The Spinach Between My Teeth

I had spinach stuck in my front tooth during the most important meeting of my career.

Of course I did.

Jim—that magnificent bull of a man, my boss's boss, the one who decided who made partner—was leaning across the mahogany table, explaining the firm's future in sentences that sounded like threats. I nodded and smiled and felt the green wedge between my incisors like a secret shame.

My hair was perfect, though. The expensive cut, the subtle product. Forty years of becoming someone who looked the part if never quite feeling it.

"And what do you think, David?" Jim asked.

I should have said something brilliant. Instead I heard myself say, "The market seems—bullish."

Someone laughed. I realized too late I'd made a pun. A terrible, accidental pun on his nickname and his temperament and the way he plowed through meetings like he was personally offended by hesitation.

Later, in the bathroom, I picked the spinach out with a fingernail and stared at myself. My father's old fedora sat on the counter—I'd brought it for luck, stupid superstition—and I put it on. The man in the mirror looked like someone playing dress-up. Someone who'd spent two decades becoming a person his parents would approve of, a person his wife could love, a person who finally, undeniably, didn't exist at all.

She'd left that morning. Not because of an affair or a fight. Because of silence. Because I'd never chosen her, not really—I'd just stopped looking for other options and called it commitment.

*You're not sad,* she'd said. *You're just waiting to see what happens next.*

The cat—her cat, now mine—sat on the bathroom counter watching me with judgment. We'd named him Bull, ironically, because he was the most timid creature we'd ever met. Now he was the only living thing left in my apartment, watching me try on hats and face myself.

I took off the hat. Washed my face. Looked at the person I'd become.

Then I did something I hadn't done in twenty years.

I made an actual choice.

I walked back into that meeting, sat down, and said: "Jim, I think this strategy is wrong. Here's what I'd do instead."

The room went quiet.

For the first time since I could remember, I didn't check my reflection afterward. I just went home, fed Bull, and waited to see what would happen next.

Finally.