Our anniversary trip was supposed to be different. It was supposed to be ours.
For our first two anniversaries, we hadn’t done anything. Money was tight, we’d just bought our little ranch house in Clintonville, and David said we’d make up for it. So two summers ago, sitting on our back porch with a bottle of cheap wine, we made a plan.
We’d save for one year, every extra penny, and on our third anniversary we’d go to Maui for ten days. We’d stay at a resort in Ka’anapali with an ocean-view room. We’d snorkel and hike to waterfalls and do absolutely nothing for the first time since our honeymoon, which had been three nights in Gatlinburg because that was all we could afford.
We opened a separate savings account at our credit union, Kemba Financial, and labeled it MAUI in the app. Every two weeks, I transferred $200 from my paycheck. David transferred $150 from his, when he remembered. I picked up extra Saturday shifts at the dental office, and every dollar from those shifts went straight into MAUI. I stopped buying lunch and packed leftovers every day for a year. I sold my old road bike on Facebook Marketplace for $380 and put that in too.
By March, the MAUI account had $11,400 in it. I knew the exact number, because I checked it almost every night before bed. It was the happiest number in my life.
I booked everything in February: round-trip flights from Columbus to Kahului for $1,640, with ten nights at the resort in an ocean-view king room, prepaid at a discount. A sunset catamaran cruise. A snorkel trip to Molokini Crater. I printed out the confirmations and stuck them on our refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a pineapple.
David kissed me in front of the refrigerator. “Best wife ever,” he said.
Five weeks later, he sat me down at our kitchen table on a Sunday night.
“Rach, I need to talk to you about something,” he said.
I knew from his face that it was bad.
“I canceled the trip,” he said.
I stared at him. “What?”
“The flights, the hotel, all of it. I called on Friday and canceled everything.” He took a breath. “Mom needs a new kitchen. It’s falling apart. The cabinets are coming off the walls, the countertops are cracked, and the dishwasher leaks. She’s been living like that for years, and she never complains. And I realized we have the money right there, sitting in an account doing nothing.”
“Doing nothing,” I repeated. “David, that’s our anniversary. We saved for a year.”
“I know. And we’ll save again. But a trip is just a temporary luxury. A kitchen is something she’ll use every day for the rest of her life.” He reached across the table for my hand. “She’s my mother, Rachel. She gave up everything for me. Family comes first.”
I pulled my hand back. “I’m your family.”
His face hardened. “Don’t do that. Don’t make me choose. You’re being selfish.”
“Selfish,” I said.
“She’s a sixty-three-year-old widow on a fixed income. You’re thirty-one. You’ve got your whole life to go to Hawaii.”
My eyes were burning, and my jaw locked so hard my teeth hurt.
“How much did the cancellation cost?” I asked.
He looked away. “The hotel refunded most of it. The flights gave us a credit. We lost about eleven hundred in fees.”
“And the rest of the money?”
“I moved it Saturday. All of it. I already gave Mom’s contractor the deposit. Eleven thousand.”
That was all of it. A year of packed lunches, extra Saturday shifts, and my bicycle, gone in one weekend.
I didn’t scream or throw anything. I didn’t say a single word. I just nodded, got up from the table, went into our bedroom, and closed the door.
I lay on the bed in the dark and listened to David call his mother at nine o’clock like always.
“She’s upset, Mom. She’ll get over it.”
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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