As I walk up to the house, wheeling my heavy suitcase behind me, I have never been so glad to be home from a vacation. Never.
Vegas was fun, sure.
Traumatizing, maybe.
But relaxing? Um, no.
It takes times like this for me to remember the reason I vowed never to go on trips with Janine unless I get to plan the whole thing. From the flight, to the hotel, to the activities—if I don’t plan everything down to the last detail, our vacations usually end in chaos.
Or trouble.
Or me getting frisked at the airport.
Always.
Our high school graduation trip to New York City? We got mugged by a homeless person—man, woman… we weren’t sure—wielding a very realistic plastic squirt gun after Janine insisted we explore downtown and check out some club she found online that didn’t check IDs. Turns out, she misunderstood. The “club” was in one of the most dangerous, seedy neighborhoods in NYC and wasn’t a club after all; just a warehouse called The Club.
Our Spring Break trip junior year in college to Mexico? We got food poisoning after Janine refused to spend money on bottled water, insisting the tap water would be fine. After all, we needed to save our money for booze. Booze we never got to drink because we spent the entire trip in the hotel room praying to the porcelain gods.
Our college graduation trip to Gulf Shores, Alabama? Janine was this close to signing a release waiver with Girls Gone Crazy—and forging my name on another—agreeing that we’d grope each other in the shower. Topless. She insisted we’d become famous. Famous for what? To this day I couldn’t tell you. Thankfully that night, our levelheaded friend Will, who’d been on break with us, threatened to beat the crap out of the producer before she could sign my boobs away.
So yeah, I will never make the mistake of letting her plan our trips again.
Or so I keep trying to convince myself.
For all the craziness we’ve experienced, I can’t honestly say I don’t have fun, that we don’t laugh, that we haven’t made amazing memories. Because we do have fun. And we do laugh. A lot. Every time.
Usually.
I trudge up the sidewalk, hauling my suitcase, feeling exhausted and not at all rested, and once I walk through that blue front door, the pace of life will once again pick up and give me no time to settle in.
I feel even more exhausted than I did when I left five days ago.
Such is the life of a mother.
I turn the doorknob, push the door in, and cross the threshold.
The scent of my fresh linen candle fills the air, and I pause a moment to inhale the smell of home.
“I’m home!” I holler as I drop my keys on the small maple table next to the door and lean my bags against the wall.
Wait for it… Wait for it…
“MOMMY, MOMMY, MOMMY!”
Jacob and the twins come loudly tearing down the hallway and into the foyer, throwing themselves at me with open arms and bright smiles on their faces. I kiss them all over their sweet cheeks as the three of them immediately start making demands for a snack and tattling on each other.
“Okay, okay, hold on,” I say with a laugh, walking around the corner to the kitchen. “Where is everyone?”
I find Owen, my eight-year-old, sitting on the couch in front of the Xbox.
“Hi, Owen. I missed you.” He just grunts in response. I guess when you’re eight years old, there are more important things to do than greet your mother after she’s been gone for a long weekend. Somehow I’m not surprised.
“I have a treat for you in my bag,” I whisper as I peck him on the head, making my way over to Sophie, who has a giant smile on her face and is jumping up and down excitedly in her bouncer seat.
“Hi, baby girl,” I coo, bending down to scoop her up. She responds by snuggling her whole body into me. I have to admit, sometimes it’s nice to have been missed.
I look around for the one person who’s missing: my mother-in-law.
“Where is Grammy, anyway?”
“Not here,” Owen says absent-mindedly, his thumbs rapidly moving over the controller. I whip my head around to look at him incredulously.
“What do you mean she’s not here?” I wonder, calculating what time Jeremiah went to work and what time it is now. So the kids have been left alone… for eight hours?
There’s no way…
She would never.
Would she?
“She said we were wittle hellions and she couldn’t watch us any mo,” Charlotte informs me without ever looking up from her coloring book. Maddie just nods her head in agreement.
“What?” I almost screech. Panic overtakes me as I wonder why my mother-in-law would leave my children to fend for themselves!
And why doesn’t the house look more trashed if that’s the case?
Just then, I hear the telltale sounds of a toilet flush in the half bath, followed immediately by the air freshener.
Ah, Jeremiah must be here.
My heart returns to normal as he makes his way out of the bathroom, wiping his damp hands off on his jeans. When he sees me, his eyes light up and a big smile crosses his face.
“Hey, babe,” he says, coming over to peck me on the lips. “I didn’t hear you come in. How was your trip?”
