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“Whatever you want,” he said, his mouth full of fish. He went back to the mail.
    Sylvie stared at the top of her husband’s bent head. You could live with someone for two decades, sleep with them, do their laundry, bear their children, and then look up one moment and see them not as a perfect stranger but as a very, very imperfect one. For a moment Sylvie stopped regretting that she had driven the car underwater and wished instead she had driven it over her husband. Out of nowhere that same feeling of rage hit her again. Why?
    Well, she thought, for one thing, for her birthdays had always been special. They were a day to rejoice. For Bob’s birthday she always made his favorite dinner: pot roast, potatoes, and red cabbage, even though the stink of the cabbage always made her queasy and hung in the air for days after. He liked angel food cake and she’d never failed to make one for him. She always had at least one funny gift, and one he really wanted. For the twins’ birthdays, every year, she’d made their favorite foods—and because Kenny loved fish sticks and Reenie liked glazed ham she had to serve two dinners. She’d never failed to bake her special angel food cake. She’d worried over gifts. She’d written (and saved) birthday poems every year, taken pictures of each event and put them in the special birthday album she had. Photos of all of them, on each birthday for nineteen years. Why was it only now she realized she wasn’t in the book on her birthdays?
    But, she reminded herself, men knew nothing about celebrations and gifts, though she’d tried to teach Bob. On the first birthday she had spent with him, when they’d been married less than five months, he’d given her a toaster oven. Sylvie had opened the package, laughed, and then waited for her real gift. The oven, though, had been her real gift. She hadn’t spoken to him for almost two days and then, in an explosion of tears and anger, had had to explain that she wanted something personal , something romantic and meaningful, as a gift between them. He’d never made an error as egregious as the toaster oven again, but he’d still never quite gotten it about gifts and birthdays. Sylvie didn’t like to feel selfish or ungrateful, but she had to believe that twenty years of training could yield something more insightful, more meaningful, more imaginative than a car she didn’t want and a shrug of his shoulders for her fortieth birthday.
    But maybe she was wrong. Maybe all he was trying to do was make her happy and doing it in the best way he knew how. The convertible—nothing she cared about and nothing she needed or wanted—might, to Bob, be the equivalent of an emerald ring with a loving engraving within. Might. Just possibly.
    Sylvie looked across the table. “Bob, I did something terrible today.”
    He didn’t put down the Ace Hardware flyer he was reading. “Terrible? You never do anything even remotely bad. What did you do, play ‘Für Elise’ in quarter time? Come on, kid, tell me about it.” He put down the flyer and glanced at her. “But I’m running late again so tell me in four words or less.”
    Sylvie looked out the window again. She couldn’t help but stare at the car in the pool. It was an eye magnet, glowing like a grape submerged in aqua Jell-O. God, I must be insane, Sylvie thought. Maybe I’m more upset about my birthday than I think. She vamped for time. “I hate it when you give that four-word order,” Sylvie told Bob and then took a deep breath. “Let me ask you this: how long does it take a submerged BMW to rust?”
    “Huh?” Bob, his mouth now full of broccoli, stopped chewing for a moment and furrowed his brow.
    She had his attention. “Okay,” she said. “In four words or less: drove car into pool.”
    Bob managed—just barely—to swallow the broccoli. Sylvie wondered idly whether she still remembered CPR, just in case the vegetable got caught in his throat. “What?…why the hell?…are you