The Interruption of Everything Read Free

they also purportedly work here and provide live entertainment.
    Now Maureen shouts: “I’m just so outdone! I’m going crazy, Trudy! I mean really frigging crazy! I can’t believe he did this! To me! After fourteen years of what I thought was a good—no, great—marriage and out of the blue he just decides to tell me he’s found a new torch that’s been turning his low flame into a forest fire and that according to Dr. Phil he’s been in denial for five years about how bored he’s been with ‘us’ and the whole suburban lifestyle and he said he didn’t want to hurt me and the kids by coming clean but there was no getting around it and by the way her name is oh who cares what her name is!? Trudy, I feel like such a fool! I mean, what am I supposed to do without a husband and three kids all under the age of twelve?”
    “You really think you’re extra special, don’t you, Maureen? That’s your whole problem. Well, welcome to the pool of pain millions of women have been swimming in for years, sweetheart.”
    “You’re not making me feel any better, Trudy. I thought I could confide in you.”
    “You are. But let me finish my thought. It’s a miracle to me just how well some of us have managed—those of us who are the unfortunate beneficiaries of out-of-control husbands. I truly believe that the women who were only given fifteen minutes to adjust to their newfound fame as Single Mothers and only used six or seven of them, have been touched by an angel of some kind because how else could any one human being adjust so quickly and handle so much responsibility without a quick stint in the Loony Bin? You and the kids are probably going to be better off, if you think of the odds.”
    “What odds?” Maureen asks.
    “Let’s face it. How much do husbands really do? I mean, what role do they really play around the house? Go ahead and say it, Maureen! Not much. I’ve managed to marry three cut from the same exact mold. Go figure. They think their paychecks and their penises equal making a physical contribution, which is why we’re always too tired to fuck them. Am I on track here or what?”
    She had a point, and I squirmed on the hard seat. Leon would certainly fit in if they were to take a group photo.
    “I hadn’t thought of it like that before, Trudy. But even still, I’ll take his paycheck and his penis any day over nothing.”
    Maureen and Trudy are both what I call Craft Junkies because in the year and a half I’ve been working here, they’ve taken just about every three-hour and five-week class offered as long as it didn’t involve fire, food, or fumes. They’re also “repeaters” because they took my beginning pillow-making class so many times that once I realized theirs were actually better made than mine, I got the owner to hire them to help with the setups. HC (as I call it) is small enough that it feels intimate. Here, nothing is locked behind glass or steel cabinets except of course the spray paint, but that’s only because of the teenagers. Other than this, nothing suffocates under plastic that we aren’t happy to unwrap. You can touch anything we sell at HC and we carry the very best high-end arts and craft supplies available in the United States. And I should know, because I’m a junkie, too.
    Trudy and Maureen often forget to pick up their paychecks, which they seem to think of as weekly gift certificates. I do not have the nerve to ask but I’d sure like to know where they put all those damn pillows. They think they’re hot stuff because they can make up to twenty different kinds of knots that they learned in Stephania’s—the spinster from Israel—Beauty of Knots class. Lord knows they’ve made enough floral arrangements to cover ten fake funerals; so many gingerbread houses that some of our Olympian ants stopped trying to penetrate them; and enough of those Little House on the Prairie year-round wreaths that ten years ago were like status symbols on front doors across America