By Shaun Haurin

Opal had an annoying habit of leaving stuff she no longer wanted on our doorstep. What’s more, she refused to call ahead or send a warning text. She wouldn’t even ring the bell. (She once gave us a partial gallon of rainbow water ice on a warm spring day, and it wasn’t until a neighbor kid spotted it staining our stoop like an oil slick that we became aware of the leaky treat, accompanied by a sticky caravan of ants.) “It’s just Opal’s way,” was how my wife explained it to me the first few times I opened the front door and nearly tripped over one of her sister’s “offerings.” “Tell her we have enough junk of our own,” I would say, or some cranky comment along those lines. “She can take it to a flea market.” Wendy would just roll her wide-set eyes and smile her eternally camera-ready smile. “You’re missing the point, Tom. She doesn’t want to sell her stuff to strangers. She wants family to have it.” “But what if family doesn’t want it?” I’d press. At which point Wendy, who was likely late for an audition, would cut the conversation short. She was done defending her sister. Not that Opal wasn’t a bona fide blackbelt when it came to verbally defending herself.

On bad days, I thought of my sister-in-law as a mangy stray for whom depositing her gleefully eviscerated prey was a sign of great respect. On slightly better days, I thought of her as a kind of half-assed Santa Claus. Not in a million years would we ask for the sort of gifts we were routinely given: A trash bag full of bucatini pool noodles (we didn’t have a pool); a cast-iron fondue pot (Wendy was lactose intolerant); an “autographed” portrait of Kevin Costner atop a horse, dressed in full-blown Dances with Wolves regalia (it was a portrait of Kevin Costner atop a horse). Opal once left us a heaping brown bag of bargain-basement lingerie—assuming the basement was located at the bottom of a brothel. It was coarse, iridescent stuff, as if its wearer’s chief concern was not getting lost in the dark. Its intense color seemed to come off on our hands. Never mind that Opal was twice Wendy’s size. It’s hard to imagine any woman being taken seriously in that sort of underwear, let alone lusted after, coveted, craved. But maybe being taken seriously wasn’t the point. Opal was good-looking, but her sense of humor tended toward the shadier side of the street. In fact she looked a lot like Wendy—Wendy with a perpetual sneer and a little extra face between her features. Once, at the beach, we came across a guy armed with a Sharpie who was drawing caricatures of passersby on balloons. After a few seconds of scribbling, his zany, inflated medium squeaking like a set of handlebar brakes, he handed us Wendy’s likeness. She and I looked at each other and shared the same tipsy thought aloud: Opal.

All this by way of saying that I was fed up with my sister-in-law’s offerings when I opened the front door and found Mike, Opal’s husband, standing there looking as though he didn’t have exact change for the bus. This didn’t bode well. Mike never stopped by unannounced, not even in the event of an emergency (twice he’d found himself locked out of his house, and both times had decided against bothering us. Instead, he’d killed a few hours at the corner bar, where he nursed Coke after Coke—Mike didn’t drink—and, for the bartender’s sake as much as his own, pretended to give a rat’s ass about whatever ballgame was broadcast on the widescreen TV). Plus, he was holding a bulging pillowcase like some overachieving trick-or-treater.

“Mike,” I said.

“Hey, Tom. Sorry to bother you.”

“It’s no bother,” I lied. Mike and I got along just fine, which was a polite way of saying we would never be friends. “What’s up?”

He glanced over his shoulder. “Um, not much. Opal just dropped me off.”

“Oh, really?” I made a show of glancing up and down the street but saw no sign of my wife’s stealthy kid sister. “Is it poker night?”

This was a joke. Mike didn’t play poker, though his face was doing a passable impression of a royal flush.

I regarded Mike; Mike regarded his pillowcase. “She left me here,” he said finally. “What do you mean, ‘left you here’?”

“This is a little weird,” he admitted.

“And getting weirder by the moment.”

He met my gaze long enough to say, “She doesn’t want me anymore, Tom. She’s had enough.”

“Oh, you had a fight,” I chuckled like some battle-of-the-sexes-scarred broth- er-in-arms. I had a niggling feeling there was more to it than that. “It happens to the best of us.”

Mike seemed vaguely insulted. “Actually, we just spent a pleasant afternoon picnicking at the park.”

I was confused. “How pleasant could it have been? You said she doesn’t want you anymore.”

“That’s right.”

