Problems of Owning a Prius - #3 You CANNOT make a Dramatic Exit.

My last mistake of a boyfriend text me one night and said that he needed the last thing he had left in my house.

"What is it?"

"My laundry basket."

"What? It's missing a handle and is filthy. It's still on the dryer where you left it. Fuck off."

I could explain here why I was so pissed but let me just say this one thing and I think everyone will get it: he started dating my best friend after we broke up.

"I want it."

"No, you are drunk, you broke up with 'the ex-best friend' and want to see me. Piss off."

How did I know this? Everyone in our town thought it important to let me know since they had all taken my side in the drama.

"I don't want to see you. I never want to see you. Where's my laundry basket?"

"Why?"

"Sentimental reasons."

I have to say, that threw me a little.

"What?"

"It was my mom's."

"She's not dead, she just moved to Florida."

"I want it." He growled followed by a hiccup.

Realizing it was the last thing of his in my place and that it would feel good to throw it at him, I agreed to drive it over to his place so we would have nothing else between us.

            As I drove over there, I wondered if maybe his mother had used the basket as a cradle and that was why he was attached to it? I had a vision of his mother swaddling him in towels as an infant, placing him in the basket and like Moses' mother, placing it in the Cape Fear River and watching it float away.  If only that would have happened, I would not have had the misfortune to have met him.

I pulled up in the driveway, honked the horn, rolled down the driver window and tossed the basket out into his yard.

I saw him run out from the front door, tripping on the last step in his drunken state.

"Wait, Mel, let's talk. I just want to talk. I miss you."

I knew it. Rapidly checking my rearview mirror, I pushed the joystick to reverse, leaned out the window, gave him the middle finger and floored it.

            Okay, the Scion I had might have been small but it knew how to spit gravel when asked. Once it even fishtailed a little after one of our first breakups. It was like that petite girl in a bar whose eyes growl and hiss when someone looks at her, and even the biggest guy in the place would not fuck with her because they knew for a fact they would forever in our small town be labeled as "the guy that got his ass handed to him by a little girl."

The Pruis. Well, the battery whirled a little, hesitated, than gracefully, silently went in reverse.

Two black guys sitting on their porch next door, quietly studied my middle finger and the car as it slowly left the driveway.

Dammit.