What Husbands Do When Wives Leave Town. Again.

Life in the Boomer Lane went to Delaware for the weekend with Sex-and-the-Sixty-Year-Old Susan. She went there to do a book signing at Browseabout Books in Rehoboth Beach. Susan would be there to helped her. LBL made jokes about Now Husband habit of making some kind of major purchase without consulting with her every time she left town. Three trips ago, he purchased a trailer (mobile home). Two trips ago, another trailer. On her last trip, he sold his sailboat. He told me LBL was then considering a Westfalia camper.

LBL spoke to him every day from the beach. She asked him what he was doing. Aside from a total cleanout of the garage, most of his answers involved complicated variations of “Nothing.” LBL thought how cute it was that he was basically just waiting for her to come home.

She called NH from the road on the way back. This time when she asked him what he was doing, he said that his friend Bob was there. Bob almost never comes over during the day, because that’s not when dinner is served. But, given that Bob sold his own sailboat about a month ago, LBL thought maybe Dan and Bob were commiserating over the loss of shackle pulley coils and scupper tenders.

When Susan and LBL pulled up in front of LBL’s house, NH and Bob came out to help bring LBL’s suitcase and bags inside. Then they stood there staring at LBL and Susan with strangely familiar expressions on their faces. In fact, LBL was taken back to the time when her then three-year-old son Micah and his little friend had the same expressions on their faces, and she discovered that they had been throwing stones into the air conditioner compressor in order to watch them fly out again. She was starting to get nervous. Again, she asked, “So what have you been up to?” Bob answered, “Oh, just doing what boys do.” This was entirely the wrong answer. Memories of a near-miss on stone-induced blindness flitted through her mind.

LBL has raised two sons. She knows what “boys do.” She was hard-pressed to imagine NH and Bob wrestling under the dining room table or playing “Rock Man/Pillow Man” (a game involving stuffing someone into a pillowcase and beating the crap out of him). She also didn’t notice any broken windows or teeth marks on anyone’s arm.

It was then that NH asked her to step outside for a moment. Instead of a camper, she was looking a motorcycle parked at the end of the driveway. A big, red Kawasaki motorcycle. She looked around for the owner. There was only Bob and NH. It took a moment for her to process that she had now morphed from being the wife of a sailboat owner to being the wife of a motorcycle owner.

The next time she goes out of town, she’s staying home.