Bottoms Up, Part 5 (Patreon)

Five: Irked

“You just missed her.”

“Missed her? Missed who?” he asked, checking his watch. 9:30 - he wasn’t even that late today.

“I don’t know who she was. Carey, I think? Said she was stopping in on her way to work.”

“I don’t know who that is,” he said, scratching his head. “Carey?”

Effie shrugged. “Well, she seemed to know you.”

“Carey,” he said again. “I don’t know. What did she look like?”

“Black? Cute hair? She looked way too cute to be someone you would’ve dated, so I just assume she’s your lawyer or accountant.”

“Oh shit. Kiri.”

“That might be it,” Effie said. “Yeah. Kiri.”

“Well did she leave a phone number? A business card or something? Did she say she’d be coming back?”

Effie shook her head. “None of that. I guess I could've asked her to leave a number. But, alas, I did not.”

He sighed, shaking his head. “Did you empty that diaper pail in the back yet?”

--

“I’m not just saying this to get into your pants, but your pancakes yesterday were much better than this souffle is.”

Harper smiled, lackadaisically letting her spoon orbit her cup of tea. “Complimenting my cooking does tend to earn one an invitation into my pants. Not that you need one.”

It had been a while since Harper felt this way. This all-consuming excitement towards one person. It had been years since she felt that way about Layne, and probably even longer since the time before that.

Syd smiled, cutting into the cafe’s overly-flaky souffle to harness another piece for herself. They looked as content as Harper felt. Or so she hoped.

There was a little error message elsewhere in her mind - it hadn’t quite made its way to the forefront yet, though Harper was aware of it. It was a reminder that she was going to have to talk to Layne about this. In her wildest fantasies, they weren’t a seperated couple - they were best friends who could support each other through whatever came next. Even if that meant heading in different directions.

Such wild fantasies.

“Alright,” Syd said, swallowing the bite of her breakfast. “We’re going to have to do it.”

“Do it? Do what?”

“We need to address the elephant in the cafe. The one that follows you around whenever we’re together?”

Harper sighed. “Yeah?”

“Layne owns a store that sells adult diapers?”

“You know, it hardly seems fair,” Harper said. “It’s his store and his dream. But I’m the one feeling embarrassed about it when I have to talk about it.”

Syd did their best not to laugh, offering a sympathetic grimace of some sort instead.

“I don’t know,” Harper said. “I try not to let it bother me.”

“I think it’s...interesting,” Syd said.

“Interesting. Better than you thinking it’s disgusting.”

“No. Gosh, no. It’s, uh, intriguing.”

“Interesting and intriguing?”

Syd laughed, running their fingers through their hair. It was something they did often. Harper suspected it was some sort of coping mechanism. If she paid more attention, she wondered if she could read Syd’s mind. Did the fingers in the hair mean they were nervous? Anxious? Gassy?

“I want to say I’m curious without saying that I want to put a diaper on,” Syd said.

“There, you just did it,” she replied with a smile. “But I might be able to help with curious. If you have questions.”

“I know you said you had been called ‘Mommy’ before. But are you into...all that? Diapers and what-not?”

Harper laughed, somehow unprepared for that specific question. She rolled her tongue around in her mouth for a moment, considering the best answer. “I think there was a time when it was something that I found pretty exciting.”

“We do weird things for the people we love,” Syd said with a shrug.

“I guess that’s a funny thing,” Harper said. “Because I was the one who brought diapers to the table originally.”

“Oh?” Their eyes lit up and they slid forward on their chair a little further to be closer. “I didn’t see that coming.”

“It was kind of new to me, too,” Harper said. “I’m not sure where the original idea came from, honestly. Maybe I saw it on TV, or online. Maybe I just saw a pack of diapers one day and my mind wandered. But it had been a curiosity of mine for a while. And so I tossed it out there to see if Layne was interested. He was. And it was really good for us for a long time.”

“And he loved it so much he decided to sell diapers?”

“That’s the very short version of that story, yeah. It just took over our life. It wasn’t a secret little thing to come home to anymore. The food on the table and our mortgage depended on diapers. We had crates of diapers sitting all over the house. I was spending hours every day talking to people on the phone who made bespoke adult-sized pacifiers. It very quickly stopped being something that we could enjoy. And, once that was off the table - and he became consumed by the store - we didn’t really have that much left.”

Syd offered a solemn and sympathetic nod. “Do you miss it?”

“I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to seperate it from the business. If I’m being honest? I wish I could. Because then I’d probably miss it.”

“I don’t want to make things weird,” Syd said. “But, maybe, I am...a little curious.”

Harper’s eyebrows raised. “Curious?”

Syd sighed and nodded. “You know, not for today. Or tomorrow. Just...somewhere down the line. If that was something that came up… I don’t know, maybe that’d be fun? I’m just saying.”