“Did she tell you that? Were those her exact words?”

Mike snorted. It was such an ugly, sarcastic sound, and so out of character for him, that I reeled backward, as though he’d sneezed without covering his nose. “Her exact words were, ‘I’m cleaning house, Mike. If Wendy asks, tell her I’m done with you.’”

“If she asks?”

He laughed nervously. “I know, right.”

On slow nights back in college, we commuters played this game called Hand-Me-Downs. It was a simple contest, in its purest form: competing and not entirely sober teams went door-to-door in search of the most outlandish “hand-me-down.” The prize was often a case of beer, but we didn’t play for the booze so much as the crazy shit people would give us and the stories that often went along with them. But no story ever topped that of glorious Mrs. Fitzsimmons, a long-retired schoolteacher and sci-fi aficionada. After she invited us into her home—an act of brazen hospitality or utter foolishness, depending on your worldview—and we explained the rules of the game we were playing, Mrs. Fitzsimmons glanced around her living room and, with more than a trace of mischief animating her milky blue eyes, proclaimed, “Take me!” “You?” we asked, glancing at one another as if to confirm we’d heard the woman right. “You mean, you you?” “Why not?” she asked. “I don’t know why you don’t have young ladies to chase or better things to do, but you boys show up with me and”—here Mrs. Fitzsimmons went dead in the eyes and lowered her voice to mimic a movie-grade Terminator—“game over.” We might’ve laughed along with her if we hadn’t been so flabbergasted. We fancied ourselves unshockable city boys, chronically blasé. But here this stout, sharp-tongued old lady, in some ways so reminiscent of our own grandmothers—women who were in bed by seven and refused to answer the door after five—had shocked us all. “I’m eighty years old,” said spritely Mrs. Fitzsimmons, shrugging as if it were a done deal. She took her coat off a hook by the door. “I’m the original hand-me-down.”

“Look, I know this sounds strange,” Mike was saying. “I just need to talk to your wife.” He tightened his grip on the pillowcase, which, judging by the wild, miserable look in his eye, was stuffed with a clowder of rowdy tomcats he was on his way to drown. He peered, desperately, over my shoulder. “Is Wendy home, by any chance?”

“I didn’t kick him out,” Opal told her sister when she finally picked up the phone. “I gave him away. There’s a big difference.”

Wendy asked her to explain.

“I care about Mike, obviously.”

“Well, from where we sit, that isn’t obvious at all.”

“Whatever,” came Opal’s petulant reply. “I don’t want him anymore, that’s all. I went and got a new one.”

“A new what?” cried Wendy. “A new husband?” “Fuck no,” Opal laughed.

“Thank god.”

“But I did get a new man, sis. I’m not a freaking nun.”

Wendy gestured to me that it would be better for Mike if she continued the call in the privacy of the adjoining room. But the house wasn’t so old, and the walls were a far cry from being soundproof. If you tried to eavesdrop, as determinedly as I was trying, it really wasn’t all that different from being a mute participant on a party line.

“Be straight with me, Opal,” I heard Wendy say. “Who is this guy?”

“I have no idea.”

“What?”

“Seriously, Sis, we only just met.”

“Just like that.”

“Yup, just like that,” Opal said. “I Showed up at the Whole Foods, undid a button on my hemp blouse and pretended—Oh, woe is me—to confuse kale with collard greens.”

“Opal.”

“Or was it mustard greens.”

“Opal.”

“What? I’m telling you the truth. Undone buttons are better than any dating app. You should stop trolling Bumble and try that vegan market near the house.”

“Damn it, Opal!” erupted Wendy. “This isn’t about me.” “Please. Everything is about you, sis.”

Wendy went quiet. It wasn’t the first time Opal had accused her of being incurably self-involved. Yet it stung her every time.

“You need to come and get your husband,” Wendy said.

“That’s not going to happen. I don’t want him anymore.”

Wendy groaned. “Then divorce him like a grownup.”

“All in good time.”

“And how long will that be, Opal? He can’t stay here indefinitely.”

“Why not?” She sounded genuinely surprised. “You have plenty of room. You’ve never turned down any of my offerings before.”

“That’s not the point.”

“You’ve always liked Mike.”

“Yes, of course, but . . . ”

“He’s a great cook. And he vacuums like a dream. Seriously, I think the man’s half aardvark, the way he’s always going around slurping up pissants.” I heard a wet, snuffling sound: Opal’s impression of her Hoover-like husband. “Tom’s always waxing moronic about starting up poker night. Now’s his chance.”

