“I refuse to be feminized any more than I already have been,” he’d explained, when I suggested he make dinner for us once in a while. After hearing his childhood-based explanation, I had, out of respect for his alleged pain and trauma, never brought it up again.

Until now.

Naturally, upon hearing his offer to cook for his ex-fiancée, knowing he had almost never cooked for me, his current fiancée, I felt betrayed. When he turned to me after hanging up the phone with the upbeat expression of a happy puppy, I stared at him with disbelief.

“You’re going to cook,” I whispered, more a statement than a question. The blood was running hot beneath my skin, but my face was a sea of calm: white rage.

He froze by the phone and licked his lips. He had a feeling, suddenly, that he was in trouble. Big trouble. But he wasn’t certain.

“I thought it would be a nice gesture.”

“A nice gesture,” I repeated. “And what are you going to cook?”

“I thought I might do a fish. Or a chicken. On the grill.”

A fish. Or a chicken. On the grill.

“But we don’t have a grill,” I said.

“I know,” he said, then laughed as if the whole situation—this disastrous dinner waiting to happen; the disastrous timing of Adrienne’s move, so close to our getting married—was incredibly amusing. “I guess I’ll just have to buy one.”

I breathed in, then out. We were less than five months away from our wedding. There were bands to listen to, caterers to test, photographers to meet with. And he thought he might “do” a fish or chicken on a grill we didn’t even have. He was a dead man.

“Gas or charcoal?” I asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Gas or charcoal?” I repeated. “This grill you’re going to buy.”

He looked at me as if he couldn’t quite believe what had just happened. Certain I was going to ask him to leave (even though it was, technically, his house that I’d moved into after we’d gotten engaged and that we lived in now) and to take his engagement ring with him (a Tiffany platinum band with small but perfect rectangular baguette diamonds, channel-set, all the way around), now it seemed to him that I wasn’t angry at all. The unexpected reprieve caused him such enormous relief that he folded himself into a chair at the table and wiped the flop sweat from his brow with the palm of his hand.

“Charcoal, I think,” he said. “I hate the taste of gas.”

I nodded. “Actually, I was thinking gas.”

“Why?”

“Cleaner,” I said, slowly, deliberately. “Easier to clean.”

More likely to explode; injure user.

“Okay then. I’ll get a gas grill.”

“I was thinking, actually,” I said slowly, adrenaline pumping; my obsessive need to know as much as possible about Adrienne growing exponentially with every surprising, unplanned word that came out of my mouth. “Maybe I should help her look for a place on Saturday? You know, go with her to a few apartments, point her in the right direction, maybe take her to lunch. I moved here from New York not that long ago, too, and I could help her get her bearings. It might also be a nice gesture.”