Pepperoni Dryer Fires — One Angry Waitress

Now that we’ve been at home alone for several weeks, I’m learning stranger and stranger things about my partner. The other day, it was the revelation that he sometimes carries meat around in his pockets.

We were watching it snow outside, and were having a fairly serious conversation, when he reached into the pocket of his hoodie and pulled out a stick of pepperoni.

“Why… do you have that?” I asked.

“Because I like pepperoni.”

“No, I mean, like, why do you have that in your pocket?”

“I thought I might get hungry, and the fridge is all the way over there.”

“I still don’t understand. Did you think that maybe we might be abducted at a moment’s notice and you’ll need a snack for the time that we spend in captivity?”

“No.”

There was a long pause before I asked, “Who are you?”

This time alone has brought other things to light too. Neither of us dusts, though we finally have all of the time in the world to do so. But I’m not the one of us who cares. I think that after a certain point, it doesn’t get any worse, so why bother?

“If it bugs you so much, you do it,” I tell him, lifting a book off the counter.

“This is exactly what I’m talking about,” he says, pointing to the rectangular shape the book has left behind.

“So what? This way, I know exactly where to put it back.”

“You’re a savage,” he says, as he walks away from me—I feel that we’ve spent a great portion of this pandemic walking away from each other.

We’re mostly having the same disagreements that we always did, but now nobody really gets angry, because there’s nowhere to storm off to. What am I going to do, go sit in my car in the garage? Yeah, that’ll really show him.

I suppose I could take the high road and try to believe that maybe I’ll actually learn something from this time, like to check pockets before I toss things into the washing machine so that the whole house doesn’t smell of baking pepperoni. And as someone who once washed (and dried) their partner’s cellphone, I could do with such a lesson.

“Oh, were you wearing that?” he often mimics, when he finds that I’ve done it again. “Perfect. Take it off so I can throw it directly into the wash.”

But pepperoni or not, I doubt I’ll ever learn. I doubt it because today I washed $5, two lighters and a tiny screwdriver. Someone is going to be so pleased with all of the little holes that the latter of these things left in all of his clothes.