My Best Friend aka The One Who Helps Me Bury The Bodies pt 1

Since you all had to listen to me rant and rave yesterday and I can't in all honesty promise it won't happen again I wanted to lighten it up some today. So let me talk about my best friend who I love beyond reason because if I say I don't she will tell all my secrets and I might end up in jail with Big Bertha and me being issued an orange jumpsuit two sizes too small. I do need to give a quick explanation of both our husbands temperaments. Mine before he turned back into a teenager and began drinking was a very gentle, never complained, loving, non selfish person who never raised his voice and always put his family first. Her's on the other hand was the exact opposite. He complained about everything, yelled about everything, cussed about everything and life was all about him and what he wanted, Rebecca and the kids came somewhere about 15 of his list of important things.

We met 30 yrs ago when we both had just gotten married 2 days apart the month before, moved to this new city within 2 days of each other and just happened to move across the street from each other. Both of us had been married before so immediately we had ex husband bashing in common, we both had two children from those first unions who became immediate friends and allies against the world, we both wore a size 1 in clothes so we finally had someone to swap clothes back and forth with for the first time in our lives. Most of all we had a penchant for getting into messes that took both of us to get out of, most of which we created ourselves without meaning too. Although there are many, many times we did stuff with both eyes wide open . But we were in our very early 20's and worrying about what might happen later never occured to us. We were instant friends within a weeks time and now after all these years we are more like sisters than friends. I know what she is thinking, can finish her sentences and she can do the same for me. We have shown up many times wearing the exact same clothes without either knowing what the other was going to wear. Our dream is to someday move to a cottage in Maine, away from kids (we have not decided if we are sharing the address with them or not), we intend to sit behind our picket fence cuss out and flip off everyone that walks by. A lot of these are not in order because to be honest we have done so much it gets confusing as to when we did what.

Our first true bonding experience, and the day I knew were were kindred spirits meant to be together came about 2 months into our friendship. Rebecca, I will call her that because she that name, was in a minor car accident. I get a call from the hospital, she is refusing to let them touch her until she talks to me and I get to the hospital. I can hear her yelling in the background to give her the fucking phone. They do. She runs them out of the room. She says "Get here fast and bring a pair of your underwear!" I go flying to the hospital, I get there and she won't let anyone in the room but me. She then pulls her pants off and I see she has on a pair of her husband's tidy whities. I ask why, she told me it was because she didn't feel like doing laundry that morning so she just put on a pair of his underwear, she didn't want the staff to know she was wearing mens underwear so we hastily swapped them out. I don't think the staff ever realized what her urgency was since she only had a scraped knee and a small cut on her thigh.

We were military and my husband was on a mission, her husband worked for a local company. I had to use military insurance that wasn't accepted at the local hospitals so had to drive 30 minutes to get to a military base for care. Usually not a problem until two of our brightest children decided one night about 10:00 pm to see who could dance the fastest while they shot at each others feet with a BB gun. My son lost and was shot through the foot. But it wasn't a clean shot I could clean up and move on with, the BB didn't come out so I knew it was either embedded in muscle or bone, either way it was a dirty wound and the BB would have to be removed. We don't want to drive to the military base so we decide to "swap" kids, we grilled the kid all the way to the hospital as to what he was suppose to say if ask his name (her son's name of course), had the whole thing planned out. We get there and sign him in under her sons name and insurance, so far so good. Then we hit the obstacle of parent only in the room, which meant her and my son was not about to go without me. So she starts rambling like a drunken moose about how I am his favorite aunt and he likes me better than her and I have raised him most of his life because of her drinking problem(she is a total non drinker, like me) so I really needed to go in with them. They let us both in. Right off they ask his name and my son rambles off his real name, she reaches out and pops him in the back of the head and says "Not your nickname fool, your REAL name" The dr asks him why his nickname consists of a first, middle and last name. Rebecca chimes in with because when he was born she wanted to name him that but her husband didn't like it so she just decided to call him that as a nickname. I am looking at her in awe. Who gives a child a different last name for a nickname? By now I am thinking this is not going to work, one of those two idiots was going to get us caught for insurance fraud. Then they start asking about allergies, etc. she can't answer those questions so I do. The dr. said "But I thought you were his aunt" I came back with a whispered "Yes, but she drinks a lot and I have had to raise him, she doesn't know that much about him" So they start to take out the BB and ask my son how he was doing using her sons name, he knows the game by now only he can't remember the correct name to give them so he says my name is "Bob", I am about to die and thinking where the fuck did he get the name "Bob" from, the dr is totally confused as this is now the third name he has been presented with so I hastily explain that I didn't like his real name or his nickname so I just called him Bob. Finally it's over, we leave, the insurance paid and we laughed all the way home. Except for "Bob" who was passed out in the back seat on pain meds.

We decide to deliver telephone books, my husband by now had retired and was working for the same company hers did. The only thing was mine didn't want me to do it in the new Lexus. We assured him we wouldn't and as soon as he walked out the door get in the Lexus and take off to deliver phone books. The sun is blinding me so she says she will drive, she did, scraped the whole side of the first mail box we came to then turned, looked at me and said "that damn sun is strong, isn't it?" Now we only have three hours to get this car fixed in. We spend 2 hours and 45 minutes driving all over town being told it can't be done, it will have to wait until morning. So now comes the monumental task of hiding the damage until morning. Neither one of us can back up a car to save our lives but somehow we had to back it into the garage so when my husband comes in he can't see the side that is damaged. We managed to finally get it in there. The next morning my husband for the first time since buying the car decides he wants to drive it to work. I hurriedly ran around the other side and declared there wasn't enough room to open the door so he needed to just get in the passenger side and slide over to the drivers side. He does, and pulls out of the garage. I instantly start screaming at him that he has hit the side of the garage and damaged my new car. He fell for it, hook, line and sinker. Apologizing all over the place. Until he reads this blog he is stalking, he never new it wasn't really him but us that did the damage.

Another time Rebecca wanted a new dishwasher and her husband wasn't having it. So we decided to just do it anyway and take the consequences of his yelling and screaming when he saw it. We buy it, have it delivered and find out it has to have a plumber hook up a different line, no problem he can be there in an hour, still plenty of time. Until her husband decides to pop in for lunch. There it is in the middle of the kitchen floor. I hurriedly threw a table cloth on it, grabbed some canisters from the counter and placed on it and Rebecca puts a cute little vase with flower in it on it. Then I lean against it. Fool comes in, actually laid his sunglasses on top of it, ate lunch, talked with us and left, never once noticing the dishwasher out in the middle of the floor. It took him three months to realize he had a different dishwasher. But then what could you expect, he didn't notice the new television we bought for the bedroom for almost a year either, Rebecca just piled clothes around it so all he saw was the screen, he never noticed it was a lot bigger.

One day she finds a dress she wants so she spends the money for the cable bill on that dress and of course they turned off the cable. Her husband, we shall call him by the fictitious name of Bill, came home from work and turned on the television, of course it didn't work. She convinces him it is an outage and she would call them the next morning. Instead she calls me, we knew he would not believe the outage story another week until I got paid so I could give her the money to pay it with. We had to do better than that. So we get us a set of pliers and go to work on the cable line outside the house, but it was an old cable line that had been disconnected many years before and was just laying loose under the house. We unscrewed the new line and threw it up under the house. He comes in from work that night and she tells him a squirrel has chewed threw the line and the cable company had to order a part, it would be 4 or 5 days before they could have it fixed. He never new any better.