Big Mike: The Husband (Or Wife) Is Always The Prime Suspect

September 21st, 2009

And so the farewell tour has concluded. Yesterday, The Loved One and I bade adieu to King Louis XVI’s eponymous town. As we drove toward the JFK Bridge over the Ohio River, I made a confession to my mate.

Me: “Honey, can I tell you something?”

The Loved One (beginning to panic): “What? What did we forget? What’s wrong?”

“No, no. Nothing’s wrong. I just wanna say something about Louisville.”

“You’re gonna miss it. I knew it. I shouldn’t have taken the job in Bloomington. I messed up your life.”

“No, no. Will you listen! Sheesh. I just wanna say this about Louisville — I can take it or leave it.”

“Really? I had no idea. I thought you loved it. That’s what you said.”

“Yeah, I know, but I was just being a good soldier. I didn’t hate it or anything. There’s just nothing to recommend the place. Well, nice people, sure. Good neighbors and all that. But, man, no good restaurants, no cultural institutions. Downtown is a ghost town. Blech.”

With that we ascended the JFK and eyed the distant vista of southern Indiana. New home here we come!

Careful readers will note the hair-trigger tone of tension in The Loved One’s voice. We’d just spent the last month bundling, boxing, crating, and stacking up every single thing we own for transport to new city. Only our home for the next two weeks will be a hotel room not much bigger than our former master bedroom. In it we’ll fit our clothes, toiletries, two cats, a litter box, a few things to read, our MacBooks, a stash of junk food, our dirty laundry, and ourselves. We should have brought a huge tin of oil — after all, if we’re gonna be sardines….

We ran an enormous truckful of our junk up to Bloomington Saturday, collapsed in our hotel beds and got up at an ongodly early hour yesterday to supervise the movers loading everything into a storage shed. Then we had to speed back to Louisville, clean the floors and refrigerator of the old house, load up the deck furniture and any odd boxes we’d forgotten on the first trip, and turn around to speed back to Bloomington. This dizzying pace has transformed every topic into a potential landmine.

For instance, yesterday morning I got up earlier than The Loved One and waited for her in the lobby, sipping my life-giving cup of joe. I waited and waited but The Loved One didn’t appear. So I took the elevator back up to the fourth floor, presumably to rattle her out of the bed. She wasn’t in the room so I headed back toward the lobby. I was waiting with another guest for the elevator when my cell phone rang. I answered it, forgetting I had it set on speaker mode. The following blared out of it:

“Michael! Where the hell are you? We’re late and you’re off gallivanting somewhere! I can never depend on….” I quickly flipped the phone shut. The guy next to me stared at me and mouthed the word Wow. It turns out that The Loved One and I had simply passed each other in separate elevators. It happens. But she wasn’t about to be so sanguine about the mix up for another hour or so.

Then this. Last night after a day of backaches, headaches, smashed thumbs, bruised shins and one episode of me nearly passing out from the heat and humidity, we finally got back to Bloomington at about 10:00pm to unload our deck furniture into another storage shed. We squeezed the last item in and closed the door. I pulled out a big padlock and tried to run the bolt through the hasp. Uh oh. The lock wouldn’t fit. Grrrr.

Me: “This goddamn thing! Just what I need. I’m too tired for this shit. Goddamn it!” All the while I was trying to force the bolt through the hasp.

The Loved One (amazingly calm): “Here, let me try.”

“Now what the hell are you gonna do that I can’t do? I know how to put a padlock on a hasp! Jesus Christ, you’d think I was mentally retarded….” And so on.

Somehow, some way, The Loved One kept her cool. “I have thinner fingers, maybe I can do it.”

“What? Now I’m too fat to put a padlock on a hasp? Perfect! Just what I need to hear….” and so on.

“Michael, come on. That isn’t it at all. Let me try.”

I threw my hands in the air. “Fine! You do it! Go ahead. This I want to see.” I stepped back and folded my arms across my chest. Naturally, she got the bolt through the hasp before I could tap my toe four times. She looked at me and I lost it. We laughed like overtired, babbling idiots.

Today, we woke up bright and early again. I drove The Loved One to work. As she got out of the car, she said, “Well, we did it. This is our new home — Bloomington.”

“Yep,” I replied. “And you know what the best part is?”

“What?”

“We didn’t kill each other.”

She smiled and nodded, knowingly.