I'll Just Pee Off The Deck Then

In our house, we have one bathroom. It has a pretty swanky dual-flush toilet, and I installed the Water Pik Ecoflow showerhead in our bath. I love the subway tile floor, the loads of storage space for such a tiny room, and my tendency towards blocking up the back of the toilet with pretty flowers. Flowers. Ugh, I can't get enough of you, ever, no matter how many rooms I put you in.

Still, it's only one bathroom, and when Elka spends the evening with her sister and comes home at the ungodly hour of 10:30, Grumpy Sleeping Bear Peter rumbles out of bed, eager for his time in this most petite of spaces. I, meanwhile, am too busy reading about fat cells in the current issue of Self magazine, which someone has mysteriously mailed me. (Who sent me a subscription to Self magazine? This stuff is like crack to me, these lady magazines. Anyway, thanks.)

"How long will you be?" asks Peter outside the door, his sleep-craggy voice interrupting my newly discovered knowledge that babies are born with brown fat cells, and women can retain them their entire life in their necks and chests.

"Um, a few minutes." I flip the page idly. I have no reason to be in here, really, except that from an early age, I escaped my family through sitting in the bathroom reading books and magazines for up to an hour at a time.

"I will just pee off the deck then," he informs me.

"No!" I yelp, clapping the pages of the magazine together.

I open the door quickly. "You can't pee off the deck when Tom and Chelsea are home," I tell him. (Tom and Chelsea are our charming and beautiful and lovely downstairs neighbors/friends/tenants.)

"I know," he says. "But it got you out of the bathroom.

Damn him.