I’ll Have a Scotch, Hold the Shards of Glass

Posted On September 1, 2010

Granted, it was a Monday. But despite that, I woke up with high hopes and a cliché-free attitude.

That is, until it all came crashing down. Literally.

Allow me to back up a bit and tell you that a few weeks ago my husband apparently decided that he was 87 years old because he came home with a bottle of Scotch. He was also wearing an ascot. Okay, he wasn’t really wearing an ascot.

It was a dickey.

Okay, kidding about the dickey, too. (Or am I?) But suffice to say, the old man’s been sipping on the Scotch every so often since it appeared in our house, and he probably had half the bottle gone.

(Notice I just used the word “had”? That’s a little foreshadowing there for you, folks.)

He had ingeniously stored the bottle on top of the refrigerator. Because our kids couldn’t just scoot a chair up there and get it if they really wanted it, like they do with cereal, bread, and basically anything edible within a 5-mile radius. Who needs a liquor cabinet?

So this morning as I was getting Boys #2 and #3 breakfast so I could drive them to school in a few minutes, I opened the refrigerator door, grabbed the milk carton out of the shelf in the door, and closed the fridge.

And that’s when I heard the crash, like someone had thrown a baseball (or, perhaps, a liquor bottle) through the window. A moment later a smell like the stench of the town drunk on a three-day bender hit my nostrils. And the floor looked like the floor of the saloon after a shootout. Wet, with shards of green glass everywhere.

There was not only a pool of scotch on the floor, but it was also running down the side of the cupboard, and the dog’s food and water dishes had both been spiked.

I stood, frozen, unsure where to begin cleaning it up. And that’s when the doorbell rang, and I remembered that I had offered to take our neighbor’s son to school, too.

“Hey there, Skippy, have a seat while the boys finish their breakfast and I down this drink, will ya? Nothing like a shot of whiskey in the morning to get the blood pumping!”

But I didn’t really want to call attention to the overwhelming smell of alcohol that was pervading our home, so I just pretended that I couldn’t see or smell it and I, got the boys ready to go and drove them to school.

And prayed that they didn’t have sticky Scotch on the bottom of their shoes. We’re already flagged as “those kind of parents.” Like we need one more reason for DHS to pay us a friendly visit!

So after dropping off the boys, I did what I was planning to do on this Monday and this day off of mine—go home and clean up a brand-new mess so that I don’t have time to take care of the messes that were already waiting for me to clean up.

Stupid Monday.

I felt like I should maybe explain to my neighbor what had happened, just in case her son told her later that our house smelled like “Grandpa’s special prune juice” or something. But how do you bring up that subject?

I guess she either didn’t hear about it or didn’t care, because she sent her son to my house again Tuesday morning.

After I finally got the glass swept up and the cabinet and floors scrubbed, I was exhausted. And it was only 10 in the morning.

Man, I thought, I could really use a drink.

Oh.

Crap.