Guilt immediately runs through me. I know I’m going to tell him everything about the convention, but I don’t know how he’ll take it. And frankly, now isn’t the time. So I deflect to the one thing that is guaranteed to distract him.
Being irritated at his mother.
“It was good, it was good,” I say, bouncing Sophie up and down as she pats my cheeks with her chubby hands. “I’ll tell you all about it later. Um, honey, where is your mother?”
He sighs and drops himself down into one of the kitchen chairs.
“She lasted one day watching the kids. One.”
“That’s it?” I ask in disbelief, throwing my free hand up in defeat. “But she watches them all the time for me! What happened?”
He shakes his head and rolls his eyes. Not all husbands realize their mothers are ridiculous. Fortunately for me, Jeremiah does. This, of course, means we almost never fight about his family. In fact, we’re usually on the same page about them.
The page where we shake our heads and roll our eyes at them together. It’s nice. Well, not dealing with them, but being on the same page.
“She said it’s different when three of them are in school and the other two spend most of your time away napping. She said if she had known Friday was teacher in-service day and the kids were out of school, she never would have agreed to babysit at all.”
I scoff. “Hold on. She makes Sophie and Jacob nap the entire time I’m gone during the week?”
“Yep,” he says.
“The whole four hours I spend away from here.”
“It appears so.”
“No wonder they’re so hyper and difficult whenever I get home,” I say as the puzzle pieces click together. “I always thought it was because they were hyped up from playing with Grammy the whole time.”
He snorts. “Does this information really surprise you? This is my mother we’re talking about. She doesn’t play with children. She makes them watch Adam Lambert videos on YouTube and talks up the benefits of auditioning for American Idol. Speaking of which, it’s time to update the will and get her name off of the potential guardian list. ASAP.”
“Remind me to put that on my list of things to do tomorrow,” I say, putting Sophie back in her bouncer and opening the fridge door, trying to decide what to make for dinner. It looks like the kids have eaten pretty much everything in the house when no one was looking, so we may be ordering takeout.
“So wait,” I say while rooting around in the back of the fridge. “Who was here all day with the kids?
Jeremiah smirks. “Me.”
“You took time off work?” I ask, glancing out from behind the refrigerator door. “She really didn’t come back?”
He shrugs. “I wasn’t going to bother chancing it. And your mother is about as reliable as mine, so what else was I gonna do? Besides, I got some stuff done around here.”
“Like what?” I ask, standing up and crossing my arms over my chest. Jeremiah’s version of getting things done usually means putting dishes in the dishwasher and, if I’m lucky, vacuuming our bedroom. Not the house. Our bedroom.
“I cleaned out the gutters and the chimney.” I raise my eyebrows in disbelief. “The leaky faucet upstairs has been fixed. Sophie’s door doesn’t squeak anymore. And I even vacuumed.”
“Our bedroom?” I ask sarcastically.
“The entire house,” he says as he stands up and makes his way over to me. “The kids were even fed, bathed, and put to bed on time every night.” He leans in to kiss me again. This time, a little deeper than just a peck. “Welcome home.”
I smile and cup his cheeks. “Thanks, babe. Thank you for doing all that. It’s good to be home.”
He smacks my ass and turns to leave the room. “And now that you’re home, I’m going to go sit in the man cave until dinner because taking care of our kids for four straight days has me exhausted.”
“Welcome to my world,” I shout after him.
He raises his hand and without even looking over his shoulder yells, “I never questioned your exhaustion for a second!”
It takes almost three hours, but we finally get all the kids stuffed full of fast-food hamburgers, bathed to a somewhat acceptable level, and asleep in bed. It was rough going since everyone wanted to tell me about everything they’d done over the past five days. And tattle on what everyone else had done. But we managed to get everyone in their beds.
Including ourselves.
“So tell me about your trip,” Jeremiah says, climbing in bed next to me.
I sigh and sit up facing him, crossing my legs. This is the conversation I was more than happy to avoid. But I don’t have much of a choice anymore.
It’s time to put my big girl panties on and fess up.
“Um, it was fun, I guess. But there’s something I have to tell you.”
“Okay,” he says, rolling towards me and leaning his head on his hand. “That sounds serious.”
“Well, I’m not really sure how you’re going to take it.”
He nods once, like he’s steeling himself for what I’m about to say. “You were with Janine, so I assumed you guys would get yourselves into some sort of trouble. I think the question is, can you get out of it?”
I bite the corner of my lip, not knowing the answer. It all depends on his reaction.
“So, um…” I clear my throat. “Janine took me to a porn convention.” I can feel my face redden with shame. The guilt has been killing me. But waiting for his reaction might just be worse.
