For four years my husband’s family called me the walking credit card and ordered lobster every time I was at the table. At my father-in-law’s birthday dinner I smiled, let all nineteen of them order, and then a waiter came out carrying a tray of nineteen separate checks.

would even out.

It did not even out. It hardened.

By about the second year the joke had a name.

Briar, my sister-in-law, would say it before we had sat down.

“Don’t worry, this family’s got a walking credit card.”

And nineteen people would look at me and laugh, and Torren would do a small apologetic face and say, quietly, “It’s just dinner. It’s easier.”

Paying was not actually the worst part.

The worst part was that the menu changed the second they decided I was covering it.

Lobster. The forty-dollar steak. Cocktails before, wine with, dessert after, and a round of the good stuff at the end. Things nobody in that family orders when they are out on their own, which I know because I have sat with several of them when they were paying and watched them order a burger.

It came to a head at Orrin’s sixty-eighth.