Before we bought this house, we lived in a decent townhouse apartment... decent enough, that is, except for the one neighbor next door who moved in after we did. He was noisy, antisocial, and had an endless stream of people visiting him for 5-10 minutes each. It didn't take a genius to figure out he was a drug dealer.
They didn't renew his lease, so we all knew he'd be leaving at the end of the month... and he threw a loud blowout party. On a weeknight. We didn't call 911 until we heard a loud thud like a body falling, and a girl screaming.
The cops had apparently been dying for a chance to walk through that apartment, so the entire shift showed up along with an ambulance. We sat in the dark and listened to the fun. It turned out that one of the male guests had fallen and cracked his scalp open in the bathroom right next to our adjoining wall, and the screams had been one of the hot young college girls in attendance. The girls all left before the last cops did. By about 3 AM, the fun was over... and it occurred to me that the neighbor and his friends might want to have a chat with me, since they must have known I had spoiled their party.
I told my wife that I couldn't sleep, and headed downstairs to "watch TV." I didn't want to worry her, so I was planning to retrieve one of the handguns from the drawer on my way out of the bedroom without her noticing. I was trying to decide whether to take my Ruger P97 .45, or her Taurus eight-shot .357 Magnum revolver, and was about to silently open the drawer when I heard her voice in the darkness:
"The revolver would be better."
I replied, "Will you marry me?"
She answered, "I already did, dear."
And she did, twelve years ago tonight.
