Inside Joke Unleashed

Our lovely across-the-street neighbors, I’ll call them Mary and Jack, kept to themselves over the winter. Sam and I hadn’t seen Mary in months, and Jack only rarely. Probably because we’d watched all the seasons of “Fargo” Sam came up with a gruesome scenario that the reason Mary vanished was that Jack killed her and buried her in the yard.

Recently, I saw Mary gardening. I told Sam that Mary was alive and well, so Jack was off the hook. Ha, ha, ha. This should have been the end of our awful little inside joke.

Fast forward to a few nights ago. Charlie looked out the window and saw his #1 nemesis, the neighborhood fox. The fox had a chipmunk, Charlie’s #2 nemesis, dangling from his mouth. He’d hit the varmint jackpot so Charlie was losing his shit when I opened the front door to let my brother-in-law and three hot pizzas in and he bolted. We were preparing a search party to comb the neighborhood when Mary appeared, holding Charlie.

We thanked her profusely and Sam mentioned that we hadn’t seen her all winter. She explained she had a terrible post-Christmas case of the flu, followed by Covid. Sam told her he was relieved to hear that because he’d been thinking Jack had murdered her and buried her in the yard.  Mary laughed and said Jack didn’t have it in him. Then, she left.

What possessed you? I was mortified. Sam just shrugged and said Mary seemed to find the story amusing. I started to say something about maybe murdering him and burying him in the yard, but we had company and the pizza was getting cold. And later, when I could have gotten mad, I didn’t. Jack wasn’t a killer, Mary has a sense of humor, and Sam is quirky.  No shockers there. At the end of the day, like Charlie, our inside joke had gotten out without incident, no harm done, unless you count the chipmunk.