I peeked in on my two year old. He had picked up my husband’s iPad and was watching Baby Shark for the 80th time in a row. I was about to walk over and take it away when a thought struck me: I could possibly take a shower in peace while he’s zoned out. A midweek miracle. I quietly backed out and skip-ran toward the shower.
I was basking in the five whole minutes of uninterrupted, independent bathing when all the sudden I heard a man’s deep voice right outside the shower door, inside my bathroom! “Steve?” it boomed, “Steve is that you?”
Why was there a strange man in my bathroom at 10 am asking for my husband?! Had Steve actually been a member of some suburban mafia and this was a horse-head-toting henchman here to break his knees?? I frantically searched the shower for some kind of weapon. The best I could find was an economy size bottle of Pantene.
Heart pounding, I tried to get the nerve to take the offensive and attack first. Just as my hand touched the handle, the door burst open and I was staring not at a beefy guy named Marco with a Louisville Slugger but instead a sleek metal square held by two chubby hands.
It took me 1.2 horrifying seconds to realize Cody had decided to abandon Baby Shark and accessed my husband’s contact list. There I now stood, in fact, on a live FaceTime call with “Randy from accounting” wearing nothing but shock and my birthday suit.
“Steve?”
I’ve never stopped, dropped, and rolled so fast in all my life, slamming closed the glass door as I tumbled. The bottom of the shower door was fogged with steam, so I crouched in the fetal position now wishing upon wish it would have been Marco and his bat. I needed to end that call and fast. I inched over to the door as Cody started cracking up at his mother’s soapy crawl of shame. Before he could raise the iPad higher to clear the steam, I gripped the shampoo bottle and shot my hand out the door, hitting the screen hard enough to slip it from his hands and smack to the ground. I scrambled out, sure to keep a wide berth from the camera stretching out my arm as far as I could while my face pressed into the linoleum, and slammed “End.”
A few hours later, Steve got home. “How was your day, Cass?”
“You need to quit your job and we’re moving to Wyoming.”
“Wha-??”
“I’ll explain after I put the house on the market. Please pack a bag.”
** As published in Laughter is the Best Medicine, 2019 **
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