It's All in the Details

Never make a sucker bet with a woman on the verge of an abyss. And when I say sucker bet, I don’t mean you think she’s such a sucker that betting her will line your sorry-ass pockets with whatever your personal poison happens to be. I mean don’t find yourself looking back on the moment you made the mistake of thinking her a sucker.

If you find yourself there, you’ll be the sucker, and you’ll realize you’ve landed yourself in a very dark, very lonely place.

I know. The reason I know should be obvious, but I’ll spell it out for you—in case you’re one of those guys who thinks his woman is one of those suckers.

(If that’s you, you need the picture on the box to put together the puzzle, so here goes.)

The reason I know is my old man pitched me the grand-slam-home-run of sucker bets last Saturday night, and right about now, he’s doing that look-back thing. He’s realizing the error of his ways. He’s found his quiet place, but it is much darker and lonelier than he ever imagined. He is going to have a few more hours to consider who the sucker is before it’s all over.

***

Mr. do-it-yourself-and-save decided we needed an underground safe a few weeks back. He made this genius decision after watching an infomercial while allowing the alcohol from most of a six pack to travel from his lips to his brain cells. (We have no need for a safe—underground or otherwise—but that didn’t matter.)

He did not consult me about his decision. When I asked Mr. DIYAS—which conveniently sounds like dumb ass when you run the letters together—whether or not he thought it was appropriate to tear up our back porch to build a safe we didn’t need, to spend money we didn’t have, and to get everything grimy with dirt and concrete dust, he belched “Betcha Bitch” like he was a high school kid burping the alphabet.

With the echo from his burp still fresh in the air, he demanded dinner. I cooked because I was hungry. Luckily for him, two TV dinners are about as easy to cook as one, so I fed the bastard. He’d barely finished complaining about the food he’d devoured when he bolted up from his easy chair, grabbed the keys to his work shed, and headed out back to play DIYAS.

That was the routine for the rest of the week: Mr. DIYAS would drink, complain, eat, and build a bit more of his concrete-lined-guaranteed-to keep-everyone-out-no-one-will-know-it’s-there safe. By the end of the day, he’d pass out from effort and beer.

Last Saturday night, I got tired of all the digging and pounding and cursing, so I asked him when he thought he might be done with the safe so he could rebuild the porch.

“Well, now. I’ll tell ya what. I’ll bet I get done with this here project before you can make-up that face of yours so it ain’t so hard for me to look at.”

There it was: a high, slow, lob of a sucker’s bet tossed right at me by that good-for-nothing-boozing-bastard. My daddy may have run out on us, but he taught all the kids—even us girls—how to hit a baseball before he took off. It was the bottom of the ninth, the score was tied, the bases were loaded, and I was winding up for the cut of a lifetime.

“You’ve got one week to finish. If you don’t finish this up in the next week, I’m calling my brother out here to fix things.”

Mr. DIYAS snorted, grabbed another can of beer, and turned back to his mess.

My brother is a passive man, and he doesn’t think much of his brother-in-law. My brother is also a kind man, so he’s never expressed to me his disappointment in who I married, but I can sometimes feel it—even when he does his best to hide it. I think, like me, my brother sometimes wonders where I might be now if things were different. That isn’t judgment: it’s love.

Today marked a week from the point at which I’d given Mr. DIYAS the ultimatum. Initially, he’d made progress, but after a flurry during the first two days, he was back to getting nowhere quickly: we had porch to the left and porch to the right, but below the back door was nothing but a three-foot drop to the twice-as-big-as-it-needed-to-be-concrete-lined- everything-proof safe.

When Mr. DIYAS finished dinner, he slammed another beer and stumbled his way to the back of the house. The thought of my brother showing up to save the day grated on him, and I knew it.

“I got ‘till midnight, and I’ll finish. You’ll see. But your face, well, we both know nothing’s gonna fix. . .”

His voice trailed off in a repercussion of noise that sounded as if he was back to pounding boards. Then, there was an oddly deafening silence even though he was at least three beers and two hours shy of his usual pass-out time.

I finished the dishes and got a hot bath ready. For a moment, it crossed my mind to lock him out for the evening, but I knew that would only lead to his yelling and screaming and waking me up when his buzz wore off. (We were five miles from the closest neighbor, so I’d be the only one he’d disturb, and that was enough for me.)

I went out to the back to wake him before his stupor got too thick, but when I got there, all I saw were his legs poking out from the hole in the porch.

In my defense, before I stuffed him all the way down, I did try to pull him up and out of the hole. I just couldn’t do it—I wasn’t strong enough. It didn’t take too much straining to begin to hear his nasty voice complaining about my face, and when that happened, my pulling turned to pushing, and before too long, his whole body was stuffed into that concrete safe: it turns out it was just the right size after all.

I organized the things he’d bought for his project, and after I spread them out on the table, I read the plans, took a few measurements, and I sealed that safe up for good. Nothing gets in—nothing gets out. I replaced the rest of the boards for the porch, and as soon as Mr. DIYAS runs out of air, I know the muffled screams will stop, and I’ll be able to settle into a nice, hot bath.