The arrangement regarding domestic chores had always been this: I took care of the outside and my wife, fondly known as Cheeky by most, was responsible for the inside. And that worked for years, until we retired within months of each other. Cheeky, whose real name is, or was, Clarice, gradually decided she would retire from housework as well.
We’d met at school, our workplace, and married in our forties. She taught English and I taught shop – wood and metal. We had no children of our own. I don’t know how she got her nickname, it was before my time and I never asked.
As a result of our shared duties agreement up until recently our house was pristine and well-cared for, or prim and proper as our exterminator would oddly put it. And the exterminator does play a role in our story.
In the driveway after he was done spraying he would hold his hands up in a steeple, like a bug-killing priest minus the robe and vestments, and he would bow – a small dip of the head and hands, peer up through his bifocals and tell me, if the place isn’t prim and proper at any time, meaning bug-wise, give me a call. Then I’d hand him a check. In fact, that was the name of his business. Prim and Proper Exterminating. He sprayed quarterly, as far as I knew. He reminded me of a mouse.
I did my part. Mowing the lawn, trimming the trees, weeding the beds, running the sprinklers, pressure-washing the driveway, painting the house more often than necessary. In the back yard I have an extensive garden of tropical plants. A large gardenia by the patio. About six kinds of palms. A key lime tree. An orange tree. Tropical sage. Native fire bush. It takes a lot of my time. Overall, the exterior exhibited what overwrought real estate blurbs would describe as Pride of Ownership.
Inside, our formerly livable house slowly devolved into squalor and chaos as Cheeky abrogated and ignored her duties. We never argued about it as dirty dishes piled up in the sink, dust balls skittered across the tile, clothes spilled out of the hamper and odd smells festooned in corners. In fact, we never discussed the condition of the house. The dirtier it got I just started spending more time outside until eventually I was sleeping out there.
We never really argued about anything, never seemed to get on each other’s nerves. Cheeky didn’t have any other annoying habits, unless you counted spontaneously breaking into a chorus of She’s a Bad Mama Jama about six times a day for no reason.
If I did any things that bothered her she never told me.
When she stopped cleaning, or doing anything really, I was stubborn enough that I wasn’t going to take care of the inside as well as the outside. We forged a pact years earlier at the beginning of our marriage. I saw no reason to modify it.
It took about six months for the house to get bad enough for me to move out. I think the unwashed sheets on the bed were the final straw.
I didn’t go far, just to the 10×10 garden shed under the old, well-tended, live oak in the back yard. I’d wired the shed for electricity when I installed it years earlier. It was kind of hidden away. You could barely see it from the back windows of the house due to the hibiscus. In it I’d accumulated a hammock, a microwave, an adequate Wi-Fi signal, a television and my laptop. There was an outdoor shower on the side of the house I usually used after gardening. I bought a mini fridge.
The grill was on the patio and I initiated hot-dog Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. I’d feed Cheeky if she wandered out and was hungry. The washer and dryer, used only by me these days, was in the garage as well as a half-bathroom that was added before we bought the place. I don’t know what Cheeky did for clean clothes, I’d only seen her in nightgowns recently.
I went weeks without going inside. If it rained, which it did a lot that summer, the shed was cozy and dry. If it stormed hard, which it also did, I closed the door. I’d installed a fan up in one corner. I ran an extension cord out from the garage to power the extra appliances.
I went to the garden store. I went to Publix. I checked the mail and paid the bills. I took my car to get the oil changed. I lived a normal life except it was mostly outdoors and I only caught occasional glimpses of my wife.
If I wanted to socialize I’d sit in the open garage at sunset and greet whatever neighbors happened to be strolling past.
One night I glanced out from the hammock where I was watching a Rays game and noticed no lights on in the house. I figured Cheeky went to bed early and didn’t worry about it. The next night it was the same. The next morning I went inside.
