Shh. Everyone Will Want One.

Ring!  Ring-ring!

“Good morn – aftern – um, morning.  This is Pearl.”

There is laughter on the other end.  “You don’t know what’s going on, do you?”

“I don’t have to know what’s going on.  I’m at work. “

“Oh, you workers,” Mary  chuckles indulgently .  “Guess what I’m doing.”

Thoughts ranging from “walking the dog” to “pooping”, a long-running gag between us, run through my head.  A group heading into a meeting pass my desk and I decide to play it safe.  “I don’t know,” I say.  “Walking the dog?”

Mary laughs, a tad giddily, if you ask me.  “Packing for Sturgis!”

The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally begins this weekend, and Mary and Jon and another couple have tuned up their Harleys, cleaned their leathers and are heading west.

“That should be a pretty light luggage rack.”

I can hear Mary grinning over the phone.  “Nope,” she says.  “This year I’m going to bring shirts and a bra.”

“What, and buck years of tradition?”

“The people of South Dakota have done nothing that would result in being forced to gawp at my aging breasts.”

“You’re too hard on yourself,” I say.  “Your breasts don’t look a day over 47.”

“I’m 46.”

There is a brief, if staged, silence.  “Those were some hard years,” I say.

“Why you little…”

“Why I oughta…”

We grin at each other.  It’s over the phone, but we’re professionals.

“So why did I call?” she says.

“You want to stop by with dessert tonight.”

“Hmmm.  No, that’s not it.  Oh, I know!  Remember when I lost a fingernail in the turkey that one year?”

Who could forget?  Half-way through a traditional Thanksgiving dinner at Mary’s house some dozen or so years ago, Mary announced that she had lost a false fingernail.  She believed it may have become part of the stuffing.

Amazingly, no one found it.

“I still have nightmares,” I say.

“Well, I did it again.  Only this time, I lost a Band-Aid.  At a cleaning job.”

I laugh.

“Yep,” she says.  “It could be anywhere.  Do you think I should call?”

“And what, tell them you believe you left a used Band-Aid somewhere?”

“Umm…”

“Maybe they could put it in the mail for you.”

“Hey, now, we don’t talk like that.”

There is a moment of silence.  “Maybe I should call her on her lunch hour, just to let her know that if she finds a mystery Band-Aid that it’s mine.  It’s probably best to be honest about it.”

“It’s hard to know what to do when you’ve left something like that behind.”

The line goes silent as we consider the social ramifications behind a lost Band-Aid.

“OK,” she says, conversation over.  “I gotta go.”

“Gonna walk the dog?”

“Nope,” Mary says.  “I gotta poop.”

Click.