His and her desserts

On the rare occasions when we order dessert after eating a meal out, we just laugh when the waiter or waitress asks if we want to split one. "Are you kidding?" I say. "I would get one bite. Unh uh, I don't care how big it is, you bring me my own dessert."

And so when we went out for Joe's birthday recently, I ordered a Caramelized Banana Cream Pie and he went for the apple tart. Halfway through, he asked me how I liked it.

"Um, I'm still deciding," I said. But I'd had enough to feel generous in allowing him to try a bite, so I pushed it toward him. We do not go in for reaching for something on each other's plate without asking.

He took one bite and declared it "gross." "How could you eat half of that thing?" he sputtered as he shoved the plate back toward me. This is a man who never met a pie he didn't like.

"Well, I kept thinking maybe it would get better," I said. It looked good, so surely some part of it had to taste good, too. I just had to keep eating until I found that part.

It was then that he told me he had read some reviews of the desserts before coming to the restaurant. "What did they say about the Caramelized Banana Cream Pie?" I demanded, though I had a pretty good idea of what he was going to say.

"Most people said it wasn't very good," he admitted. "But I didn't say anything because I didn't want to influence you."

Everything else in our life, he has no qualms about influencing me, especially if he can do it with information learned from Google. I am not sure why this occasion was any different. But suddenly I felt I could abandon the quest to find a good-tasting part of my pie.

To console me, Joe let me have some of his apple tart, which I had declined to order for myself because I thought it would be too, um, tart. It was to DIE FOR. He was too full to finish it (this is a man who never met a dessert he couldn't finish), so I helped him. I figured the half of the banana cream pie I'd eaten didn't count because I didn't like it.

Tomorrow we are looking forward to some Cheesecake Factory cheesecake. I am hoping he doesn't like mine and is too full to finish his.