The Willies | Page 7

Fleur was right. He knew she'd seen his moment of indecision from the stands.
~
They turned up the laneway and parked facing Simon's little blue sportscar, its front like a silver ramjet and rear like an old bar of soap. Its little round headlamps gave a wink as Fleur turned off the station wagon's lights. The car was Simon's treat to himself last year when his team won the playoffs. Unfortunately, the win didn't end up making him much richer.
Fleur popped the hatch with a button on the dashboard. Simon got out, took his bag from the back, and walked to the house. He leaned the pocket with his housekey in it toward the front door to unlock it, and headed in and down the split stairs to the basement. He heard Fleur go upstairs and walk around the kitchen. She'd start supper, they'd eat, they'd sit around, they'd go to bed.
Is this what I want?
He pushed his damp clothes into the washing machine. Soap. He'd forgotten to put in the soap first. He'd get white clumps of soap on his clothes if he put the it in now. He pulled the clothes back out, then grabbed the box of detergent from its spot beside the dryer.
"New Formula!" it claimed. "Works Great on Stains!" He imagined an ad with him in slow-motion, taking a shot on the net as he flew sideways toward the ground, landing in a messy, stain-making swamp of muddy grass -- even though he played "box" lacrosse: indoors in arenas, so his uniform never met real grass. His imagination cut to a shot of him pulling his now-clean jersey from the dryer and smelling it.
Except no one uses a lacrosse player to endorse their products, he thought.
He poured a pile of the white stuff into the washer, then rammed his clothes in and cranked the dial to the start position.
It's a good team, he thought. Maybe it's not much money, but sometimes I can help with the mortgage payments. And if the franchise gets picked up... And I love my wife. Yeah, sometimes she's hard to take, but she just wants the best for us.
He remembered their trip to Greece, the picture he took of her, sitting next to the chalky white wall of a restaurant that looked over the sea. She had a glass of red wine in her hand and smiled a big vacation smile. She wore big sunglasses and her hair was pulled back because she'd been hot walking around earlier. Her round face shone in the dusk, pale with sunburn spray-painted across her cheeks and nose. That was a good time. So what if things were a little tough now? He loved her, and that was that.
"Right?" he asked whomever he was trying to convince -- the other side of his head, perhaps. The side that presented an image of him walking out the front door and out into the night, going nowhere in particular.
He shook the thought from his mind and went upstairs to the kitchen.

Chapter 3
Connie looked around the wood-panelled room one last time. Or, rather, a fifth last time. "I don't like the idea of leaving all our things here," she said.
"Well, honey," said Roger -- he'd never called her 'honey' when they were engaged, but now they were a married couple -- "we have to go out sometime. The travel agency assured us that this was the safest hotel on the coast."
"Okay," she said, biting a nail and looking at her dark green suitcase. She leaned over and snapped the case closed, looked at it, then pulled herself away. "Okay, let's go! And if they steal everything, well, at least we'll still be here in paradise. We can always have the traveller's cheques replaced. And -- oh, have you got the videocamera?"
Her husband held up a tiny, burnished silver cube with a blue glass lens on it. She smiled at him and laughed at herself. She knew she was making a big deal of this. It had taken her half an hour just to decide which bathing suit to wear. In the end, she picked the lime green one with the tie-up top and the little rectangle of a skirt for a bottom. Though she felt good about the weight she lost for the wedding and was nicely tanned, she still tied a loose white shirt over her top out of modesty. Roger wouldn't be going in the water, so he wore his belted blue shorts, the only ones he owned, with a lapelled yellow shirt and the fishing hat Connie thought looked silly.
Today was a big day for her, and they both enjoyed her excitement about it. This was, after all, part of their honeymoon plans.
At the door, Connie spun around and ran back to her suitcase. It