I didn’t put a single one of those things on that table.

They did.

Every one of those choices was made by an adult holding a menu, and every one of them was made on the assumption that someone else would pay, and that someone else was always, automatically, without anyone even having to ask, me.

It had never once been decided out loud.

That was the genius of it.

A thing decided out loud can be argued with, but a thing that is simply assumed, dinner after dinner, year after year, becomes as unquestionable as the weather, and just as easy to blame on no one.

That was the cleverest thing about it, though I am not sure anyone was clever enough to have designed it on purpose: a cost borne by one person and shared by none, authored by everyone and admitted by no one, as natural and unremarkable, to all of them, as the salt on the table.