Howard was too embarrassed by his accident to respond. He sat on the unmade bed and let her to dress him in his briefs. They seemed a little large on him that morning when he got off the bed and went to the kitchen for breakfast. The elastic barely put any tension on his waist and the rear of the briefs drooped baggily behind him. After breakfast, she dressed him in overalls before leaving him at home while she went on her customary Saturday morning shopping trip. Just before she came home, he went to get himself a drink of water from the refrigerator. Somehow the handle of the refrigerator door caught his full glass of water when it swung shut and he managed to spill the entire contents of the glass on the floor. He was standing in the puddle of water wondering how to clean up the mess when the garage door opened and Anita walked in. Howard decided that she must have used the radio control on the automatic garage door while he was still in the family room. The accident in the kitchen had distracted him and he hadn’t heard the Geo’s engine as she pulled into the garage. She stood over him and shook her head at the mess surrounding his feet like a mother with an exceptionally clumsy child. Howard looked up at his wife and started to explain, but shut it again when he realized that excuses were useless. Anita put her purse on the kitchen counter and bent down, then put her hands under his armpits and lifted him bodily out of the water. She carried him to the family room and sat him down on the couch with his damp feet dangling off the edge of the couch. She told him to stay put and then went back to the kitchen to mop up the mess. Suddenly Howard was seized with an immediate need to urinate. He dropped off the couch and fairly ran to get the bathroom before he had another, even more humiliating accident. When he got to the toilet, he fumbled frantically to unzip his pants only to discover that his overalls had no front opening. Howard tried to shrug his way out of the suspenders to drop his pants, but the “Y” shaped yoke behind his back prevented them from being removed in that fashion. He forced himself to curl over his protruding tummy in a vain attempt to unbutton the unfamiliar straps before the inevitable happened; he peed in his pants.

 

The warm urine was still draining from his overfilled bladder when Anita came into the bathroom to find out why he had rushed off. The black stains on the carpet from his wet dirty feet had left an unmistakable trail for her to follow. He looked up at her helplessly as the dark yellow puddle at his feet continued to grow. The deep indigo-colored wet spot on his pants started at his crotch and ran down the inseams of the legs of his overalls almost all the way to the floor. He was soaked. A steady drip of pee fell from the cuffs of both legs and joined the damning proof of his childish incontinence that surrounded him.

 

Tears of utter defeat and mortification ran down his cheeks and fell off his quivering chin to join the puddle below. Except for the terror induced incident at the playground, he hadn’t had a real “accident” in his pants since he was a preschooler. Dribbling in his pants was one thing, but he had completely lost control of himself this time! He didn’t even have the merry-go-round to blame for it. It was all his fault! He wanted to explain to Anita, but when he opened his mouth, words utterly failed him. He had peed in his pants like a toddler! Nothing he could say or do would change the fact of the evidence at his feet. He wasn’t just a failure as a man, he didn’t even have the self-control that every schoolchild had. He had become a pants-wetting infant, a baby who would to have his underwear changed when his lack of control caused him to dirty or wet them. Anita didn’t say a word, she only stared at the puddle on the floor and nodded as if she was agreeing to something she had silently told herself. Then she picked him up out of the puddle and stood him in the tub. She took a towel from the rack and dropped it on the puddle and turned back to her incontinent husband. Howard had stopped peeing in his pants, but his soggy pants were still dripping. She smiled at him and said in the patronizing tone that women use with children who are too young to be held responsible for their actions, “Do you need some help, Sweetiepie? It looks like you’ve had an accident!”