They stopped in Burger King and pulled in the parking lot rather than go through the drive through lane.
Once inside, Howard realized she had been right about the cigars. The disparity in their apparent ages made everyone think that they were a mother and son. When it came time to place their order at the counter, the woman at the register took Anita’s order first and then asked her if she would like to order anything for her son. Anita smirked a bit when the saleswoman referred to Howard as her son, but said nothing to dissuade the woman’s notion. She merely turned and looked at Howard expectantly and waited for him to speak up. He ordered a burger, a drink and some fries, then turned away to let Anita pay for their meal. After the tab had been paid, the saleswoman put together a tray of food and slid it across the counter to Anita. Thy found themselves a quiet booth at the rear of the restaurant and sat down with their tray. After they ate their meal, then proceeded to Walmart to buy some underwear for him. Anita went to the fabric section first, allowing Howard to follow passively behind. She opened package with a cloth tape measure and measured his waist, then tossed the cloth tape in the basket along with the package. She looked at him sympathetically and said, “Why don’t you go and look at the tools while I do some clothes shopping, Honey? I’ll come and get you when I’m finished. I know you get bored while I’m trying on clothes. It’ll be awhile until I get finished.”
Howard agreed and went to take a look at their power tools. Within ten minutes he felt an urgent need to find the store’s bathroom to relieve himself. The exercise of walking around the store had stimulated his intestinal tract and he made it to the toilet with only seconds to spare.
On the way back from the bathroom he took a shortcut through the childrens’ clothing section to the hardware department. As he cut through an adjacent aisle, Howard passed by a mother who was talking in low furious tones to her little boy. From the large dark spot on the front of his shorts it was obvious that he had wet himself. As he neared the pair, the smell of feces assaulted his senses. Apparently the mother was well aware of what the toddler had done in the back of his pants. She shook her finger at the weeping tot and told him that if he couldn’t learn to control himself, she was going to have to put him back in diapers. The little boy screamed in humiliation as the mother took a package of toddler-sized diapers from the nearby baby goods aisle and tossed it in the shopping cart. Then she sat the wailing toddler in the cart’s baby seat and headed the basket in the direction of the bathrooms. Howard shook his head at the little boy’s lack of self-control as he wound his way through the packed aisles of the store. Even though he was a hundred feet away, he could still hear the outraged screams of the little boy as his mother wheeled him to the rear of the store to carry out her threat of sartorial regression at the diaper changing station of the women’s restroom. No wonder that little boy’s mother was ready to treat him like a baby, Howard thought, that child had no sense of self control at all!
