived the exaltation of dancing lights and rising bubbles as they blissfully rode out the Alaska winter.

“You know, bring the food to the table! The fact is, he’s not bringing anything to the table,” she’d whisper-hissed into my ear as he prepared his artichoke dip and fare, hors d'oeuvres plate on the other side of the dining-room half-wall.

I’d been there at her birth while he was locked just outside of delivery doors because he hadn’t heard my get-down-here-now call, him spending her labor playing his drums. They’d seen one another after high school, he the baby of an Italian family of brother’s, upper, middle-class, hailing from New Jersey. George liked skateboarding magazine’s and trending music, worked spotty construction jobs, drank a little too much, and had never outgrown his role as rich, surplus baby, maybe spending some summer’s at boarding camps?

He’d moved into her craftsman on the hill, filling the living-room with his tower, vintage speakers and entire wall of compact discs, most of her good music was his and he did love to cook, each meal taking hours to prepare, a bottle of good wine drunk while sautéing while another was uncorked for the eating.

Sommelier-style, a breaking down and tasting, not only of the wines, but a testing competition of knowledge unfolded as we three sat at the old, oak table--her table--in the house she owned. I soon saw I was invited as a buffer, me, their only dinner guest, am now being side-pitted in their cuts of who has power and who prestige, “Now, isn’t that right, Kimberly?”

My non-committal responses, pointing to mouth filled with Mediterranean chicken, railroaded by a Hermann Hesse debate read in the Alaskan cabin back when their neck and neck meant necking and not proof of imbecility in what the chapters fated to intelligent design.

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