It takes him a minute to finally say something. “What? Why in the hell would she think that was a good idea?”
I crinkle my nose and peek up at him. “Remember that text exchange you had with her when she asked if it was okay for me to go?”
“The one where I was sarcastic the entire time?”
“Yeah. Apparently your sarcasm font wasn’t working that day. At all.”
Jeremiah stares at me for a few long seconds before rolling on his back and laughing his ass off.
“Why are you laughing?” I ask and smack him on the shoulder. Truthfully, I’m trying to suppress a smirk because I’m just so relieved he doesn’t seem mad. “I saw penises!”
He laughs harder.
“And vaginas!”
He laughs harder still, clutching his stomach now.
“And… and… and things I can never un-see!”
At this point, he may just fall off the bed, he’s laughing so hard.
“I don’t get it,” I say, giving him a little shove. “Why are you laughing? I’ve been torn up about this, thinking you were going to be mad!”
He finally pulls himself together and rolls back over to face me, wiping his eyes as he does. “Because it’s you and Janine. Of all the people in the world to end up doing something like this on vacation, it would be you two!”
“So you’re not mad?” I ask in disbelief. I expected a strong reaction out of him, but not this kind.
“Well, I’m not thrilled.” He shrugs. “But I know you. I know you were probably in shock most of the weekend.” I nod vigorously. “So let me ask you a couple questions… Is this going to become a regular thing now?”
“Oh hell no,” I say with conviction. “Never again.”
“Did it turn you on and make you fantasize about having sex with other men?”
“Ew. No. It did the exact opposite.”
“Did you cheat on me?”
“Well, no.”
“Did you kiss anyone?”
I hesitate. This is the part that I was really dreading. Time for confession number two.
“Becky,” Jeremiah says as he sits up, all trace of laughter gone. “Did you kiss someone in Vegas?”
“Well…” I squeak.
“Becky,” he says, starting to sound agitated. “You’d better explain who you kissed and how that happened before I freak out.”
“I didn’t kiss anyone. He kissed me. Right here,” I say as fast as I can, barely pausing between sentences and pointing to the corner of my mouth.
“Who did?”
I gulp. “Don Dean.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” he says, holding his hands up and shaking his head. “Don Dean, the king of porn, kissed you?”
I nod, feeling shameful once again. And yet, wondering how he knows who wears the porn crown.
“No way.”
I nod again.
“Okay, I’m gonna need you to start at the beginning and tell me how that happened, because… yeah, just tell me.”
So I tell him everything. From the skanky women feeling each other up to the back rub Don Dean gave me to him dropping his drawers right next to me. Jeremiah doesn’t say a word, just listens as I tell him about the guilt-riddled forty-five minutes of my life I will never get back.
As soon as I finish, he says the last thing on earth I ever expected…
“You saw Don Dean’s penis up close?” he practically shrieks. “Did you take any pictures?”
“Wait… what?” I ask in confusion. “You’re not mad?”
“Mad that the king of porn has the hots for my wife? Why would I be mad about that? That’s awesome!”
And now I’m even more confused.
“I don’t get it. Is this a joke? Are you just so mad that you can’t think straight?”
“What’s not to get?” he says excitedly. “Men always think their wives are hot, right? And I know you’re hot. But now I have proof. Do you know how jealous the guys at work are going to be that I have the hottest wife? I have proof! Tell me you have pictures. Do you have pictures?”
I hand him my phone, still not quite sure what’s happening. “So you’re not mad that another man hit on me, showed me his penis, and kissed me?”
“Well, yeah, if it was just some guy,” he says, not even looking up from my phone as he scrolls through my Vegas pics. “But this is Don Dean we’re talking about! Aw man, babe. I wish you didn’t look like such a deer in the headlights in these pictures with him. I would have posted them on Facebook.”
My jaw drops and my eyebrows furrow. I’m so… shocked by his reaction.
“And you got to see his penis up close and personal!” Jeremiah exclaims, tossing my phone to the side. “Was it as big as it looks on TV? That guys is hung!”
“I’m sorry,” I finally say, finding my voice once again. “Are you… fan-girling over Don Dean’s penis?”
“Why yes, yes I am,” he responds with no embarrassment whatsoever. “That muscle is famous for a reason, ya know.”
I just shake my head and roll over, turning the lamp next to the bed off. This conversation has officially thrown me over the edge of exhaustion, and I just can’t take any more surprises.
Jeremiah is still babbling about what a lucky man he is when I finally fall asleep, only to dream of my husband… the wannabe porn star.