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opened that can, she’d heated it on the stove and she’d been the one to throw it on the floor. Now she had to be the one to get down on her hands and knees and clean up the spattered, tomatoey mess. Who was she kidding? Nothing was fine. The stink of it made her stomach heave, and for a few crazy seconds Marnie thought about opening her mouth and letting the vomit spew out all over the floor along with everything else. What difference would it make? What difference could anything possibly make when everything had turned to shit?
    Above her, the floor creaked. Marnie paused with her hands full of cold, congealed beans, her face tipped to the ceiling. Tony. Was he coming down to check on her? Christ, she hoped not. But no…he was probably just getting up to pee. If she had been in bed, he’d have woken her by turning on the hall light, and she’d have been pissed off.
    She was still pissed off.
    Everything about him infuriated her even when he was trying to be nice, which he almost always was. “Babe, let me get that,” Tony had said when she flung the saucepan full of beans onto the floor, but she’d turned on him with a snarl, a real snarl coming out of her throat, and he’d backed away, hands up. Gone out the back door into his damned “man cave,” whatever the hell that meant, to putter and tinker with all of his stupid bits of metal and wood.
    But at least he’d gone.
    He’d stayed out there for a few hours, leaving her to pace and stew and fume, and if he’d thought she’d be in a better mood when he got in, he’d been sorely mistaken. He’d gone to bed, at least there was that, and left her alone. Only when the house was dark and quiet had she finally gone back to the kitchen.  
    Now she soaked the dishcloth in the pail of hot soapy water and scooped up a double handful of the mess. Getting to her feet was hard enough now without being unable to grab the counter and or the back of a chair and heave herself up, and she struggled for two minutes too long before sinking down, back onto her knees with her hands full of spilled beans and fatty chunks of pork. The glop slipped through her fingers, and the sodden cloth hit the floor with a sloppy, sloshy thud.
    “Motherfucker,” she breathed. “Cock-sucker. Motherfucking piece of shit, pus-encrusted douche-nozzle.”
    Cursing the mess didn’t make a difference — she was the one who’d spilled it, so she was cursing herself. That never made her feel better. She wanted to curse at Tony. She wanted to push him, slap him, punch him right in the middle of his mooning, concerned face.
    And why? Because he’d dared to tell her he didn’t like pork-n-beans, the meal she hadn’t thought twice about when she was in the grocery store pushing her cart with her enormous belly in front of her, the cans on weekly special at four-for-a-dollar. The meal she hadn’t bothered to plan more than ten minutes in advance when she found the cans in the cupboard and opened them, put them in the saucepan and turned the heat on low, then tossed a loaf of bargain bread onto the table with a tub of margarine and a pitcher of homemade Arnold Palmers.
    The drink was the only thing that hadn’t made Tony wince, and it was the one thing she was sorry she’d put an effort into. He loved the iced tea and lemonade mixture she’d made for him the first time she’d cooked dinner, back in those golden days when she couldn’t get enough of him and it was finally okay for them to be together. For her to sit down with him at a table in the tiny kitchen of the farmhouse in which she’d grown up, the same place she’d sat with all her boyfriends. The place she’d sat with Cal when they’d first been dating.
    Cal had never cared for mixing his tea and lemonade. He said it was too sweet that way. But Marnie had thought it was fancy, something she could show off and impress Tony with, along with her roasted chicken and rosemary potatoes. Her homemade bread.
    She’d wooed him with her