My wife got drunk at a girls' night with her best friend and called me to pick her up.
In the taxi, she slurred through half-closed eyes:
"You know, compared to my friend's husband, you really are kind of useless."
My hand was mid-scan on the payment code. It froze.
Before I could say a word, she kept going:
"Sure, you were a hotshot at a top university once, but now? Dead-end job, no ambition. You can't hold a candle to Herman Simmons, not in looks, not in anything."
"Let's be honest. You're a live-in son-in-law. You're basically free labor for my family. What right do you have to say anything about him?"
The words hit me like a plunge into ice water.
Then it clicked. She was still furious about a few days ago, when I'd called out her adopted brother for devouring the entire forty-dollar durian I'd brought home without saving a single piece for my eight-year-old son.
Fine. So that's how she really felt.
Then we were done.
……
"Just because I had too much to drink and said some stupid things, you want a divorce?"
Leona Simmons sat on the couch the next morning, sober and staring at me like I'd lost my mind.
"Yes."
I gripped the handle of my suitcase and pushed the signed divorce papers closer to her face.
On the balcony, my son Silas Weiss looked up from his building blocks, frowning at me.
"Dad, can you stop threatening Mom with divorce? She wasn't even wrong. You're not as successful as Uncle Herman. Everyone knows that."
My own son, the kid I'd fought tooth and nail for, standing with his mother and throwing it back in my face.
Leona and I had been married ten years. Our combined salaries barely cleared fifteen hundred a month.
Six people crammed into a nine-hundred-square-foot apartment, and her parents had no pension, no retirement income whatsoever.
That forty-dollar durian was something Silas had been begging me for, day after day, until I finally broke down and bought it.
I'd planned to save it for when he got home from school. But when I brought him back and opened the fridge, the durian was gone.
Herman strolled out of his bedroom holding an empty plate, shrugging like it was nothing:
"Sorry, man. It was just so good I accidentally ate the whole thing."
I wasn't happy, but all I said was:
"Forty bucks for a durian. Never mind anyone else, you could've at least left some for Silas."
One sentence. That was all it took. Herman's eyes went red on cue, like he'd been dealt some unforgivable blow.
The moment Leona got home from work, he ran straight to her:
"Sis, I barely touched the durian Lucas Weiss bought, and he already went off on me..."
Leona shot me a look, the kind that said I was the problem, though she didn't say anything out loud.
But she'd been carrying it ever since.
"Hey, is breakfast ready? I'm meeting friends to go shopping soon."
Herman shuffled out of his bedroom in pajamas, yawning.
"Uncle Herman, have my milk and egg!"
Silas rushed over with the breakfast I'd prepared for him, holding it up like an offering.
My in-laws, who hadn't said a word during the whole divorce conversation, instantly switched on warm smiles.
My mother-in-law, Amy Simmons, set down her watering can and hurried over:
"What do you feel like eating? Mom will make it for you today."
Funny how nimble her legs were all of a sudden.
Last time Leona was away on a business trip, I'd had a hundred-and-four-degree fever, and Amy still dragged me out of bed to make her husband corn and pork rib soup.
Ten years I'd given this family. To them, I was still an outsider.
"Uncle Herman, my school has a family sports day coming up. Could you come with my dad?"
Silas gazed up at Herman, eyes wide and hopeful.
Herman glanced at me, a look that might have been casual or might have been deliberate, and patted Silas on the cheek.
