She Must Smoke

“This shirt looks good,” I wondered. My wife, Sheryn, was peeking over my shoulder as I picked up the plaid tee from the stack of tops on the table. It took me a moment to find the tag:

“Fifteen dollars for a shirt?” Sheryn exclaimed incredulously. “I hope it’s on sale, Ed!”

“Yeah, right,” I muttered, scooping the top under my arm.

I really didn’t want to be there. Sheryn had dragged me into this confounded clothing store. KB Nickel’s or something like that…I hate shopping though. I’d rather be stuck in my same clothes for years than buy a new outfit. They may be drenched in the odor of beer and smoke, but at least they’re comfortable. When I saw a lot of the shirts in Nickel’s, they just looked plain stiff.

“Let’s go look at the women’s department. It’s twenty percent off today and I don’t want to miss a moment of it!”

And then there was THAT.

My wife claims that she hates shopping as much as I do, but once you take her into a store, you lose her. It took me about an hour once to find her again, only to see she had been in the exact same area as she had been an hour ago, looking at the same garment that she had been near an hour ago, just about to go try ON said garment that she had just been examining for that long hour, only to come out of the dressing room and complain that the shirt was too small. I mean, don’t tell her this, but I don’t think it’s the shirt, if you know what I mean…

WHAT? Don’t look at me that way, Bob!

…What? I joked too much again? Yeah, about that…Sheryn claims I’ve been joking too much lately. She claims that I was a bit too funny with the sales associate at the front counter as we were checking out. It’s not my fault though! She took, like, five minutes to check out all twenty of our purchases and bag them, not to mention that she dropped the card on the floor behind the counter as she was trying to hand it back. That’s FUNNY…

She was a poor kid. She probably was in high school or something—she looked like a senior. Her hair was all frizzy like electricity had run through it and just barely pinned back with a headband and a clip in the back. Her glasses looked as if they’d slide right off her huge—and I mean HUGE, Bob—nose. I lost count after she pushed them back up thirty times. All in all, she was a mess. She was nice, but a mess.

The nice mess ran my credit card through the machine on her end since the one on the table wouldn’t read it. I had been joking all along: “Hey, I want a bag for each item!”; “I hear they’re hiring at Cold’s!”; “Do I have to sing for that?”; “Don’t forget to hand the card back!”. She was doing her job okay—she was friendly enough and she was working as hard as she could, I guess, and I could tell that she knew I was just kidding.

I completely lost it when she dropped that card though.

“She must be one of the ones who smokes crack out in the back!” I laughed.

Silence.

I looked over at Sheryn and I could see her rolling her eyes and glaring. The nice mess’s face drained of any color she had as she kept bagging, starting a quiet laugh. I THOUGHT she was amused! She handed the bag over with no problem and she told us to have a good day like she was trained to…

See, Bob, it’s funny… But Sheryn didn’t think so!

“Edgar, what is wrong with you?” she complains as we pack up our bags in the dinged up van.

“What do you mean?”

“’She must be one of the ones who smokes crack’? What is wrong with you?”

“But it’s funny!”

“…You’re an idiot.”

…Well, at least I thought it was funny.