“I’m gonna go get coffee and write this morning.” His body aches from starting a new core yoga class yesterday. “You want anything,” he asks.

She hears his steps on the hardwood floor walking down the hall. “I thought you were going to go help a friend this morning,” she responds.

“Fuck. I forgot about that.” He looks at his phone. No messages. Whew! “It’s all good. No, Frank didn’t send me anything. We’re not meeting.”

“So Frank is code for Carrol,” she asks with utmost sarcasm, rolling over in bed to pet a dog. She’s smiling. She’s pleased. She thinks she’s funny.

He appreciatively smiles back. He gets it. He understands. He’s endeared by the joke. If we’re not laughing, we’re crying. So let’s indeed laugh.

“Dork. I’m not meeting a girl today. I was gonna meet Frank about a legal issue… and my girlfriend’s name is Deb by the way,” he jokingly proclaims.

“Really,” she asks with such a long painful sarcastic drawl that it reminds him of one of those bit characters in a Hopalong Cassidy radio program.

“Well at least it’s not Dina,” he quips without thinking.

There’s a pause, a cessation, a hesitant moment in which that name hangs in the air. He sees it. The letters, D-I-N-A, floating toward her.

Closer the letters float, into her ear, through her ear canal, vibrating her eardrum. Those vibrations instantly create electrical signals to her brain, allowing comprehension of the letters in phonetic sound, forming the word, bringing his quip into her consciousness: “At least it’s not Dina.”

Recoiling from the name marks the moment it hit. “Fuck! No, anyone but her,” she proclaims with dramatic exhaustion. “Please, anyone but her.”

The thought of it, the ridiculousness of it, makes them both laugh. It feels good to laugh, to be honest about these things, albeit indirectly by joke.