The dirty plates trembled in my hands as I took a cautious step back toward the living room. On my way in, I had noticed that my husband was no longer sitting on the couch where he usually sat.
I had heard footsteps creaking down the stairs behind me a few minutes earlier, so I had simply assumed he was upstairs checking on the babies. He was not checking on the babies at all.
Six grown men sat crammed onto the sectional sofa with sweating beer bottles cluttering my coffee table, and every single one of them was staring directly at me instead of watching the game on television. Scott stood right beside the television screen, grinning broadly as if he had just won a prized trophy.
In his right hand, he held the pastel pink package that I had hidden carefully beneath the folded bath towels in the upstairs bathroom. “Look what I found upstairs, guys,” my husband announced to the room, shaking the package high above his head. “Our triplets can already hold it in, but apparently their mother still hasn’t finished her own potty training!”
The room broke into another loud wave of coordinated, almost rehearsed laughter. My ears started ringing instantly, and the plates in my hands suddenly felt as though they weighed fifty pounds each.
“Careful, gentlemen,” Scott continued while waggling the pink package in the air. “Don’t make her laugh too hard tonight, or we’ll have to cover the entire couch!”
My face burned with deep embarrassment as I stared at him. “Please put that away right now,” I whispered, my voice trembling.
Scott rolled his eyes at me as if I were the unreasonable person who was ruining everyone’s fun. “Oh, relax, Gemma, it’s just a harmless joke,” he said loudly. “If you’re really that embarrassed, maybe you should have fixed yourself by now.”
Somebody in the crowd whistled while someone else slapped the armrest of the couch in amusement. I stood frozen in my own living room holding two greasy plates of chili, completely forgetting how to move my feet.
Scott kept going, making crude remarks about waterproof mattress covers and long visits to the diaper aisles at the grocery store. I couldn’t process his words anymore because they were reaching my ears through a thick layer of fog.
