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EDITED 07/06/2025 to remove identifying places/names.

Yesterday we drove up to the biggest lake in the state, up to my husband's coworker's family cabin to meet with his team, get a little drunk and enjoy the lake. The drive up was a slow parade of Trump bumper-stickers tacked onto pristine sportscars, with a view of sprawling McMansions planted alongside century-old wooden cabins.

It was hot and I was chewing through tampons like my uterus had teeth. I was bleeding through when we arrived, so I introduced myself to the man of the house and asked for the bathroom.

He asked me if I needed "number one or number two". I told him one.

He bellowed in response, so all could soak up the knowledge dripping from his mouth, that the house was built in the twenties, and was on a septic system, so if I could please just relieve myself in the woods, and then if I needed Number Two later, I could go inside, but I really needed to restrict my toilet paper use.

I froze and gripped my Dunkin cup.

"Uh, actually...I've had coffee, so...I'll do a two-in-one." :)

So awkward. He led me into the house, begging me to not use toilet paper. As the front door swung open, I made direct eye contact with a taxidermied deer bust wearing a MAGA hat. Yikes.

We barbequed and played beer pong (with Truly seltzers and spiked lemonades instead of beer) with two of our best work friends. We dipped a little into the lake, sat around and gossiped.

The host of the house came by the picnic table and seemed to have forgotten who I was. "You're [Husnand]'s friend, aren't you?"

I laughed. "Actually, we're more than friends! We're married."

He gave a faraway look - I couldn't tell if there was an intelligible thought behind his eyes. "Oh..." and sauntered off.

The property was incredible. There were four buildings - the woodshed and small cabin were first visible amongst the trees, then the main cabin was right up on the lake. An extra building, the game room, was tucked in the corner of the lawn next to a homemade tetherball pole. The boat launch and fire pit sat next to that. A tiny sandy beach sat about ten feet away from the boat launch - between the beach and the launch was a small trail which winds around and ends in the swimming dock. You could see massive houses all along the water, but from the lawn it seemed like a remote getaway.

The host and his wife were insanely generous - constantly asking how we felt, how we were doing, what was happening. Our host's face got redder and redder, his eyes got further and further away as the night progressed. He must have been drinking for hours before we arrived, and never stopped. His wife was sweet, too - she seemed smart and down-to-earth, compared to her wild husband.

My husband and one of our coworkers both mentioned that she seemed closer to our host's brother than to him. I hadn't noticed that - I was too busy watching our host size up my friend's muscles, grab his biceps, gleefully pointing out his six-pack. On the swimming dock, my friend took off his shirt to get in the water - our host proclaimed, "What a specimen!"

Later on in the evening, three of us sat in the shallow sandy water. Our host stumbled up to my friend and asked him to "come with me" into the empty wooded path. My friend got distracted by some raucous activity at the picnic table, and our host stood among the trees, watching him from afar.

As the night went on and the sun sunk behind the trees, the group continued to drink. At some point, during the bonfire, one of the particularly insufferable middle-aged men decided to pick on the young couple we'd befriended - being twenty-plus years their senior was the only shaky ground he had to stand on. He interrogated them on their ages, their relationship, their goals, their plans for the future, their naivety.

He and the girlfriend of our coworker sat together on a cooler and he argued that because she's a woman, she "will change her mind every thirty seconds" - called her a stereotype of somone who never leaves their hometown. I sat and seethed.

My husband's manager, ever the instigator, piped up as well - he pointed out that the insufferable middle-aged man had never been married, had children with multiple baby-mommas, and, in the eyes of the law, kidnapped a child. "That's why you should never listen to anyone who works here!!!" I hollered.

Nobody listened to my protests to change the subject, and I kept getting madder. So my husband and I decided to go look at the stars on the swimming dock. As we headed out, his manager yelled - "You guys going to go touch each other?!"

I wish. The atmosphere was perfect for it.

We sat and took pictures of the sky. One by one, the rest of the group came and joined us. Our host went to bed - his wife warned us that he tended to sleepwalk in the nude, and not to be alarmed if he tried to get in bed with us or if we found him wandering the cabin in the middle of the night.

The night was thankfully uneventful, save for my husband screaming in his sleep into his CPAP machine, and, later, on my return from the bathroom, seeing my silhouette and fearfully calling out our host's name.