“Tom wouldn’t know a full house from a sitcom,” I heard my eternally closeup-ready wife say.

“Not my problem.”

“Oh, you mean the way your marital issues are not my problem.”

“That’s just it, Sis,” Opal said. “There are no marital problems. Mike still loves me or thinks he does. And I don’t hate him. I just don’t want him. The thrill is gone. Along with my half of our joint savings account.”

“You don’t know what you want,” Wendy said. “You never have.”

“I know what I don’t want,” sneered Opal.

“But you’ve only been married a few years. You wrote those lovely vows. You made a promise.”

But it was a moot point—or a mute point. The line was dead.

Opal was as good as her word. Mike, indeed, was an excellent cook. As for the vacuuming, I’d never seen our carpets so clean. Rather than an aardvark, he put me in mind of a lumbering Snuffleupagus, haunting our oft-untidy home in near-constant search of dust bunnies and cracker crumbs.

A couple of weeks into Mike’s residency, as I liked to call it, Wendy had had enough.

“This can’t go on,” she whined. “What are we supposed to do with him?”

“Feed him,” I said drolly. “Change him. Burp him.”

She eyed me with annoyance. “Said the man who doesn’t want children.”

“Hey, I never said I don’t want children.”

“No, you just insist on wearing a condom even though I’ve been on birth control half my life.”

“You’re only thirty-two.”

“And?”

Wendy was right, I didn’t really want kids. But I’d been given a lifetime sup- ply of brightly colored condoms as a gag gift the night of my bachelor party— my friends’ way of saying carpe diem, if not that I’d make a lousy father—and damn if I was going to let them go to waste.

“Well, if we ever do have kids, taking care of Mike will have been good practice.”

“You’re equating a semi-divorced thirty-year-old tax attorney with a baby.”

I considered this. “Mike woke me up the other night with his sobbing. And I have caught him admiring your breasts. Does that count?”

Wendy snorted. “At least somebody admires them.”

“In my defense—”

“I know, I know,” she sighed, “you’re an ass man.”

“Butt crack is the new cleavage.”

“Such a charmer.”

“You prefer someone less entertaining? A teetotaler, say, who doesn’t play poker?”

Wendy shrugged. “He cooks, he cleans, he admires my body. Sounds like the perfect husband to me.”

“Your sister sure thought so.”

“My sister’s . . .”

“Yes?”

“Confused,” she said after a moment.

“Finally, something we can agree on!”

“She’s desperate, Tom. She’s unhappy.” She gave me a look. “I hear there’s a lot of that going around.”

I feigned taking an arrow to the heart. My unhappy wife blew me a kiss all the way from the kitchen, where Mike had a big pot of some fancy gourmet soup simmering on the stove. I watched her remove the lid and dip a tentative finger in; I watched her lick the slender digit clean, largely for my benefit; I watched her disappear, slowly and with what can only be called a sashay, up the long, narrow staircase in her lowriding jeans. New cleavage indeed.

A better man would’ve followed her. No, a better man would’ve made his buxom wife happy, if only for a few wild moments, right then and there on the spotless checkerboard floor.

Opal called the next day, ostensibly to get Wendy’s banana muffin recipe. I suspected she was really checking up on Mike.

“She’s caving,” I said.

“Opal doesn’t cave,” Wendy reminded me.

“She misses him.”

“Maybe,” she conceded. “But my earlier point stands: Opal doesn’t cave.”

“She wants him back.”

“Even if that were true,” said Wendy, “which, by the way, it’s totally not, Opal would never admit it, much less act on it.”

“How can you be sure? You said yourself that every person is a mystery, even to themselves.”

Wendy laughed and put down her phone. “When did I say that?”

“I’m paraphrasing.”

“No, you’re lying.”

“What’s the line, then, Wendy? The one in the commercial?”

She stared at me blankly. “The hummus commercial?”

She was being willfully naive. Wendy wasn’t exactly proud of the fact, but a new brand of dessert hummus had made her a household name. Trouble was that the name was fake; Suzie, the doting girlfriend of a criminally misunderstood man named Yousef, was a role she played—and played well. The character was wildly popular, as far as fifteen-second hummus ads go. Suzie wasn’t quite on a par with AT&T’s Lily or Progressive’s Flo (currently starring in insurance spots with Jon Hamm!). But Wendy had signed on as their official co-spokesperson, and more commercials were in the works. Like it or not, Yousef Hummus was gradually making my wife famous.

