“I am normal. Stan. You are the one that still pulls the crust off your bread like the brat next door.”

“I don’t like crust,” he spit out in a tone as uncivil as any other morning after trying to make love in a bed full of her stuff.

Sara mumbled to herself something on the order of “and this tart doesn’t like you,” but he had already walked out the room, carrying his breakfast, a hot dog and bread, sans crust and the ever present bottle of ketchup. Sara just grabbed her chocolate milk and pulled her Maeve Binchey book from beneath her feet, setting it on her lap, then reached for the piles of CD’s she lined up down the center of the bed each night before bed, except the nights they had sex, of course. Last night, after sex, she had moved them to her side during, and tossed them more haphazardly than normal down the bed’s center.

Yes, Sara and Stan had fought over those CD’s. She said they were there to keep him from rolling over onto his side and snoring. He told her she was full of it… and that other it, too, but her family wanted to hear the story, too. She told him that he had plenty of room to sleep comfortably in his half of the bed, after all, she did have a king sized bed and he was so scrawny he could have slept in a full size bed.

We never figured out what magic she had (or, as Tom put it, what she was holding over Stan) because he stayed. Every night he slept with Pink Floyd, Uriah Heep, and Barbra Streisand and a couple hundred others between him and her. Each morning she would sort through them, moving some from one pile to another, ordering them according to her mood for the day. Once she had them sorted, she put three in her 3 CD changer at the foot of her bed.

While he was showering, she picked up her book and opened it at the bookmark, the birthday card from her ex-boyfriend. It was designed to look like a CD, and Stan never knew the difference.