“I grabbed a parenting
magazine and tried
to make myself
comfortable—as
comfortable as a person
can be with a paper
towel wrapped around
their waist and an ugly
pink tunic that opens
up in the back, like the
little ties are going to
make a difference.”
rang. I got up, and of course my paper “wrap”
stuck to my butt. I answered the phone. It was
Dave, my husband. I sat back down between the
stirrups, and told him I loved him.
“Remember that e-mail you sent me?” he said.
“Yeah. You asked for Josh’s e-mail address. I
gave it to you.”
“In that email you also wrote that you thought
Eli”—Josh’s son—“wouldn’t be coming to Jeff’s
party”—our son—“because he’d be too busy with
his World of Warcraft ‘vidiot’ friends. You called
Josh’s kid a ‘vidiot.’”
I laughed. “So? Eli is a vidiot. All he does is
play video games.”
“You said that you’d never forget the Passover
when Josh told you that Eli had tossed and
turned about inviting Jeff to his party, and in the
end, he’d decided not to because he thought it
was bad people-combining.”
“Yeah. It still makes me sick when I think
about what Eli did and how fake he was after
he’d overheard Josh tell me Jeff wasn’t invited.”
“I know. You wrote it in the e-mail. How Eli
slung his arm around Jeff and told him he was
his best buddy, even though he’d already said
that thing about bad people-combining. You said
the memory of that still brings a chill to your
heart every time you look at that sniveling little
shit.”