There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell - v4 by Laurie Notaro

more tricky to secure good hiding places, particularly because Maye had to hide her addiction to the printed word by draping her books in camouflage, lest Charlie stumble upon the hidden booty, open them, and out Maye as the book whore she indeed was. As a result, there was an unusually high number of boxes labeled PERIOD SUPPLIES, MAKEUP, and MONISTAT-7, just to throw Charlie off the trail. It was a dicey maneuver, however, and Maye was nearly discovered early one evening when Charlie looked at her after she had been in the house for five days in a row because she said there was no reason to go anywhere.
    “You know,” he said carefully, “if I had a purple sweat suit, I’d wear it a lot, too, but whaddya say we freshen it up in the washing machine and break into one of the time capsules in your pyramid of makeup boxes in the basement? Because even though I’m not a meal psychic, I can tell that you had teriyaki chicken today for lunch and ham on rye yesterday because a dollop of Dijon mustard is encrusting part of the zipper on your hoodie and a soy-sauce-stained grain of rice is glued to the drawstring. There is a Hometown Buffet on your boobs, Maye. The only thing separating you from the lady who lives under the old oak tree on campus is four dogs, a shopping cart, and the fact that it looked like she washed up yesterday, even if that means sticking her head in the drinking fountain. There has to be a good amount of pretty in any of those boxes—they weigh even more than your tampons.”
    Maye was thinking precisely of that narrow escape as she hauled around fifteen pounds of books at the bookstore, roaming from section to section as the crook of her arm became red and sweaty with her treasures. She thought of how she had to run to cut Charlie off at the pass, lodging her dirty self in the doorway of the basement to prevent her husband from discovering her nest of deception.
    “I wouldn’t go down there, Charlie!” Maye warned, preparing to strike at her husband’s most tender, vulnerable fear. “I went to get a tampon today, and I saw a spider sitting on the pyramid that was so big that if we caught it and had it taxidermied, we could use it as a Halloween costume. Big as your head, Charlie. It stared at me and I swore it said, ‘Hello, little girl. Super or regular-absorbency?’”
    “
Spider
?” Charlie barely hissed as he backed away from the door.
    “The kind you only see on Discovery Channel, like jumping ones,” Maye added in a strike worthy of the devil, since she knew Charlie’s most repulsive moment of life came in the seventh grade when he woke up and felt a daddy longlegs about to attempt a little spelunking into the mysterious warm cavern that was Charlie’s mouth. “And I think it was laying eggs.”
    Charlie gasped silently and covered his mouth after emitting a short, tiny yelp. “Spider babies,” he wheezed as he stumbled backward until he collapsed onto one of the benches in the breakfast nook. “I can’t go down there. I’m sorry, I can’t.”
    “It’s okay, Charlie,” Maye said. “I’ll just have to pretty up with some berries and charcoal sticks I find around the house.”
    It was a slim getaway, Maye admitted, and looked at the books in her arms as if they were a fifteen-pound bundle of joy that shared half of her DNA and would end up hating her like no other and plucking money from her purse in a little over a decade.
    “Oh, books,” Maye cooed, caressing them softly. “I have to give you up because of my shame. I can’t bring you home. He would never understand.” She abandoned them sadly, reshelving each one, and proceeded to the H section of fiction, which was why she was there in the first place.
    Still reeling from the happy news that her friends were about to visit, Maye had optimistically taken a chance and answered the ad for the Gothic book club. When the club’s leader, Crystal, e-mailed in reply to Maye’s inquiry, she seemed kind and nice and was