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Inconvenient Lies

Posted on October 25, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

How great is it when a sick person you know just, dies? Not great at all? Must’ve been someone related to you (funerals can be terribly wearing, especially when you can’t leave whenever you want to) or someone you loved.

The exact same thing happened to Mary Sue and she was both hurt and angry at the same time. It was nearly impossible that those two emotions could occupy the same space but Mary Sue managed. She was resourceful like that.

The fellow who died was Larry, her long-time lover and sometime boyfriend who did everything in his power to keep the fact that he was screwing other broads from getting between him and his girl whenever he felt the time was right. Mary Sue wasn’t exactly a dumb girl but she seemed to have accepted the blinkers Larry bought her as the best present a girl could receive.

See Larry did everything right. Everything that is, except for dying in the car of the woman he was screwing outside of Mary Sue’s knowledge. If anyone had had the slightest inkling that Mary Sue suspected her man’s fancy for another girl, such a person might have suspected that prim and proper Mary Sue had got down on her knees and done something horrible to the cable that connected the brakes of the girl’s car to the pedal that Larry pushed in vain in the moments before their speeding vehicle was stopped dead by the wall that stood behind the tree that split the front of the car in two.

Mary Sue hadn’t suspected a thing because Larry was always attentive in bed, never too tired to rub her back or massage her temples or seduce her feet so that he could get in between her legs. He bought her flowers just because it was Wednesday and he took her to the movies on Fridays because he liked her to be among the first to see what motion pictures were playing that weekend. He took his hat off indoors and he held doors open and chairs back for her. When she was on his arm he ignored the other women in any room and in so doing he made himself more attractive to her and the girls who left him their phone numbers when she wasn’t looking.

Larry was the best boyfriend a girl could want and he made sure enough girls had him. Only Mary Sue didn’t know about it. But then neither did Sandra Dee and Betty May. The only girl that did know was Callie Anne and she was the one who died in the car with him that evening their car split past a tree and bumped into a wall.

At a separate funeral across town Callie Anne’s husband Murray looked like he was standing up to the loss of his cheating wife with a stoic strength few people knew he possessed. Yet again, people might have seen his behaviour differently if they suspected he knew about the affair. It seemed to be a time when people knew much lesser than they should so his silent grieving helped him pick up wife number two right at Callie’s wake. Of course they would do a little dance around each other while waiting for the passage of an appropriate amount of time before finally consummating and then legalizing their union. Still Murray would never trust a woman ever again.

Not that Mary Sue knew any of this or would have even cared if she did. She was still trying to figure out what kind of sick man professed his love to one woman and died in a car with another.

The police captain neglected to mention that Larry’s flies were undone. He also neglected to mention that there appeared to be lipstick stains inside Larry’s undershorts. From where he stood in the shade of one of the many trees that lined the graveyard he concluded that Mary Sue was not the type of woman to put that kind of stain in a man’s undershorts. From the photograph he had seen of Callie May he also concluded that she most definitely was that type of woman.

As he returned to his car after Larry was in the ground, Captain Maguire couldn’t help feeling a little bad that girls like Callie died young while girls like the one he married stuck around long enough to get round and old and never amount to much fun at all.

On the sunny October afternoon that Larry and Callie were laid to rest, few people realised that it was also a funeral for two people’s naiveté. If they had known, people would have applauded because the world could do with fewer naïve people. They do nobody any good.

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