I believe I owe you an explanation for the teaser I left at the end of my last post.

The evening I found Callaghan in his underwear on the back patio, I’d gone to the gym solo, as he had to work an hour late. He would get home at 6:30-ish. I would return from the gym at around 7:00.

Right on time, I walked into the house with sweat plastering my t-shirt to my body, looking forward to jumping into the shower… but my usual announcement of Mommy is home! was met with unusual silence. Callaghan can be heard before he’s seen, and I didn’t hear any sign of him.

I looked around and spotted Nenette doing her evening cat thing of lounging sleepily, recently woken from her late afternoon nap. She wasn’t behaving at all like a cat whose Daddy was home.

Callaghan had taken his motorcycle to work that day, but before I went to the garage to see if it was there, I checked my phone. No new texts. I walked through the whole house. I didn’t find him.

Then I wandered back into the kitchen area, just as I heard a rapping on the back door leading from the kitchen to the backyard. I went to the door window and looked out onto the patio.

Callaghan was kicking back in the patio chair next to the door. He had his backpack with him, and he was wearing just socks and underwear. When he saw me, he started gesticulating and grinning like a crazy person.

The first thing that struck me was that he had chosen his Gaston LaGaffe socks that day. Gaston LaGaffe is a Belgian comic strip character whose surname means “The Blunder.”

Les chausettes de Gaston LaGaffe.

The second thing that struck me was that Callaghan was doing something on his tablet, like it was normal to be engrossed in one’s iPad while wearing just socks and underwear – or should I call the whole ensemble blunderwear – on the back patio.

The third thing I realized was that he was locked out, but I was already laughing, so it was too late to feel profound sympathy. (I do feel profound sympathy for blunderwear-wearing-Callaghan now that I’ve gotten the amusement of the spectacle out of my system.)

Something clattered to the ground when I unlocked the door and pushed it open. It was the screen for the door window, all crumpled up. He’d tried to break into the house.

“I forgot my house key, ” he said.

“Oh no! Poor Baby!” I said, laughing harder.

“I hosed off the top of my head to stay cool,” said my bald husband. It had gotten up to 110 degrees that days. “I drank from the hose, too.”

“At least we know that someone would have to make a real effort to break in,” I said, perversely triumphing in this discovery.

Fortunately, he’d only been locked out for a half-hour. I’m pretty sure some of the second-floor residents of the apartment building behind our house got an eyeful of him in his socks and his unmentionables.

(By the way, have you ever wondered why the term “unmentionables” is used almost exclusively for women’s underwear, while it’s fine to “mention” men’s?)

The moral of this story is “have a spare key to your house hidden somewhere outside.” Duh.