her able hands

Tuesday afternoon, Lila and I made the trek out to the old house to get another load of detritus and loose cannons with the pickup truck, and to attempt (unsuccessfully) to gather the rest of the felines. The day was hot and humid, and when I pulled in the driveway my heart lurched at the thought that I might somehow get trapped there and have to stay forever. That would suck on a thousand levels, though isn’t a remote possibility. We fed and watered the chickens and Charles the female rabbit, and while I was outside I got a visual reminder of the fact that my fat cat Oliver has opposable thumbs when he opened the sliding screen door and ran for the woods. Bastid.

Bummer for him, because I couldn’t go back on Wednesday, so he spent two nights outside. He’ll be clinging to the screen when I get there this afternoon to try again, and he’s going to get the sneak attack from behind while he’s gobbling up his kibbles like a hungry dog. He can sit his sneaky ass in the pet carrier until I’m done collecting another load and cleaning out the fridge.

When I got home (HOME!!) on Tuesday evening, Chris wasn’t back yet from his guitar lesson, and the Corvaire wasn’t in the garage. And the one cat we’d managed to collect on Monday wasn’t anywhere in the house. I cracked a Negra Modelo, sliced some lime and squished it into the bottle neck. Drank half of it, then set about searching for the whiny cat that everybody but me loves. Nothing. And where was my errant husband, due home by 5:45, and here it is 7:00? And Lila running outside and down the driveway every five minutes while I tried to make dinner? The cell rings, it’s Chris, and he’s exactly where I suspected he’d be (and on an easier day? exactly where I’d encourage him to be) at his friend D’s house in town, having a beer. This is the friend who lives right down the street from the shop, where Chris has often wanted to stop after work and have a beer with the guys and the wives, or two or three, but hasn’t because the drive home would be dangerous. Now the drive home takes exactly three minutes, and the fact that he can stop in for a beer or two or three is a beautiful thing. Except not this night.

He tells me they all want me to put Lila in the truck and come on down, and a dozen voices are howling in the background that they want to meet Chris’ Phantom Wife.

But I’m in freakout mode and the idea of a new social situation is just more pressure than my already angst-ridden brain can manage, and I kind of screech at him in a way I hate to do that I can’t go anywhere with this cranky kid, and we’re starving and I can’t get dinner made and the stupid piece of fur he calls a cat is missing and I’m covered in scratches from the other soon-to-be bathmats at the old house and they won and are still roaming around in the empty rooms wondering where their life went so it might be better if he just get the hell home and help me.

Bitch.

While I waited for him to return, Lila tip-toed around the house trying to whistle for the kitty, and I browned up onions and red pepper slices for the quesadillas, and had second thoughts. I called back the number he’d called from and had several back-and-forths with somebody I’ve never met, somebody who had clearly been drinking for a couple of hours already, and couldn’t understand why somebody named Kelly was calling his phone for somebody named Chris. Chris? Chris who? Uh, the Chris who bought your Tangerine Corvaire. I wanted to tell him it’s because the somebody named Chris doesn’t ever bring his stupid expensive cellphone with him anywhere, that it just takes up space in the bottom of a drawer at work, never charged, never turned on, and that he’s the most unreachable human in America when he’s out and about, but I didn’t. Instead I asked for D. who knows me, and told him that we were all coming back down and I’d be bringing quesadillas. And beer. Hip-hip! Hooray!

Chris melted on the floor when I told him to get Lila into mosquito clothes because we were going back. I scooped him up, spread him on tortillas, sprinkled him with chopped avacado, the onion and pepper sautee, cilantro, and dropped them into a hot cast iron skillet. Yum!

When we arrived, I took a little ribbing and then unwrapped the quesadillas and said, “I don’t want to be known around town as Chris’ Ball and Chain. Can I have a cold beer?”

Everybody was really nice, and really talkative in a surfacy kind of way. Lots of car talk, motor talk, engine talk, grease talk. Some kid talk. Some gardening talk. At first I stood around with the other wives, but I kept putting my foot in it by trying to take the conversation into deeper waters. After the third or fourth time I did that, and tried to recover in the glaring headlights of everybody’s stare (note to self: don’t talk about your discomfort with how your son is starting to smell exactly like your ex husband in front of people you only just met an hour ago.) I noticed that whenever I went to respond or interject, the other wives just kept talking as if they couldn’t hear me. It happened for about ten rounds of subjects, and I turned into a twitching ball of anxiety. I started to truly understand what Melissa means when she says she needs to be careful about letting a Fiat fly out of her mouth. But I also understood that the wives were just trying to help me recover. So I just tried to listen, but I’m never very good at that either. I wanted to say things, kept thinking that if I could say whatever stupid thing was pushing against my clamped lips that we could BOND! And that I would feel more COMFORTABLE! But that’s not how it works, so I went back in the garage to hang out with the boys.

Technorati Tags: home, Wife, quesadillas, beer, conversation, anxiety

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