The comment had been a joke, technically. The kind of joke that uses a compliment as cover. He had laughed along because the rest of the table was laughing and because not laughing would have been the bigger thing. But walking to his car afterward he kept returning to the exact phrasing. The smallness of it. The way she had watched him while she said it — she had known what she was doing. He sat in the driver's seat with his hands on the wheel and the engine off and let himself be angry for a minute, so that by the time he got home he wouldn't be.