Paul snickered.
Darla's eyebrows shot up. “You promise?”
“Wet hole bad for man to go in,” he said, looking at Joe with pained sympathy.
Now I was trying not to laugh.
“Plenty of men like to go in wet holes,” Darla muttered under her breath.
“Joe looked like he was being squeezed out of a big ceiling vagina,” I added.
“You saw this happen?” Paul asked.
“Yep.”
“I turn on whole house water when you call, Mr. Ross,” Dmitri said to him, apologetic. “Must be leak in wall. Leak grow and then bam.”
“Yeah, bam. Big damn bam.”
“You get free other house. No sue me.”
“I won't sue you,” Joe said, wincing as he stood, the paramedic cleaning up.
Dmitri looked around the room, relieved but ready to cry. “Witness? You hear? He no sue me.”
Paul said to Darla, “Please promise me your hot shot boyfriend won't sue.”
“As long as it was all a mistake, no.”
“Good. Dmitri has a thing about being sued.”
“Ya think?”
“I be back,” Dmitri said, running out the front door, as Paul pulled out a small voice recorder.
“Can you describe the incident? I'll run this through dictation software and save us all the trouble of handwriting it.”
For the next fifteen minutes, Darla, Joe, and I did just that, until Dmitri interrupted us with a piece of paper with numbers on it, a bottle of white wine, and a stuffed teddy bear.
“What's the bear for?” Darla asked him.
“New baby. I heard. Cathy so old! But god give her boy. Baby always good.”
“You know my mama?”
“Cathy nice. Calvin like dead beasts in taxi.”
“Huh?”
He looked at Paul, who smiled.
“Tax – ee- der – mist,” he said slowly. “Calvin is a taxidermist.”
Dmitri nodded, pointing to himself. “I coder. I work with them. Cathy nice.”
“You're a coder and a landlord?”
Dmitri shrugged. “I make living.” He tilted his head. “You Cathy's daughter? One with two husbands?”
“I'm Cathy's daughter, Dmitri,” Darla said with a yawn.
The casual way he said 'two husbands' made my taint tighten, but none of the guys in the room blinked.
Whatever I'd been feeling about anything went out the window the second that light fixture looked like it might hurt Darla, but emergency mode drained out of me as the conversation dragged on. His offer to relocate to a new house meant packing up our belongings, so I abandoned my very capable girlfriend to fend for herself verbally while I went upstairs to get our bags.
And throw on some clothes.
“Hey! Not so sure about structural integrity,” Paul warned me. “Let me come with you.”
“Okay.” He went first, looking carefully, finally getting to the door to the bedroom. Fortunately, we had never unpacked, our stuff along the edges of the room, none of it fallen in through the hole. I grabbed two suitcases, Paul got the third, and we were done.
Fast.
“Darla sure does know how to make a scene,” he said as we descended. “Had to steal her baby brother's thunder.”
“She's new to having a sibling,” I replied, instantly defensive for her.
“Fair enough. Guess it is weird to have one when you're pushing thirty. Not like she's having any of her own.”
I had no idea what to say to that, so I shut up and said nothing. In the periphery of my vision, I saw Darla fish through the suitcases and pull out clothes for us all, which she then passed around.
Five minutes later we were covered.
Dmitri handed Joe a set of keys to the new house as I loaded our stuff in my car and started to see little waves around my field of vision. You went long enough on too much adrenaline and not enough sleep and reality distorted.
And suddenly, you saw beds crashing through ceilings.
By the time we were done giving statements, getting everything loaded, and talking to Dmitri, it was well into dusk. Luckily, Doc Oglethorpe's house was only four blocks away.
“Why is that name familiar?” I asked Darla who gave me a weird look.
“You know. The closet shoehumper?”
“Huh?” Joe asked, sitting up in surprise in the backseat.
“I told Trevor the whole story in a coffee shop a few years ago, Right before you two went insane and I had to dump you.”
“That is not how I remember it,” I informed her.
“Me neither,” Joe concurred.
“Don't matter what you remember, because I know exactly what happened,” Darla said evenly. “And I told you not to be a closet shoehumper about me.”
“Still not following you,” Joe said in a very familiar, weary voice.
“The whole long, stupid story about the doc don't matter. Moral of the story is this: back then, Trevor needed to come clean to his parents. I told him a story about Doc Oglethorpe that was similar.”
“Nothing about the two situations was similar, Darla!” I argued. “I never got beaten by someone wielding a plastic lawn ornament baby Jesus while putting my penis in a woman's high heel shoe!”
Joe just blinked. “Are you sure? Remember that time you disappeared for three days in 2016 in New Hampshire and no one knew where you were until you crashed a Ted Cruz presidential candidate rally and declared Mavis the chicken a presidential candidate? Could have happened then.”
“YOU ARE NOT HELPING,” I shout.
“Since when did I give a shit about helping you out of your own verbal traps, Trev?” he asked as I pulled in front of the address Darla gave me. Doc Oglethorpe's house was a sprawling ranch, the kind that has white aluminum siding, black trim and shutters, and little silhouettes of horses and a carriage under each window.
“I am too tired to argue,” I moaned through a yawn, pulling into the driveway as Darla searched on her phone. She leaped out, went to the door, punched in a code and -
Success.
This time, there was no second story. If the bed collapsed, it’d drop straight into the basement.
Joe yawned, right in front of Darla, the gesture contagious. She stared at us, fascinated, for a few too many beats.
“What?” Joe asked, irritated.
“You two just confirmed it.”
“What?”
“You're not sociopaths.”
We dropped the bags in the living room and I went down the hall, stopping at the first room with a king-sized bed.
“If you haven't figured it out by now, after all these years together, Darla,” I said, crawling into bed clothed, stealing the plumpest pillow, “then you're not as smart as I thought.”
“How smart do you think I am, Trev?”
“Smart enough to let me sleep. I'm exhausted.”
“It's four in the afternoon already!”
“We got three hours of sleep. Not enough.”
“Visiting hours!”
I tossed her the keys. “Go ahead. I need to recover.”
“I can't go alone!”
“Why not?”
“Because I – I - I...”
The tears hit, hard, like a sudden gust of wet wind.