It was worse than the last time I’d been in there weeks earlier. Used dishes covered the counters. Garbage bags containing who knows what were piled in a kitchen corner. Magazines covered the sofa except for a spot where Cheeky usually sat. Junk mail concealed the dining room table. I glanced in the bedroom and the sheets were now unspeakable. Somehow there were no roaches. Nothing alive scattered when I kicked the garbage bags. There was a taint of bug spray in the air. Cheeky was nowhere. Her car was in the garage as usual. I walked outside and looked around.
My neighbor Dan, a retired jail deputy, was in his driveway washing his pick-up. I walked over.
“Have you seen Cheeky today, Dan?”
He stopped hosing and looked at me steadily with plenty of eye contact. “Today? No.”
“Yesterday?”
“No.” Still the eye contact.
Sometimes Dan gave the impression I was an internal affairs investigator instead of a retired teacher.
“This week at all?”
“I saw her get in the passenger seat of the bug man’s truck a couple of days ago,” he said. “Then they left.”
“The exterminator? He’s not scheduled for another two months.”
“His truck’s been here a lot lately,” Dan said. “Usually when you’re out. I figured either you had a major bug problem or you guys were friends.”
I hadn’t seen the bowing exterminator in at least a month.
“Do your friends show up when you’re not home, Dan?”
“No, they don’t. She had a suitcase,” he added reluctantly. “I figured he was giving her a ride to the airport or something.”
“Huh,” I said. “Maybe he did.”
Back inside I ventured deeper into the bedroom. Bureau drawers were open and some of Cheeky’s clothes were missing. Shorts and swimsuits, not travel clothes. Her best pair of flip-flops were absent their usual spot in the garage. I went back to the shed and got in the hammock to ponder the situation.
I woke from a refreshing nap with the bright idea to track Cheeky’s phone, my brain apparently problem-solving while I slept. That feels like you found money on the ground. I knew our phones could keep tabs on each other but never needed that because Cheeky and I worked at school together and after retirement she was usually on the sofa watching Spanish crime dramas on Netflix even though she spoke no Spanish. Plus, she’d never gone missing before.
At first I thought she was on a boat out in the bay but when I looked closer her phone was on the causeway next to the water. I watched the map for ten minutes but the phone never moved so I guessed she wasn’t in a car heading somewhere. I couldn’t figure out what Cheeky would be doing on the causeway ten miles from home. I hoped the exterminator, professional killer that he was, hadn’t murdered Cheeky and dumped her body on the beach, especially since it wasn’t a real beach, just a sandy patch between the water and road.
I headed out to find Cheeky.
Dan was washing his wife’s car now. He was a machine. “I think Cheeky ran away with the exterminator,” I told him.
He stopped scrubbing a wheel. “That mousy little bug guy?” Dan said. “Weird.” He went back to scrubbing.
I pondered things on my way toward the water. I couldn’t figure when or how Cheeky and the exterminator got the idea to run off together. What Cheeky and I had was more along the lines of domestic stability rather than tranquility, until recently. We married later in life, the first time for us both. Maybe she decided to branch out, but with Mister Prim and/or Proper? You’d think she could find someone more appropriate for a fling, like a retired P.E. teacher; man or woman.
And why was the exterminator at the house outside of his quarterly appointments? It wasn’t like we had a roach infestation, although who knows what happened during the “dirty house period” as I came to know it. Maybe Cheeky decided she needed to bring in the big guns to mitigate the effects of her mess and then developed a rapport with Mister P and P.
He seemed like the type to run in the opposite direction when faced with a mess of the magnitude that was the interior of our house but maybe he courted chaos in his own way and decided the woman who created it was just what he needed.
The guy had been spraying our house for fifteen years and I didn’t know if he was married. Heck, I didn’t even know his name. I thought I was doing well by calling him the exterminator. Everyone else called him the bug man.
