Archive for March, 2009
Unfortunately True pt 2
Posted on March 31, 2009
I made the coffee, but I had forgotten that I’d run out of milk. Sweetening the coffee carcinogenically and apologizing for the lack of cream, I presented the bitter Sumatran brew to him.
He sipped it thoughtfully while I surreptitiously checked my cell phone for a reply from Heather… Nothing so far.
I leaned in and read the addresses of the mail he had brought with him. It was not his mail and the collection seemed to an issue of Popular Mechanics and a couple of letters.
“What’s up with that stuff?”
“Oh, this?” he answered, drawing the little pile closer to himself protectively, “I just haven’t figured out what to do with it yet.”
I wondered if the pile of mail was somehow a source of stress to him, and offered to take a look at it.
In answer, he clutched the papers in his hand and stood up.
“Nah,” he said, dumping the remainder of the coffee into my kitchen sink, “its something I have to take care of myself.”
Although I then assured him that I was only idly interested in the mail, it seemed I’d agitated him with my offer of assistance. Shortly thereafter he excused himself and left my home.
Seconds after watching his car pull away I finally received a text from my wife with his wife’s phone number.
Unfortunately True
Posted on March 20, 2009
At around 8:45 on Sunday morning he walked into my house unannounced, carrying a short stack of mail.
He’d been in the area, he said as Samantha gave him a hello hug around the legs, and had decided to stop by and say hello.
Furthermore, he stated mildly, he now knew about the colors.
I wondered at his real purpose for visiting. His scrubby stubble, combined with the fact that my home is hardly “in the area” for him, meant that something was wrong. I asked him what colors he was talking about, speculating as I did so whether he’d had a fight with his wife or something.
”The colors“, he answered, tilting his head with an expectant expression, “of the teams“.
”The… teams?” But he didn’t answer this time, and my thoughts turned to more sinister possibilities than a little marital tiff. I asked him if his wife knew he was at my house, a question which he answered with a firm “maybe“.
I began to suspect something was very wrong. I invited him to sit down in my kitchen and have some coffee, and presently he plopped down and laid his little pile of mail on the table. Was he OK? “Yes, ” he answered, he “was fine.”
Watching me nervously pour him a mug of coffee, he straightened out the the Popular Mechanics magazine and the two letters he’d inexplicably brought into my house, leaned forward and spoke earnestly:
“I have been encouraged to invest in a civil war chess set and I was told you might have one,” he stated and, after a pause, “What do you think of that?”
I disavowed any knowledge of any such Civil War Chess sets and, as I did so, I picked up my cell phone and began tapping out a text message to my wife, who was out of town. I didn’t have his wife’s cell phone in my contact list, but she did.
