Before I start this lurid tale, I would like to assure you that the
following is the plain, unvarnished truth, completely unembellished with
artistic flourishes, hyperbole, or other devices employed by the tellers
of tales with the aim of either adorning an otherwise bald and
uninteresting narrative or an underhanded attempt at leading the
gullible down the primrose path and shoving him over a cliff. In other
words, true story. :-| (notice the straight face).
Anywho, last summer I bought a Honda CR-V just for bouncing around out
in the desert. As it is neither new enough to require frequent cleaning
nor used enough to get very dirty inside anyway, it wasn't until
yesterday evening I decided to give it a good dusting inside. As there
were quite a few nooks and crannies involved, some of which had begun
growing some interesting crops, I found one place that apparently had
not been cleaned in years. I saw a flash of metal between the back
seats, stuck my fingers down in between, and fished out what we
euphemistically called a 'raincoat' when I was a kid, upgraded to
'rubber' when I got older, and which is currently known as a 'condom,'
still in the original package.
I kind of grunted to myself and tossed it into the trash can I had
brought along. But when I finished cleaning the interior, I noticed
there hadn't been enough debris to cover the artifact. Said package
still lay there for all the world to see. Well, maybe not the whole
world, but Patty was sure to see it.
Here I should digress and inform you that Patty and I had never used
one of those things, hence it would look more than suspicious for one to
turn up now. The only time I ever saw one up close was when I found two
of them in my parents' dresser drawer when I was about five. I had no
idea what they were, of course, but my older brother (17) did. He said
they were chewing gum. It didn't take me long to find out they were no
such thing, much to my brother's hilarity. When I tried to persuade my
friend Gerald that they were chewing gum, he just sneered at my
ignorance. He said they were to put on your wee-wee so you wouldn't wet
the bed. He knew because he'd walked into the bathroom one night and saw
his daddy putting one on, and that's what his daddy told him. It didn't
take long for me to discover that was false, too, mainly because it was
designed for grownups and not little kids. It was like trying to fill a
grocery sack with a radish. That remained a head scratcher for years. I
would have tried to blow it up like a balloon, but by then I had tried
it on my wee-wee and decided against it.
By the time I got old enough to realize what condoms were for, I wanted
children. Then when Patty and I got married, she told me she couldn't
have children. That's why neither she nor I had ever used one.
So now I was in a fine pickle. If I threw it away and she saw me, she
would want to know what I was trying to hide. If I kept it and she found
it, that was even worse. By then I was getting red in the face and
tongue-tied just thinking about trying to tell her what I'd found, and,
of course, that made me look even guiltier.
I got so bumfuzzled trying to figure it out I didn't hear her walk up
behind me. Writers of pulp fiction have often used the device of
'ominous silence' to build up suspense. I assure you it exists. Don't
tell me you can't hear silence you can cut with a knife, because I heard
it yesterday for the first time in my life. That Patty was standing
behind me with that rubber in her hand was a foregone conclusion. Little
daggers were zapping me right behind the left ear.
A dozen scenarios played themselves out in my mind, none of which came
to a satisfactory conclusion, 'satisfactory conclusion' being defined as
my getting out of this alive:
"Oh, I see you have that whatever-it-is I found in the car." Hunh-uh.
"Is that yours?" In a menacing, angry voice. Nope; even less.
"Where did you find that?" Better, but not foolproof. It had been lying
out in plain sight when she found it.
"Huh. I wonder where that. . .?" No.
I slowly turned around, ready to feign surprise at suddenly seeing her
there. She wasn't there; she was still in the house. What had worried me
so was my own imagination, and I hadn't even done anything!
Weak with relief I walked over to the big garbage can and shoved my
find way down deep. If she found it I would blame her brother, John.