I hear the crunching of gravel and we poke our heads into the living room. The tow truck driver is here. He must’ve had trouble finding the entrance to our driveway, because we’ve been waiting on him for close to an hour. I have to run upstairs and hide if I want to preserve my delusion that this never happened.

“Peace out,” I say, and vamoose.

“Coward!” he yells after me.

Nicholas finds me in the kitchen on Monday morning heating up farfaccine in the microwave. He falls against the doorjamb laughing, straightening his cuffs. He’s heading in to work. Today, the Junk Yard will only stay open from noon to three, and Brandy and I are the only ones scheduled. Brandy texted this morning to say that Melissa’s quitting, and I feel like we’re the kids in Willy Wonka’s factory, dropping off left and right.

“You’re eating a bowl of food poisoning, Naomi.”

“I’m hungry. Don’t judge.”

He takes down a bowl for himself and chisels out a congealed glob from the storage container. The microwave beeps, but I go ahead and press three more seconds onto the timer. When it beeps again, I press three more seconds. Nicholas stands there and lets me get away with it two more times before bumping me out of the way with his hip.

“We really need to go to the store,” I inform him. “There’s nothing here for dinner.”

“I’ll probably have dinner at Mom and Dad’s tonight.” He admires his reflection in the shiny oven door and smooths his hair. “You don’t have to come.”

This has never been optioned to me before.

I try not to be sulky. “Fine, then.”

“I thought that’s what you’d want.”

“To eat dinner alone? Here all by myself? Sure, that’s the dream.”

“You don’t want to go to my parents’ house,” he points out in a deadpan.

“No, I don’t. But I think you should try making it three days without going over there.”

“You know how my mom gets. Especially since we blew her off last night. I want to please everybody, but I can’t, and in somebody’s eyes I’m always falling short. Don’t put me in this position where I have to choose.”

I never make him choose, but he always does, anyway, which puts me in a position where I’m forced to be crabby. I press the release button on the microwave to open the door thirty seconds before his food is ready, then walk away.

“Real nice.”

I scuttle up to my bedroom so that I don’t have to say good-bye to him when he leaves, pondering what I’m going to do with my life. I check my phone for missed calls from potential employers, but I have no notifications because no one loves me and I’m a failure. I don’t even have any spam emails.

I scroll through Instagram for five minutes and then have to shut my phone off because everybody else’s lives are amazing and mine is a black hole. I have zero job offers and one fiancé too many. I have an abundance of odious fiancé. How am I going to get rid of him? I cannot marry this mama’s boy.

Every time I picture the wedding I break out in hives. Deborah will want to come on our honeymoon with us, and she’ll switch out my birth control pills for placebos. When baby Nicholas Deborah Jr. comes, I’ll walk into the house one day to find all her belongings stuffed in the right-hand bedroom. I’ve come to stay with you, she’ll threaten with a nightmarish smile, head spinning all the way around. Forever!

I’m putting a pin in plan D and picking up the lost momentum on plan A. I can do this. I can convince Nicholas to call it quits without getting his mother involved. I never want to see her again. I think about eating dinner by myself tonight in this empty house while Nicholas scarfs down a three-course meal cooked by “the woman,” Deborah petting his hair and telling him he’s special. There’s no doubt in my mind that at some point in his teenage life she subjected him to a public mother-son dance.

You can’t pick your parents or your grandparents, but you can pick your children’s parents and grandparents. I don’t have kids yet, but I think it’s failing some kind of morality test to give them Deborah as a grandmother. It’s particularly important that my kids have sweet, attentive relatives on one side of the aisle because they won’t be getting any from mine. My parents are as distant and withholding as Deborah is smothering and omnipresent, and haven’t expressed much interest in my life’s developments aside from “Aren’t weddings supposed to be in the spring?” They didn’t even come down when I was being shuffled in and out of bridal boutiques with Deborah and her four closest girlfriends, which is supposed to be a momentous mother-daughter experience. Na?vely, I’d hoped for a close relationship with Nicholas’s family, to give me that warm, supportive, grounded sense of belonging I’ve long been missing out on. I have so much unused love sitting inside me with nowhere to direct it.

I like the Nicholas who drops everything and runs when I’m freaking out at the side of the road. The one who wraps his coat around my shoulders and eats a bowl of food poisoning with me. But I can’t wait for that Nicholas to pop up every now and then, leaving me a different version of him to deal with regularly: the man who abandons me in more ways than one to placate his demanding mother.

That’s the Nicholas I need to be focusing my energy on. I can’t let myself forget.

It’s November twelfth and I’ve got to hand it to him, Nicholas is upping his game. I have a new document on my computer that keeps score. Sometimes I catch myself regarding it too objectively and from that point of view, we’re immature children who need to grumble forced apologies at each other and shake hands. It goes without saying that I try to stay as unobjective as possible.

The past week looks like this:

Point Naomi: pirate b-day, lol

Point Nicholas: Instagram pic

Point Naomi: Brownie

Point Nicholas: Brownie

Point Naomi: Toothpaste

Point Nicholas: Shoes

Point Naomi: Shoes

Point Nicholas: Underwear

If you think about it, it’s all Deborah’s fault.

After Nicholas ditched me to have Family Fun Night at dear old Mr. and Mrs. Rose’s house, he brought home an ugly set of salt and pepper shakers that Deborah gave him. They’re porcelain babies. If you’ve ever seen a medieval painting of a baby, they look like straight-up demons. They have scary little old man faces and their necks are twisted at unnatural angles.