I'm not a morning person, never have been, so when the alarm goes off, I always have to restrain the urge to want to slap the thing silly looking for the snooze bar. On this particular morning, it took me six wild tries to land on it quieting the stream of crappy pop music pouring out of the speakers. I lay there staring at the ceiling, trying to find the motivation to sit up and start my day.
"You planning on getting up, or just lie there and count the cracks in the ceiling?"
I sat up scratching the top of my head. Standing in the bedroom doorway was my wife of two years, Julie, holding a cup of coffee in one hand.
"It's a work in progress...give me a second," I said, rubbing at my sleepy eyes.
"I've never seen anyone so slow to wake up. Come on, sleepy head, time and tide wait for no man!"
"Whatever...You've never sailed in your life...time and tide...," I yawned in mock exasperation.
The floor was chilly, so I put on my slippers and pulled a t-shirt on over my head. Julie had already fled from the bedroom back into the kitchen of our small one-bedroom apartment. By the time I emerged, she had eggs going in the skillet and bacon sitting on a plate next to the stove. I grabbed a piece as I breezed by on my way to fetch some of the same coffee she had been imbibing.
"You need to get a move on or you're going to be late to work," she said.
I nodded, blowing on my coffee. It was hard to work up much enthusiasm for another day of bean counting at the bank. Why I had let my dad convince me that accounting was in my blood, I'll never know. He and my sister were both enamored of their debits and credits, but that had never been my bag.
Julie carefully flipped the eggs over easy. She liked them that way. I preferred scrambled, but marriage is about compromise, right?
She was biting her lower lip in concentration, a habit of hers that had been going on since we met, and I am sure long before. A curvy brunette, with short hair, currently pulled back into a hair tie, Julie and I had met our freshman year of college, but not exactly hit it off. Admittedly, it had taken me a few years to get the hang of the whole college thing. I was immature out of the gate and more interested in partying than education. I give Julie credit with helping me to settle down and learn to study. She had been my English tutor back in the day, helping me navigate the tricky world of early American literature. I hadn't considered her a dating prospect at the time. Julie didn't exactly jump off the page as an exciting alternative. A girl of medium height with everyday sort of country girl looks including a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose she had come off as dull compared to some of the more animated girls I was used to hanging out with at school. Over time, she grew on me. Her quietly sarcastic sense of humor, the way she could be so patient and then almost comically angry when that patience would suddenly run out reminded me of my mom in an odd way.
I ended up getting the flu near the final days of my sophomore year, and it was Julie who nursed me back to health. I took her out to dinner as a thank you, and that started what turned out to be the last romantic relationship I would ever cultivate.
"Can you butter the toast?" she asked as it popped up out of the toaster next to the oven.
I did as she asked, trying not to get in her way in the small kitchen. This was a feat that would have been easier a year ago, though I would never have said anything to her face, Julie had put on a few pounds since the wedding, and her much broader rear end required a bit of navigation to get around.
"Can you pick up the dry cleaning on your way home from work tonight? I have class until seven, and they'll be closed."
"Sure..." I replied, setting the buttered toast on separate plates.
We took the food over to our kitchen table. It was a hand-me-down from my parents, but still more than functional. We had a small T.V. sitting on the kitchen counter nearby, and I flicked it on as I passed putting it on the local news.
"Do you always have to watch that while we eat?" she asked.
"I just watch it for the traffic news before I go into work," I said, trying not to sound defensive.
"You could try having a conversation with your wife in the morning."
I turned down the T.V. and smiled, not letting my annoyance show. This had been a reoccurring argument lately, that I wasn't paying enough attention to our relationship, but I honestly felt that was a two-way street and Julie hadn't been holding her end up either, not in the bedroom anyway.
"What would you like to talk about?"
"I think we should reconsider moving into a bigger apartment. I like the one over on Sage Avenue that we looked at last month."
"We don't need a bigger apartment right now, Jules. There is just the two of us, and I thought we agreed we would save our money for a while."
"Well...It might not stay the two of us..." she said quietly looking at me over the top of her steaming coffee.
I almost dropped my bite of egg short of my mouth. There it was again. How could a woman that was only twenty-four years old already be feeling her biological clock ticking?
"Yeah...I thought we agreed to table that issue for the time being."
"You always sound like your father at times like this making everything sound so impersonal like having a kid is a business decision."
"It is. I mean there is certainly a financial component to consider, plus we've only been married for a couple of years shouldn't we enjoy each other for a while before we bring a kid into the mix?"
Julie frowned at me, and I know what was going through her head. She had come from a family with three brothers and two sisters, big by most standards. I believe her expectations had always been to have a bunch of kids running around underfoot. I wasn't necessarily opposed to the idea, but I wasn't in an all-fired hurry to get there either.
"Look...I'm just saying that we don't need to rush into being parents. We're just starting, and there is no reason to jump ahead in the game."
She sat down her coffee cup, running a finger around the lip.
"I get what you're saying. I just don't want you to lose sight of how important this is to me."
"That's hard to do when you bring it up every day..." I muttered taking a bite of my breakfast.
"What?"
"Nothing, Dear. I gotta get ready for work."
I got up from the table walking back into the kitchen just catching a headline scrolling across the bottom of the T.V. screen. It was an update on a story that had been going on for weeks now about people being kidnapped and then returned under mysterious circumstances. The folks involved never wanted to talk about their experiences, and the police so far were baffled by the seemingly random crimes that included no ransom notes and the victims being released within a day apparently with no knowledge of who had held them or why.
