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.

Four years of that. I had done the sum the previous week on a Sunday night and the number is eleven thousand four hundred dollars.

Not one person has ever offered. Not once, in four years, has any adult in that family put a hand out and said let me get this one.

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PART 3 — THE SPREADSHEET

I rang The Lantern House at ten past nine that morning.

I spoke to a woman called Ottilie who runs the front of house, and I told her exactly what I wanted, and she did not laugh and did not make it strange.

Separate checks. One per adult. Delivered together to the table, to each person, after the plates were cleared.

And my own check to include mine and Orrin Mallory's, because it was his birthday and that has never been the issue and I was not going to hand a sixty-eight-year-old man a bill at his own dinner.