My mom is just like any other mom: when I was a kid, she drove us to school with rollers in her hair; she has that special dish, so perfect in my mind that no chef, no culinary master can ever match or copy. My mom is not like your mom: she is a super-sleuth, a hard-nosed detective, a Master Spy.
When she first suspected my dad of infidelity, she used all her powers of deductive reasoning to try to divine the truth. Her (then) twelve-year marriage was at stake. If you had asked her what her opinion was of the gay marriage debate, she would have looked at you square in the eye and told you that gays were not a threat to her marriage—it was the straight bitch who was fucking her husband that was. The worst a gay ever did to her was to convince her to get bangs. It was criminal, yes, and her hair took six months to grow out, but it was certainly not worthy of a constitutional amendment.
When I was in sixth grade, I walked into our garage and saw her sitting in the passenger seat of my father’s car, fiddling with something. When I asked her what she was doing, she matter-of-factly told me that she was rigging the vents of my dad’s a/c to blow directly on whoever is sitting in the passenger seat. This is after she had already moved the seat back to fit a seven-foot tall man.
It’s a brilliant ploy. Let me explain it to you as she explained it to me:
One: My dad is one of those people that liked to have the a/c blowing at full blast whenever he’s in the car. I don’t know why. Maybe like me, he liked the feel of the a/c in his hair as he pursed his lips and slowly smiled for the imaginary camera in front of him. Never mind, if you aim the passenger side vents just so, the person sitting there will feel the full force directly in her face. Since it is out of my dad’s reach, only she could adjust the vents to evade the cold air, unless of course she’s menopausal, then she wouldn't want to.
Two: By pushing the seat farther out, the person would have to pull the seat up to a more comfortable spot. While I may find seven-foot tall Yao Ming attractive, my dad was decidedly attracted to a more petite build.
In this manner, while my dad was taking a shit, my mother was able to deduce by studying the position of the vent and the passenger seat that on Tuesdays and Thursdays, he took a woman, probably shorter than she, out possibly for a “nooner”.
Granted, she had no hard evidence. But her heart, heavy as stone was its own truth.
I don’t know if she had thought out what she would do at the end of her investigation.
Did she have some nebulous fantasy, possibly involving a butcher knife and male genitalia? Did she plan out in her head how to pack up four kids, carefully picking out each child’s prized possession? Did she have a speech written ready to be flourished at the appropriate time, designed to cut him down to size?
Or maybe she just found herself in my father’s car, sitting utterly alone, in a dark, damp garage...
NEXT: Part 2.
