Them's the Breaks

Peter:

You haven’t lived until your wife calls you at a bar. By “calls you at a bar,” I’m talking old school, as in:

1. A phone actually rings (yes, there’s an honest to goodness BELL inside it)
2. Several men say something to the effect of “If it’s my wife, I just left five minutes ago.” I do that, too; because that line was so funny the first seven hundred times, I just know it’s a classic!
3. The bartender picks up, says “Stinky McDrinkington’s” or whatever, pauses for a moment, and calls out “Is there a [First Name, Last Name] here?!?”
4. Some guy either plays the “Not Here” game, or sheepishly takes the receiver. Regardless, he’s gone in five minutes.
5. Somewhere, at some point in the near future, hell is eventually paid.

Ah, childhood.

But today? I mean, who gets a call from his wife at the official bar telephone number anymore? Beat up old rummies who can’t afford a cell phone, right? That’s what I thought, until that fateful evening of March 16; that no-man’s-land of a day that’s stuck hard between “Luck of the Irish” and “Being Brutally Murdered by a Gaggle of Your So-called Friends.”

“Is there a Peter Spaulding here?” It doesn’t even register.

“Is there a Peter Spaulding here?” I sit there mute, unable to believe that there are two Peter Spauldings in this bar, at this very moment. Uncanny!

With assistance from my ManDate (it was far too early in the evening for me to have forgotten my own name, thank you), it eventually sinks in that Sara is trying to call me on the house phone at Al’s Airport Inn; I think the bartender telling me “call your wife” was the clincher. Which, if you know my laid-back, low-maintenance wife, means she’s either bleeding to death, just found a foot of water in the basement, or (God help us) went into pre-term labor. After all, if she wants to annoy me (Kidding, honey! Kiss-kiss!) while I’m out with friends, she knows she can always call my cell phone…which, as I learned the hard way, I can’t hear when the thing is stuck in my coat pocket while I tool up Route 29, rockin’ out to the National Public Radio. Damn you, Robert Siegel and ME-shell Norris.

It turns out that the following text message, sent some 20 minutes earlier, before I left The Mill Hill Saloon, is the reason I haven’t been sleeping in the garage for the past three weeks: “This place is lame. Goin to Al’s for some shuffle bowling.” Therefore, I will pause here to say this: all you men who think that checking in with your wife is the bailiwick of henpecked milquetoasts can line up and Bite Me.

I called Sara to learn of the very real possibility that she broke her wrist, having slipped halfway down the stairs. She seemed pretty calm, all things considered; I would learn days later that this apparent Midwestern stoicism belied the increasingly frantic voice messages she left on my phone, which culminated with “PETER!!! ANSWER YOUR (unprintable, for I am a gentleman) PHONE!!!” I ran out the door, leaving my ManDate with 11.75 ounces of frosty-cold Budweiser, and made it home in 15 minutes.

Yeah, Sara’s wrist seemed to be pretty well mangled. And it hurt like hell, given what I know of her pain tolerance. So we drove on up to Capital Health, Trenton’s lunar landscape of a roadway system coaxing some or other unprintable out of Sara every block or so. Hell, I was just happy not to have the car destroyed by a pothole on Calhoun Street, leaving the two of us at the mercy of the local thugletariat.

The ER at Capital was pretty quiet; it was thoughtful of Sara to sustain this injury on a Tuesday. As soon as we were called in to triage, I learned something that I guess I knew viscerally, but had never experienced firsthand:

If you want to feel like a top-flight scumbag, take your pregnant wife to the ER with a possible fracture.

I couldn’t help but believe that every staffer we encountered that night looked at us and thought “Yup, textbook wife beater. Of course she won’t admit it, she’s carrying his kid, isn’t she? Yup, we’ll be seeing HER again, I am so sure!” And so on.

I would learn something else, a week or two later:

If you want to feel like an even bigger scumbag, when you take your pregnant wife to the ER with a possible fracture, you should sit there worrying about what everyone thinks of YOU.

We eventually learned that Sara’s wrist was, in fact, fractured; though, as wrist fractures go, not a horrible break. Nope, not horrible at all; tell that to the very pregnant woman who will have to wear a cast on her dominant arm for the next six (to eight!) weeks. Because some measure of bodily trauma was sustained, Sara’s OB sent us up to the L&D as a precaution, to find out what was going on with Our Little Miracle. Fortunately, the little almost-tyke was just fine. Once we learned this, we decided we’d much rather watch that episode of “The King of Queens” in our own living room, than in the comfort of a spare maternity room. However, we couldn’t be discharged until the attending physician came by with his blessing, so we were able/forced to watch the rest of TKoQ, which is by far the shining star of the “Fat Slob with Impossibly Hot Wife Sitcom” television genre….

Three weeks later: Sara is suffering the cast as gladly as one could reasonably expect (read: not gladly at all). I recently reminded her that she was “halfway there,” and…let’s just say that Sara definitely considers that particular glass to be half empty. I know because I asked for confirmation. And received it. Without hesitation. And I can’t blame her. All things considered, however, she is doing rather great, for someone who is learning to squeeze every drop of function to be had from an arm that’s cast in fiberglass from knuckles to elbow. Pregnancy tends to spawn many an unforgettable story; all in all, we'd have preferred one slightly less painful.