I cruised the causeway until the phone showed I was there. The Prim and Proper truck was backed into some mangroves on the sand and had a small boat trailer on the back. A tent was pitched next to the truck. A big afternoon storm was blowing in off the gulf, I’d been watching it on my way there and I really wanted to be in the dry shed since a game was coming on. But this was a mystery that had to be solved.
Cheeky had never been camping in her life and certainly not with a bug and rodent slaughterer.
I parked in front of the truck and walked up toward it. As I got near the tent someone crept up behind and bonked me on the head with something large and substantial but not too heavy. I don’t know if I got knocked out or just befuddled. When I regained my senses I was laying on the damp sand next to a big red empty plastic cooler that hadn’t been there before. At least it wasn’t a shovel.
Cheeky and the exterminator were at the water clambering aboard a flimsy aluminum Jon Boat, maybe something you would buy at Sears years ago. It looked more suitable for casting for small bass on a quiet pond rather than forging out into the choppy bay in the mouth of a squall. And the storm was approaching fast. Large drops progressed across the water and began pelting the mangroves, truck, tent, and me.
In addition to afternoon storms another thing we get is funnel clouds. They skitter across the bay rapidly like mini cyclones. If they touch the surface they’re technically tornados. Then they suck up, thrash, and eventually discard water, fish and I assume other small objects in their path. I wouldn’t want to be out in the open near one, and not in a dinky little craft for sure.
They were both in the boat a few feet from shore out in the water. I could have walked over and grabbed it but that seemed a little confrontational. I hadn’t prepared myself mentally for any type of drama when I was driving out here.
With some frantic pulling the bug man got the engine going. It sputtered, coughed and smoked like something that had been sitting in his back yard unused for a few years. I was friends enough with the small engine repair teacher to know when an engine wasn’t living up to expectations.
The bug man and Cheeky were both glancing back at me in terror, although my hands were empty and I wasn’t even yelling or angry, just confused, and a little woozy from the cooler to the head. I’d never seen that look on her face and it kind of threw me. In fact it was the most emotion I’d ever seen my wife exhibit.
The engine finally caught and the boat turned slowly and sputtered out into the bay, the bug man with a death grip on the throttle and Cheeky huddled in the bow as far away from me as possible.
I finally got a little peeved. “This is neither prim nor proper!” I yelled at the slowly departing boat, hoping the use of elevated language might cause Cheeky to ask the bug man to turn around back to safety. It didn’t work. I may have made a fist.
“There’s a storm! Look out for funnel clouds!” I yelled after it was apparent they weren’t coming back. “And lightning!” They eventually puttered out into deeper water and disappeared into a wet ash-gray mass of mayhem.
Lightning finally drove me to my car, now soaking and chilled. I called 911 and reported two endangered boaters.
The little Jon Boat, which the fastidious exterminator had properly registered and numbered, was found washed up under a bridge, twisted and folded almost in half and minus its engine. Several other boaters had been caught out on the water, but unlike Cheeky and her boyfriend, were safely accounted for after the storm passed.
After a few weeks I found another exterminator, a faceless corporation that never sent the same person twice, and hired a service of the type that cleaned out squatters or dead people’s homes. The house was now spotless. I changed the locks for some reason I couldn’t articulate. I moved back inside but still go out to the shed to watch games. The hammock works for baseball, football or hockey season, so I’m out there most nights.
Sometimes, when a game isn’t particularly engaging, I lay there and think random thoughts. Like how I used to suppose, since the husband usually goes first, how someday I would die in a hospital bed, perhaps peacefully drugged, with Cheeky there next to me for the entire final act, maybe with one of her word finder books to keep her occupied, no matter how long it took. That was a comforting scenario.
Cheeky’s white face, hunkered down in the bow of the bug man’s boat, still comes to me in dreams most nights, no matter where I sleep.
Edward Hagelstein’s short fiction has appeared Roi Faineant, Mid-Level Management, Cowboy Jamboree, Pithead Chapel, Sundog Lit and other places. He lives in Georgia.
https://www.threads.net/@edhagelstein
Urban Pigs Press 
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