Thanks, Chair

Okay, here's one to file away under 'unexpected last minute reprieves'...so, my apartment manager finally caught me at home. I've only actually spoken to her once, when I rented the place. She's a trip. She looks a little like Mrs. Roper from that old tv show, 'Three's Company" only shorter and wider, sort of like a bowling ball in a polyester caftan. She knocks, and I know she knows I'm home, so I figure I might as well face the music and I let her in.

"Well, dear, you're in quite a pickle." She told me I was in a 'pickle'. Who even says stuff like that anymore? Anyhow, I invited her to sit and figured that I should calmly explain my financial  situation. As I launched into it she noticed my 'shabby chic' French chair, the one I painted with shoe polish and nail lacquer.

After giving me a long winded description of her new, all-white decorating scheme, she asks where I got the chair - apparently she never noticed me painting it out on the lawn, dripping white shoe polish all over the fescue. I almost told her that I'd made it myself, but for some reason that I'm still unclear about I said that it came from an exclusive shop off Melrose. I don't know why, I just opened my mouth and the lie fell out. She looked at me askance, as if to ask why I'd spent my rent money on overpriced furniture. I just went with it at that point, "Oh no, I didn't buy it! It was one of the only things I took from the house when my husband and I split. He didn't know, but it was done by a really famous European designer. It's only going to appreciate in value..." Her eye got this acquisitive gleam in it and I realized that I might be able to parlay that gleam into something useful.

By the time she left, with my lovely chair tucked beneath her pudgy little arm, she'd agreed to drag her feet on my rent predicament and gave me until the 24th to get the rent before she files the eviction papers.

So, thanks, Chair, for inspiring a useful lie and buying me some time. Maybe I should be a writer...or a con-man...woman...whatever...