I was at Costco today, stacking $511.29 (actual figure) worth of crap onto the conveyer belt when my husband, who was kind enough to endure the excursion with me and also load and unload the haul several times—from shelf to cart to belt to truck to house—stepped on my foot.

I’ll say here that I have extremely large (nearly size 11) feet, so they get stepped on a lot. But when somebody flattens several of your toes in the mother of all megastores, you’d sort of like an apology.

“You okay, big foot?” my husband laughed over his shoulder, not even breaking his loading-stride.

I hrumphed.

When he was done unloading, he wrapped an arm around my shoulder. “How’s your toe?”

“It wants an apology,” I told him.

“I apologized fifteen times!” he exclaimed. “I just asked you how it was again. What do you want from me?”

“An apology,” I told him.

“Well, technically you stepped underneath me,” he informed me. “In basketball, that would be a foul on you.”

We actually were having this conversation. I swear on thirty-six rolls of toilet paper and a trough of salsa.

“Well that’s the most fucked-up thing I have ever heard,” I replied. “Why wouldn’t I just run around the court stomping on people’s feet and calling FOUL then?”

“Because that’s not how you play the game,” he said.

We were laughing by this point and I really wasn’t even mad anymore, because I realized that in his mind, he had apologized to me. Not with actual words—clearly that’s not his thing and never will be—but with his concern. And then I wondered about the eleventy jillion times I’d stewed silently for days because I was waiting for this man that I love to say he was fucking sorry for something. Maybe, just maybe, he’d “said” it but I just hadn’t heard him.

“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t realize that. Sorry.”

At least one of us can say it.

*not my actual foot as mine are too ugly to share, but you get the idea