She sat across the booth from her teenage son in one of those chain restaurants. Dark wod, huge bar, kitschy memorabilia hanging from the rafters, and seven strategically placed big-screens 
distracting you from the fact that you are paying $26.94 for a couple of burgers and a glass that contains more ice than tea.
During their burger wait time, the sugar packets offered further diversion with trivia questions:
The Boy grabbed one and queried, “Who recorded ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’?”
“Billy Joel!” she blurted.
“Jurassic Park was released in what year?”
“1993, the same year you came screeching into my life like a hungry raptor,” she smiled and stuck out her tongue. He gave her one of those teenage boy looks. The kind of look that says, “You’re much too old to be as funny as you think you are.”
He continued, “What fictional town is the setting for many of Stephen King’s novels?” She paused for a second to search the recesses of her right brain for this information hidden between Casablanca and Clapton, Eric. Two words…begins with a C…
The Boy raised an eyebrow and his lips curled into an evil little grin, believing he had stumped her, but this kid was clueless how much Stephen King his mother had read over the years.
“Castle Rock!” she finally proclaimed.
Eventually one of the little white packets posed a personal pop-culture question:
It read, “Who would play you in the movie of your life?”
Oooo, a deep, thought-provoking question…let’s see…she’s too young for Meryl and much too old for Mila.
Tongue-in-cheek she responded, “Easy. Because of our physical similarities I would have to say…” 
and before the name “Angelina Jolie” rolled off her tongue, her son spurted out,
“Kathy Bates”?
Ugh. He was seventeen and REALLY good at it.
She then mumbled something about a sledgehammer and hobbling him like James Caan, but lucky for the Boy, the burgers arrived.
After the drama of yesterday’s flat hair we wonder how much more Stephanie and the cowboy can take? HOW. MUCH. MORE? They have now entered their 50th hour without working indoor plumbing. FIFTY HOURS. That’s roughly 3,000 minutes suffering in the desert of their shared abode.
Will she be able to discern PVC from galvanized iron? Can she manage the right length and thickness?
the vent was to crawl into, and Stephanie may have to help him get back out. She tells him not to worry. She is certain if his middle is too round to fit, and he has to remain wedged there for several days in a great tightness, she will be certain to visit every day and feed him honey until Christopher Robin can help with the rescue effort.
She turns the meter on, and behold there is water, and it is good. (cue “Hallelujah Chorus”)
When we last left our victims, the cowboy-turned-plumber had been made aware of a possible skunk under the house just as a main waterline blew. He had given up the claustrophic chore of crawling beneath the concrete to conquer the catastrophe, postponing it until tomorrow. But the dreaded “TOMORROW” is now today. BUT soon there will be water and all will be well.
looking like a decaying extra from The Walking Dead. He hurts. All over. Neck pain. Back pain. Knee pain. “Bad day,” he comments, “aching all over. Swelling. Pain. Head hurts”
Yet another day without water. The laundry is piling up. The dishwasher is overloaded. The pitchers of water are running dangerous low. The toilet is being flushed with a 5-gallon bucket of pond water.
Removing the exterior vent cover nearest the central air unit, the cowboy-turned-amateur-plumber-because-heaven-forbid-we-pay-someone-to-do-a-job-today-that-he-can-do-himself-for-free-not-counting-supplies-over-a-period-of-several-days ‘army crawls’ into the damp darkness. Once he is securely wedged under the center of the house, he begins to bang and groan and saw. Stephanie chooses this critical juncture to share important information by yelling through the floor of the kitchen.
Stop the choir! The rejoicing was woefully premature, and the repair only served to stress the line further toward the front of the house, causing a full-on rupture of the pipe.
Emergency showers are taken. Legs are left unshaven (and this is NOT November! The cowboy is risking serious stubble burn if he has his sights set on snuggling.)
The synchronized stoppage of the strange hissing sound in sync with her son’s shower and the incoming text is an awfully big coincidence. (Of course, everyone knows, there are no big coincidences or small coincidences, only coincidences.) Still, she grabs her glowing purple cell, eager to discover who, WHO, has texted at this wee hour of 8:15 a.m.??? It’s the cowboy, who left for work just after discovering the hissing noise. Text: Wrench in garage. Leak under house. Turn water off at meter.
Now Stephanie runs her bath water while the washer fills, simultaneously her son fills 2 pitchers, brushes his teeth. Miraculously the laundry finishes spinning only moments after Stephanie’s legs are shaved…DONE! And in record time – only 38 minutes from text to wrench twist and the water is OFF!
Anyway, my quest for simplicity finally led me to this 16×20. I love it dearly, but it is woefully dated and needs to go (much like that herb-laden wallpaper border in the kitchen. But that requires a stepstool and a boxcutter and two hours of my time, and I’d rather whine about it than strip it. But I digress.)
It could be perhaps
Now the chaos was vanishing
That evening we made a bed on the couch for my sister and began manually inflating the balloon-bed on which Mom and Dad insisted they would sleep. And when I say “manually” I mean “orally”. Yep. No self-inflating mattress here. No simple vacuum attachment. Not even a measly little foot pump. We huffed. We puffed. We huffed some more. We puffed some more. And we blew that giant overpriced pool float right up. . . over the course of, say, two or three hours.
At an hour late, I called the girl who had picked up last month, and she verified the semi does, indeed, say Covenant on the side, and added the fact there will likely be 2 people in the truck. A few minutes later she called back with phone numbers. So I called the organic grocery company, who gave me the number to the trucking warehouse, who gave me the truck driver’s number, who chased the cat, who killed the rat, who ate the cheese… who didn’t answer his phone.
I spent an hour taking pictures of gaudy gadgets and sending them to my daughter:”Things I am buying for your house.” I was especially fond of the 4-ft-tall-Mystic-Fairy-statue. This amused her somewhat and kept me entertained for a bit.
she said 
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