Patch a Hole

Prompt courtesy of BeKindRewrite’s Inspiration Mondays.

I was just laying on the couch, flipping through the channels. It was Saturday morning and there was nothing on. Never is. But I was sitting there anyway.

It had been a tough week at work. The boss thought my ass was the best damn rollercoaster he’d ever rode and bought out the ticket booth. He’d be leaning against the half wall surrounding my desk before I even sat down and he’d go on and on about something I didn’t do or did, but not the right way. He’d complain I’d never get anything done and I almost asked how in the hell he expected me to with his circling me like a seagull squawking at a bait bucket.

So I was laying there, sipping on my coffee and just enjoying myself for the first time in five whole days.

Some game show came on. The gist is these repo guys show up for your car, but instead of sneaking away with it, they ask you a few questions and if you get enough right, they pay off your car. I don’t know where they find these people, but they have to be the dumbest things slinking along on two legs. Don’t know that an apple is a fruit kind of thing or the who their current president is. Real bottom of the barrel stuff. Good for a cheap, easy laugh though.

A shirtless guy just answered the final question wrong and they start pulling his car away and he starts yelling and freaking out and throws himself under it. If the driver hadn’t slammed the brakes, they would’ve crushed him. My coffee went down the wrong hole. I’m sitting there coughing, trying to breathe and that when my wife decides to start in on me.

She starts yelling from the kitchen she doesn’t know how I can sit there when there’s so many things to do around the house. Things I’ve said I’d do for the last three weekends. I manage to ignore her through the commercial break. But then she comes in stands over just the same way my boss had all week.

I coughed the last bit of coffee from my airway and ask if she’d still be nagging at me if I was dead. That just made her more mad. She gets all riled up. Goes on tirade about how I never do nothing and if it weren’t for here we’d be out on the street and even then she’d probably have to chew me out all morning before I got my little cup and cardboard sign out and started begging for pennies.

A man can only take so much and I knew it was no use to argue with her. She has as much conviction as a preacher raining hellfire down on his congregation. Whereas I’d be the little kid in the fourth row feeling his feet burn for pulling Suzy’s pigtail in English class.

I stood up and said I’d better do something. She stopped harping long enough to agree. But then started up again rattling off a list of things that needed to get done. The holes in the laundry room drywall needed to be patched and filled and it seemed like the farthest place from her.  I ran down the  basement stairs and almost fell and broke my neck tripping over the laundry basket sitting there in the middle of the steps. Instead of asking if I was okay she said I could bring that up and fold it when I was done. Real loving, that woman. Constantly wracked with worry about my well being.

The holes were her fault anyway. I’d set a bunch of a few clotheslines crisscrossing overhead, like she asked, so she could hang things to dry. I didn’t know she loved hearing that washing machine swirl so goddamned often, she’d gone out and picked up laundry contracts for all the little league teams in the county. One by one the five of the lines were pulled from the wall and now it was my fault for not setting them properly in the studs.

The tub of plaster wasn’t closed tight and I spent a half an hour scrapping the top off hoping for something to work with underneath. If I needed to drive down the hardware store, I’d get saddled with the groceries and I never managed to buy the right brands and then I’d hear it.

I pulled the crust off and figured there was enough soft plaster at the bottom to fill two  of the holes. I could probably get away with sticking a few of the hooks backs in and plaster around them. Make it look like more work.

If I took my time about it she might take off somewhere and I could get back upstairs and watch TV.