She sat at the kitchen table with her newspaper and her coffee at 7:30 on a Saturday morning. It hadn't been too long ago that weekends were a time to sleep until at least 9AM, roll down to the corner Starbucks in a pair of sweats for a leisurely cup of coffee, and then home for an afternoon nap.

Now, she was a married woman, a homeowner, and Saturdays were spent in weeding and painting and roaming the aisles of Lowe's with Woody looking for just the right widget for whatever D.I.Y. project he was tackling.

She sipped at her Maxwell House and longed for a tall mochachino when Woody padded in. He was still heavy-lidded, and his hair stuck up in eighty different directions.

He was in his usual morning attire a pair of striped boxer shorts and nothing else. She had always enjoyed this display when they were dating and he would spend the night. There was something insanely sexy about this man with the body of an underwear model wearing a pair of stodgy, old-fashioned boxers. Now, it just seemed vaguely unhygienic, him rummaging through the refrigerator in nothing but his underpants.

"Morning," he finally mumbled and flopped into the chair with his bowl and box of Captain Crunch. They sat silently across from each other at the breakfast table. She watched him eat his morning cereal as he stared intently at the word jumble on the back of the box.

It was like this almost every morning. She would read the paper, he the back of whatever box of kids' cereal they had. Then the peaceful silence would be broken as he took a noisy, slurping spoonful, followed by this sound, sort of a painful clicking sound he would make with his jaw. Then she would sink back into her paper only to be interrupted again.

Slurp. Click click click click.

She glared up at him over the top of her paper.

He looked up from his box. "Something wrong?"

"No."

His eyes fell back down to the box. Slurp. Click click click click.

"Could you not do that?"

"Do what?"

She folded the paper. "That sound you make when you eat cereal. The slurping and then this clicking sound."

He looked at her, baffled. "Does it bother you?"

She paused before replying. "...Yes!"

"I can't help it." He looked down sheepishly. "I lost my retainer in the move, and now my jaw is all out of whack."

"Well, then you need to make an appointment with the orthodontist," she said, unfolding her newspaper with a snap as she added under hear breath, "That doesn't explain the slurping."

She kept her nose in her paper and wondered whether the silence that followed was due to his attempts to improve his breakfast table etiquette or his being engrossed in the cereal box puzzle.

"This Wednesday is the 4th of July. I've got off all day. What do you want to do?" he finally said.

"We've got that 4th of July barbecue at the neighbors' house."

He snapped his fingers. "Oh, yeah."

"Hey, I'd much rather do something else, but you already told them we'd come and that I'd bring a side dish."

He sighed in exasperation. "Yeah, I know, I know. I'm sorry. It just seemed like the neighborly thing to do. And I'm sorry I volunteered you to bring a side dish. I've apparently set the women's movement back a hundred years. I'll bring the side dish, how's that?" He plunked his spoon down in his bowl, sending a spray of sugary milk across the table.

"Hey, it's no big deal. I'll do it." She dropped her nose back in the paper and the silence continued.

For a moment. And then:

Slurp. Click click click click.

"You're doing it again!"

He jumped up from the table and dumped the remains of the bowl into the garbage disposal. "Oh, for Pete's sake, Jordan, I'm sorry, okay? I'm sorry. No one has been this interested in my table manners in a long time, all right? My mom wasn't around, and my dad...Cal and I could have eaten with our feet and he wouldn't have cared. It's a bad habit, and I'll try and stop."

She looked up at him then, a bit stunned. He was trying to appease her, but his voice was angry. "Fine," she said evenly after a beat.

He glared at her for a moment and then stormed out of the kitchen and up the stairs. She sat and stared at the space where he had been standing and then resumed reading the newspaper. Finally, she carefully folded it and put it down after five failed attempts to absorb anything in the paragraph she had been reading.

What had happened? How had she gone from over the moon in love to bickering about the way her husband chewed his food in the span of four months? It was all normal, right? Part of some period of adjustment?

She felt more than a little guilty, then. He had brought her flowers the night before, for no reason at all. She had raced him upstairs to the bedroom, and they had made love while dinner burned in the oven. Now she was finding fault over the least little thing.

The worst was that it had stirred childhood memories for him, too, and she saw him suddenly as a sad, motherless boy. She put her cup in the dishwasher and hurried upstairs. He was sitting on the end of the bed looking down at the floor. She sat down next to him and laid her head on his shoulder. "I'm sorry," she whispered.

"I'll try and stop the slurping, okay?" he said quietly.

"It's all right."

"You know one of the last things I remember about my mother? She had been in the hospital for weeks, and they finally let her come home. I was four, and I was in nursery school, and I just wanted to spend the day with my mom. But dad said I couldn't stay home from school because mom already had her hands full with Cal. So, I gave the school bully my juice money to pop me in the face. I got a bloody nose, and they had to send me home for the day. My mom made me and Cal spaghetti-o's, and we sat together at the kitchen table and just laughed and talked." He smiled wistfully at the memory, but it faded quickly. "She went back in the hospital a few weeks later and never came out. Anyway. I was just thinking about her."

She smoothed his stubbly cheek. "I know."

They sat that way for a long moment. He reached out for her hand and held it to his heart.

"Well, I guess I'll hit the shower," he finally said. He rose from the bed and slipped off his boxers before entering the bathroom. He tossed them across the room and narrowly missed the clothes hamper. She rolled her eyes. How could a man who played pick-up basketball twice a week with some guys at the precinct always fail to miss the hamper with his shorts? She resisted the urge to nitpick and tossed them in herself.

Things were fine. It was just a silly argument. She would end it the way newlyweds always ended arguments.

She slipped off her robe and opened the shower door.

"Hey? Want some company in there?" She ran her finger suggestively down his chest.

He grinned and pulled her in.