The muddle rose from my decision to add colour to our washroom. The room, and everything in it, is white as a Saskatchewan blizzard.
At the store, I chose bold navy and green accessories, including two terry bath mats for the floor, and a rubber one that pictured pebbles for inside the tub. I put that one in and out of my cart several times.
Not until after I got home and had hung the striped shower curtain did I notice the missing tub mat.
"Maybe you didn't actually buy it." The Preacher is acquainted with my dithering.
I checked the bill. "Right there. Bath mat, $12.00."
"We have a pile of lost mats here," someone at the service counter told me when I called. "Come back, get another one from the shelf, and bring it to the service counter with your bill."
"I'll go," the Preacher said. He headed back to the store, taking along my freshly-arrived brother-in-law.
The phone rang a half-hour later. "We've walked every aisle in the bath department a dozen times. We can't find a pebbly bath mat for $12.00. Neither can the clerk!"
When a bass sounds soprano, you know he's stressed. "Let me talk to her," I said.
When I described the mat, she said, "We found a mat with pebbles, but it's $15."
Right then, I knew the problem. "Um, could you please check my bill and tell me how many bath mats are on it?"
"Two," she said.
The two already in my bathroom. My last decision concerning the mat must have been to leave it.
Mortified, I explained my menopausal brain lapse, adding, "Please tell my husband to just buy it."
She hung up, had pity on those two glassy-eyed men, handed the mat to the Preacher and gave him a simple directive, the kind most men appreciate. "Your wife says to just buy it." Obediently, he headed for the till.
Back home, my thrifty brother-in-law, who didn't know about the other two mats, told me what happened next. "He was going to just buy it for $15. I told him he'd lose his credit. That he should go back to the service counter and just pay the difference between what they charged you, and its actual price. I saved you some money!"
By now so addled he wouldn't have known a bath mat from a shower curtain, the Preacher told the service counter clerk what he thought had happened: His wife had bought the mat; it rang in incorrectly, and then hadn't made it into her bag. He'd come to pick it up and wanted to pay the difference - which he did.
I laughed till I flopped.
A few days later, he set things straight with the store.
"What'd you tell them?" I asked.
"The truth," he answered, poker-face.
"What, that your wife made you shoplift, and you'd come to make it right?"
"Yep." He grinned.
Sometimes it doesn't pay to have a husband with a tender conscience.
