Five-second rule

Ed was at his kitchen counter one day explaining to his wife how lucky he was. He’d been lucky in love, he said, and his wife blushed, but, he was lucky in lots of other ways too. Suddenly a grape fell from the counter, and he picked it up quickly, said “five-second rule,” and popped it into his mouth.

This in fact was to him a tradition that went back to his childhood; saying “five-second rule” was little more than saying “gezundheit” after someone coughed; it was a kind of superstitious cleansing of whatever had dropped. His wife laughed quickly and looked the other way. When they were courting she had asked him what that “five-second rule” was all about and he’d said, if it’s on the floor less than five seconds, it’s not too dirty and you can still eat it. The essence of it is, you have to move fast; you can’t stop to think about it, and you have to let a little dirt go, it’s not going to kill you.

The afternoon sun shone in the kitchen window and left a calm, peaceful, clear kind of day that appeared to be about to end with a gentle western Missouri sunset. For some reason, perhaps because he’d been explaining about luck, Ed thought about the hedge-apple incident, which happened when he was maybe about fifteen. Hedge-apples, also known as Osage oranges, were these big softball-sized nuts that were hard as a rock but wild and easy to find in those parts. People said that if you put a hedge-apple under your sink it would keep the roaches away because they kind of stunk in a really subtle way, only the roaches could smell them. Ed didn’t really know whether this was true, because he hadn’t had much problem with roaches anyway and didn’t have to experiment. But when he was about fifteen, he came over a hill near his house and happened to see a local bully roughing up his sister. The guy was mean and he was being rough with her in a way that made Ed’s adrenaline flow and made him pick up a hedge=apple and hide behind a large tree. When he’d had the opportunity, he fired the hedge-apple at the bully and, just out of pure luck, hit him in the head and knocked him out cold.

His sister Edie, who was actually his twin, didn’t miss a beat, thanked him for his generosity, and stole the guy’s pants, right there on the road not far from their house, and talked Ed into hiding them in the barn, a kind of shed connected to their house, after they’d run home. Ed was sure this guy would wake up, enraged, and come after them both, and do them in, but in fact the guy didn’t know what had hit him, woke up somewhat confused and ended up dropping the matter, never bothering Edie again. Ed was in fact lucky; he never had anything more to do with the guy.

Edie wasn’t so lucky. She’d married a guy who had turned out to be bad; spent all their money, got in trouble with the law, ran off with somebody else, she had to go out to California to untangle some legal issue he’d gotten himself into before he’d been thrown in jail. On her way back she’d stopped in Vegas, and that was the last Ed had heard from her, except that, more or less as he was telling this story to his wife, she’d called and said she was arriving at his home that very evening, if it was ok with him. Of course it was; he was her twin, they were still close after all these years. He and his wife spent a few hours getting the house ready and preparing a guest bedroom.

She arrived breathless, though she’d been driving, as if she were running away from something, but Ed and his wife got her a glass of cool lemonade, put her bags in the room and sat her down in the living room in front of a fireplace. She took a look around and noticed that in general, the house was cleaner than the one they’d grown up in. He was lucky, he explained, that his wife had such high standards. His wife said suddenly that she was lucky, in that Ed, her husband was more relaxed than what she was used to. Her own sister had married a guy who insisted on everything being spotless, and they’d had a kid who was born with every allergy under the sun, including an intense allergy to peanuts and strawberries. They’d asked their doctor once why so many people had so many intense allergies these days and all he could think of was that there were so many antibiotics these days, that people’s bodies had gotten more sensitive just for that reason alone. What else could it be? Otherwise we’d lived in the same world, the dirt sure wasn’t any cleaner than it used to be.
Ed’s sister finally got to tell her story. She explained that, in Vegas, she’d been talked into marrying some guy who she’d met at a show. The man was wealthy, successful, and charming, and had swept her off her feet for a couple of days, until the moment they’d married, soon after which, something ugly happened that had revealed his true character. She didn’t want to go into details, so they didn’t force her to, but she knew at that moment that marrying again had been a mistake. She dumped him like a hot potato and fled, and now she was looking for a place to hide for a while, and she thought there was no better place than right out in the open, at her brother’s place. She only wanted to stay a couple of days, though, she said, and she’d be on her way.

His wife asked her if, by association, she didn’t feel bad about marrying this weasel, this guy who was hanging around Vegas preying on the innocent.

No, she said. It was the five-second rule, she figured. If she got out of there fast enough, she’d probably be ok, there wouldn’t be too much lasting damage. It was the one thing she’d said that night that stuck with Ed. Even after she left he couldn’t stop thinking about it. She was, after all, his twin, and their fates seemed connected, even when he didn’t know where she was, or where she was going.