She looked away in mock dismay but humored me all the same. “‘Get to know yousef—for a change.’”

“That’s it!”

“Come on, Tom. It’s just some bullshit line meant to move product.”

“No, it’s profound! It’s poetry!”

“Fuck you,” she giggled.

“You see, you don’t know Opal all that well. According to Suzie, you can’t know Opal all that well! Opal barely knows herself!”

Wendy just shook her head. “Has she asked for the fondue pot back? Or the power washer? Or the mechanical bull?”

“I kind of dig the mechanical bull, to be honest.”

“No, Tom,” Wendy said, reading my mind, “you dig cowgirls.”

I’d signed her up for her three weeks of a hoedown-themed gym class one year for Christmas, along with Daisy Dukes and overalls to go with them, and based on this whimsical act of generosity, my wife chose to believe I had a thing for farmers’ daughters. When she saw all the denim, Wendy also assumed I’d booked us a trip to the dude ranch in Montana she’d been hinting about. Imagine her disappointment.

The Christmas Eve argument that followed had been heated enough to roast chestnuts.

You’re always telling me I have a flat ass and then you buy me short shorts.

I never said flat.

You said in my case NASA stood for No-Ass Slope Administration.

It was a joke.

Yeah? Well, ha-fucking-ha.

I regarded my wife, who had resumed scrolling on her phone.

“Why are you always on your phone?”

Wendy didn’t flinch. “That’s an exaggeration.”

“No, it’s not.” She ignored me. “What are you doing now?”

“Just the crossword, dear.”

“Can I see?”

I assumed she hadn’t heard me, that Wendy was so immersed in her pretentious little puzzle that my request hadn’t even registered. But when she sprang from the armchair and shoved her phone in my face, not unlike the fistful of wedding cake she’d smooshed into my mouth, albeit laughingly, almost a decade before, I realized how wrong I’d been.

“See!” she cried. “A bunch of little boxes with letters inside. You know what that’s called?”

“A crossword puzzle,” I muttered.

“Congratulations.”

She sat back down and returned her attention to her screen.

“I thought you might be trolling Bumble,” I said after an awkward moment had passed. I seemed to operate under the assumption that if it was best to leave a tender moment alone, it was even better—that is to say, defiantly masochistic—to blow an awkward moment to smithereens.

Wendy’s mouth was motionless, but I caught her angry eyes flicker, a lightbulb either coming on or burning out, only a complete idiot or seasoned electrician would say for sure.

“What if it’s genetic?” I asked.

“What are you even talking about?”

“Your sister’s condition. What if handing down husbands just happens to run in the family?”

“And who the fuck would I hand you down to, huh?” she sniped. “I’m all out of siblings.”

“Lucky for me,” I said feebly.

“Yes,” agreed Wendy. “Lucky for you.”

“Can I help you?”

“Er, I’m not really sure.” The remarkably handsome man loitering on our doorstep had mesmerizing green eyes; sumptuous, pelt-like hair; a lean, muscular torso. He looked like somebody who’d wandered off a soap opera set, where punishingly jacked bods and slightly skewed beauty were the norm. Wendy had starred, briefly, in a local daytime soap when we’d first started dating, and all the men looked like relatives of this guy (and all the women like relatives of Wendy). He was better-looking than ninety percent of the population but nowhere near attractive enough, say, to be granted leading-man status in a summer blockbuster. The hypnotic green eyes were a fraction too far apart, the ninety-degree nose slightly off-center, the lush, womanly mouth snagged at one corner. “I don’t know why I’m here.”

“Well, let’s start with the basics,” I said, intrigued despite myself. Was he experiencing a legitimate existential crisis or merely playing dumb? Perhaps he was having a bad trip and had mistaken our house for a safe place. Perhaps he was putting me on. “Who are you?” I asked. “What do you want?”

“Jacob,” he smiled crookedly and stuck out a hand. He seemed relieved to know the answer to at least one of my questions. “Jake, actually.”

“Pleased to meet you, Jake Actually.”

“Ha.”

We shook. His grip was strong but not overpowering, like that of a man accustomed to making deals.