She tried to play it cool. She nodded slowly before sipping her tea. But inside? She was dancing. That excited feeling that Syd gave her seemed more intense than ever. For the first time in years, the word ‘diaper’ didn’t feel like an immensely heavy word associated with finances and time spent apart.

“Well, you know,” Harper finally said, “if we ever decide to try something like that out. I know a guy who can hook us up.”

--

He had never been inside of The Schoolhouse before. He knew of it. He got the jist of it, but it just didn’t seem like his scene. A ‘gastropub,’ whatever that was. Expensive bar food, expensive craft beer, and an environment that looked like it was built to replicate a rich man’s fantasy of what a dive bar looked like.

He was on time - maybe the first time he was on time for anything since the days his mother drove him to elementary school. By that virtue alone, he thought, Grace should raise the white flag and spare him an expensive lunch.

“Mr. Stanlan, you absolutely irk me in a way that very few people ever have before.” That was just her opening statement as they were seated at a table together.

“I don’t have quite that level of disdain for you yet, Ms. Vanderhoof, but maybe we’ll give it some time and see what happens.”

She shook her head as she laughed - a contentious laugh if there ever was one. “It’s Vanderhoeffen, actually.”

“Are you married, Ms. Vander...uh… Grace?”

“No,” she said. “Why? Were you hoping you could work in a joke or two about me not being married? Or the kind of man I’d marry?”

“I was just curious,” he said. He paused for a moment before adding: “Actually, I guess I was curious to know what kind of man would’ve married you. No offense. That’s genuine curiosity. Science.”

“Believe it or not, I’m not a full-time activist,” she said, playing with the silverware laid out before her. “I’m a social worker. The hours are often...unforgiving. And it leaves me with little patience for my fellow man.”

“That sounds like an excuse,” he said. “You’re capable of love, right?”

She scoffed. “Your wedding band would suggest that you are married, yes?” she asked. “What kind of woman marries a peddler of adult diapers?”

He was tempted to take a little offense to her question, but it was essentially the same question he would’ve asked her. He was tempted to correct her and tell her that he was separated. That didn’t seem like an especially good commentary on his character, though. Not to mention the meta-psychology one could dip their toe into regarding his insistence on wearing a wedding band while he was separated.

He shrugged. “People make bombs, right? Nobody likes bombs. Nobody thinks bombs are a good idea. If I was to ask anyone on the street if bombs should be outlawed, they’d probably be, like, ‘Yeah, fuck bombs.’ But there’s still people who have to make them. And those people have spouses. I assume.”

“Is this part of your argument?” she asked. “The argument to get me to drop my complaint with the city council?”

“I haven’t even gotten there yet.”

The menus arrived, and a few minutes of careful food contemplation followed. Layne had wondered if this was part of her game. Were there more ‘powerful’ lunch options? Did he establish more assertiveness if he ate, say, the short-rib grilled cheese instead of the fuji apple salad? Maybe it was the other way around.

Ultimately he went with the blackened chicken thigh sandwich. By his quick guestimation, it was smack in the middle on the scale of weakness-signaling and strength-signaling option.

She ordered the fried plantain entree - which he couldn’t place on his scale at all.

“So,” he finally said, after the menus were taken away. “I annoy you?”

She sighed. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have led with that.”

“We’ve talked all of twice. For probably less than 10 minutes total. I can’t possibly bother you that much.”

“I’ll tell you what it is,” she said, finger wagging in his direction. “It’s the fact that you came to me. You came to my meeting. You were late - but you bothered to learn where and when it was and then you showed up. I guess I wasn’t expecting that.”

“What were you expecting?”

“Complete indifference, I suppose. Or an angry and bitter argument - whether it was in person or in front of city council. But you’re neither of those. You...want to reason. Talk about it.”

“It just makes sense,” he said. “Doesn’t it?”

“It’s a lot easier when you’re angry. Or yelling at me. Or if I didn’t see you at all. But you had the audacity to show up to my meeting and…care. Right? That’s what you said. You said that you wanted to know what the concerns were?”

“So you’re annoyed because I care?”

“I’m annoyed with you because I wish we were on the same side. I...don’t dislike you as a person.”

“You just dislike my store? You dislike me as a…'peddler of adult diapers?’”

“Yes, that about sums it up,” she said.

He laughed. It was the most human she had ever looked. She might not have been a complete stuck-up, no-nonsense, joykill. Partially. But not completely.

“Is there anything worse than finding out your enemy is friendly?” he asked.

“It’s the absolute worst.”

“Do you think I’d be able to convince you to drop this drama and leave my store alone?”

“No,” she said. “I doubt it.”

“Alright,” he said with a shrug. “But, I will say this: At your meeting yesterday, I overheard you say that your group was ‘providing the facts,’ yes?”

“Yes.”

