You Deserve Each Other

The house is full of relics (like a TV from the 1970s) and is meant to invoke a sense of the past when children respected adults without question. Deborah greets Naomi with frigid passive aggressiveness, which Naomi meets with an overkill of exuberance. Deborah calls out the couple for not sending out their wedding invitations. Both Nicholas and Naomi realize they don’t have to send out the invitations, and they glare each other down in a silent challenge.

Over a dinner of veal that Naomi hates, Nicholas and Naomi have a barely disguised argument about how little they have sex and, when they do, how neither satisfies the other. The discussion circles back around to the wedding. Naomi casually drops the idea of Nicholas taking her last name. Deborah rejects the idea because Nicholas wants his children to have his name, to which Naomi responds they aren’t having children because “[she] lost [her] uterus in a Ponzi scheme” (77).

At home, the argument continues. Nicholas rages about how Naomi never supports him and is holding him back from the life he wants, with a house in nature and time to enjoy the outdoors. Nicholas flips a coin to determine whether they start living his way or keep going as they are. Instead of revealing the results, he storms to their bedroom and locks Naomi out. Naomi feels like she should be upset, but instead, she feels better, realizing, “We’ve been together for almost two years, and this is our first real fight” (84).

At the Junk Yard the next morning, someone delivers several bouquets to Naomi. The card is blank, but she knows they’re from Nicholas. Melissa says the flowers look like oleander, which is poisonous, and the group spends the rest of the afternoon frantically researching the flowers to figure out if they’re going to die. Brandy insists that Naomi break up with Nicholas because he’s clearly murderous, but Naomi refuses, determined to face him. Zach burns the flowers while the others scrub the shop with bleach. Afterward, they play games and forget about the incident.

Later, Nicholas texts Naomi to ask if she got the flowers. She tells him she burned them because she didn’t want a bunch of poisonous oleander plants. Nicholas says they were jasmine, adding that burning oleander would kill her because they’re poisonous. Naomi is sure he’s trying to show off his knowledge and ignores him. Even so, she wants to feel good about the flowers because they are so pretty, but she can’t. She knows he only got them out of a sense of obligation, making it “an empty gesture, a dark condemnation” (96).

On Naomi’s next day off, Nicholas doesn’t go to work either, though he spends the day out of the house. Naomi enjoys her time alone until her employer calls. The Junk Yard can’t afford to stay open, and everyone, including Naomi, is being let go in a few weeks. When Nicholas comes home, he doesn’t tell Naomi where he’s been and asks what she made for dinner. When Naomi says nothing, he orders pizza for just himself and locks himself in his office.

On Halloween, Naomi puts business cards for Nicholas’s dental office in bags with candy, knowing it will make him look like a terrible dentist. Nicholas arrives home in a Jeep, instead of his fancy car, and he’s wearing jeans, which aren’t allowed at his work. Naomi wants to know where he’s been going and what he’s been doing, but she refuses to give him the satisfaction of asking. At the end of the night, Nicholas says he has a surprise for her that he’ll show her after work on Friday. Naomi goes inside, silently promising herself that “there’s no way [she’s] coming home Friday after work” (108).

When Friday comes, Brandy insists Naomi keep in touch so Brandy knows she’s alive. Leon wants to buy the Junk Yard and turn it into a restaurant. He’d hire Naomi and Brandy, but not Zach and Melissa, and while Naomi loves the idea, she knows it won’t happen. Right before closing, Nicholas arrives, wearing hiking clothes in camo colors.

Nicholas bundles Naomi into the Jeep, and she wonders if someone else took over his brain because he’s acting so strangely. In the car, there’s a cup of cold tea (which he never drinks) in one cupholder and his favorite discarded jacket in the back seat—-details that make Naomi unexpectedly jealous because “he just got this car and already there’s a full life he’s lived in here that [she hasn’t] been part of” (116). The surprise is a house out in nature that Nicholas says is their new home.