“So far, so good,” I said. “Are you selling something? No, wait, you’re a new neighbor and you just realized you’ve moved in next door to the lovely and talented Wendy O’Neal.”

“No, no.” He knit his dark brows, which were enviably arched and suspiciously even. “Wait, for real?”

I waggled my own anemic eyebrows. “Oh, Ms. O’Neal,” I called.

“I’m in the kitchen, Tom,” Wendy called back. “What is it?”

“You’re needed at the front door.”

“Yeah, but I’m in the middle of something.”

Jake started to protest but I waved him off.

“Surely you can spare a moment for your adoring public . . . ”

“My what?” she sighed. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

Wendy appeared in the foyer, hair tied back, sleeves rolled, bodkin-like knife in hand. I’d interrupted Mike’s oyster-shucking tutorial, which was merely the latest of many such culinary classes he’d given my wife over the last few weeks—in lieu of rent, he joked. “What are you shouting about . . . ”

She stopped dead in her tracks when she caught sight of yummy Jake Actually. Decent-looking guys were a dime a dozen in our neighborhood (almost all of them, I couldn’t help noticing, attached to far more attractive women). But Soap Star Jake was cut from a decidedly different cloth—Egyptian cotton, say, rather than the knock-off shammies with which cheapskate motorheads buffed their cars.

“Oh, hello.” Wendy locked eyes with Jake as though his mesmerizing peepers were a rolling camera for which she was showcasing her good side.

“Oh, man,” he gushed. “This is unbelievable. I’m a big fan.”

“You must really like hummus.”

“Hummus?” he asked. “Oh, right. The commercials. No, no. I used to watch Brotherly Love, like, religiously.”

As a rule, my wife didn’t blush. She didn’t know how. At parties, we often played a game called Make Wendy Blush. Lewd photos, embarrassing anecdotes, foul language, crude jokes—nothing worked. Jake here was a ringer. But what was the prize?

“What are you selling?” she asked, her nervous cough not so unlike the sound of a credit card swipe. Jake could’ve said Cyan-Ade and Wendy would’ve taken an entire case off his hands.

“No, I don’t . . . ”

“You don’t what?” Wendy said, her voice thick with innuendo. An adoring stud was one thing, but an adoring flustered stud was just too much fun. “Never say never,” she smiled slyly. “Maybe you just haven’t met the right girl.”

This was getting ridiculous. Yet when Wendy glanced my way, all I could do was shrug. “I went to get the paper and there he was,” I explained. “A little lost lamb.”

“Four legs good,” laughed Wendy. She glanced at the crotch of Jake’s snug-fitting jeans. “Three legs better.”

Jake looked from my wife to me and back again. “Um, Opal dropped me off,” he said sheepishly.

“Opal?” we said in unison.

“Yeah. She, um, thought you would get some use out of me—her words, not mine.”

I tried to catch my wife’s eye, but my wife only had eyes for Jake Actually. They were the size of the oysters she had been learning how to shuck.

“You don’t happen to work at Whole Foods, do you, Jake?”

“No, why?”

“No reason.”

I could see Wendy’s wheels spinning. If this wasn’t Opal’s boyfriend from Whole Foods, who was he? And what of his predecessor? Was he at least as attractive as Jake Actually? And if so, who had Opal pawned him off on?

“Do you think she’ll be back for me?”

“Who?” asked Wendy. “Little Bo Peep?”

He shrugged.

“It’s hard to say, Jake. People are such mysteries to each other.”

“I guess that’s true.”

“But in the meantime, we’ll give you a good home here.” Wendy slipped the oyster knife into her apron pocket and took hold of Jake’s sturdy, branchlike forearm. I could’ve built a treehouse on that thing, had I been inclined to build anything.

“What are you good at?” she asked, leading him into the house. “Do you have any special skills? What I mean is, how can you contribute?”

“I’m good with my hands.” Jake’s face turned the color of raw red meat. “Opal says I give a mind-blowing massage.”

Wendy shot me an accusatory look over her shoulder. “I haven’t had a massage in ages,” she cooed, stroking Jake’s arm. “It was sweet of Opal to think of me—of us. My sister’s generosity knows no bounds.”

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Shaun Haurin is the author of Public Displays of Affectation, a story collection. His fiction has appeared in The Baltimore Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, and Philadelphia Stories, among other publications. He lives in Greenwich, Connecticut.