“I’d argue that you don’t actually have ‘the facts.’ You have assumptions and preconceived notions of what my store does and what it represents. Tomato, tom-ah-to, you might say. I don’t know. You’re a social worker, right? And I’m sure you’ve never once taken action on case without doing all your research.”

“Are you suggesting I research...diapers?”

He shrugged. “Yeah, I guess I am.”

“You irk me, Mr. Stanlan.” She was smiling.

--

The boxes were taped up and registered to be shipped off. She swept the floor in the stockroom and salesfloor. And she had even found some thick yellow rubber gloves under the bathroom sink that she used to carry the Nursery trash can out to the dumpster to throw out Layne’s overnight surprise. And she still had an entire afternoon to kill.

This was how bored she was: Effie had begun looking up local ordinances for businesses, looking for rulings and loopholes that either Grace Vanderhoeffen would use against Layne, or that Layne could use to his advantage.

She was far from a lawyer - most of the documents she found online were coded in addendums, footnotes and references to other documents that she didn’t know where to begin in looking for them.

But something had jumped out at her amidst her research. The names of the members on the city council. Seven councilmen and women - all of them with dreadfully old sounding names. Evely. Lawrence. Hillary.

And then there was Hamish Bellencourt.

It seemed way too good to be true. But was she really supposed to believe that there was not just one man in this town named Hamish, but that there were two?

She quickly searched for the councilman’s name, and found his picture. He had a slightly different appearance when he was wearing a suit and tie - but make no mistake, this was Baby Hammy.

For a moment, she contemplated calling Layne to let him know the good news. She stopped himself from calling, though. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Layne to do something good with this information, she just… Actually, that might have been exactly what it was. Besides, she already had an in with the councilman’s ‘mommy.’

She looked up Margaret and Hamish’s recent transaction in the system, and used that to pull up the account. Under her name - of course it was. Margaret McCrea; not a Bellencourt.

Further online investigation would yield that there was a Mrs. Madeline Bellencourt. Poor Mrs. Councilwoman - she probably had no idea that her husband was such a big baby.

The phone rang three times and the familiar voice of Margaret answered. “Good afternoon.”

“Good afternoon, Ms. McCrea. Sorry to bother you. This is Effie from…” she was almost afraid to say the name. She imagined Ms. McCrea driving a car filled with nuns for some reason - her phone playing through the car’s audio system. “...Bottoms Up?”

“Oh. Bottoms Up. And you must be the young woman who helped us pick out our diapers the other day.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“I’ll be quite frank with you, dear, I didn’t think you were going to call me like I asked. Especially not so soon.”

“I’m surprised, myself.”

“And so what can I aid you with, Miss…”

“My name is Effie.”

“That’s a pretty name. Is that short for something?”

“Not to my knowledge. Actually, Ms. McCrea…”

“You may call me Margaret. For now.” Those last two words were saturated with implication.

“Margaret. I was actually hoping to get in contact with your, uhm, friend? Your...baby? Hamish?”

“Ah yes, little Baby Hammy. Quite the character, he is. While he’s with me, he’s mine. But...he’s a rather important baby. I’m not sure if you knew this or not.”

Effie winced a little. She did, in fact, know this. “That’s what makes it difficult to reach out to you now,” she said. “Because I’m sure you were hoping that I’d call for the sake of some sort of...playtime. But, see, there’s this group who is trying to damage our business by going to the city council and…”

“Ah,” Margaret said, chuckling softly into the phone. “A political favor. Would you believe I am already aware of this little situation?”

“I would.”

“Baby Hammy told me all about it. It’s quite the pickle for him, really. He’d love to defend your store - and as a councilman, he’d have a lot of sway. But at the same time...it may not look good for him to defend a store like that. Even if he is a customer himself.”

“Do you think he’s open to a, like, conversation or something? Maybe myself or my boss could…”

“Miss Effie, Baby Hammy is completely under my spell. As are most of my babies. He’ll do as I ask. Or, at least he will if he wants his dirty diapers changed. And I assure you, he is almost always in need of a change while he’s in my care.”

“So...you’re saying that you’d talk to him?”

“For you, darling? Most assuredly.”

“Oh my gosh, thank you. That really means a lot to me. And, probably, my boss too, because…”

“But…”

Effie drew in a sudden breath. “But?”

“You may think me cruel for saying this, but...nothing comes for free.”

Effie winced again. Her heart beat faster and her stomach tied in a knot. Given enough time, she probably could’ve put together a shortlist of ideas Margaret might have had. She just needed to rip the bandage off: “Alright. What’s the cost?”

“It’s actually a very fair offer,” Margaret said. “Not only would you get me in Hammy’s ear, but you’d be getting some hands-on experience with your own merchandise.”

Effie could’ve guessed as much.

“Come spend some time with me. I’ll make you into a perfect little baby. And when we’re done? I’ll make sure the councilman has your store’s back.”

“Okay,” Effie said, slightly surrendered. Slightly curious. “We have a deal.”