Suckers - J.A. Konrath

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Andrew
It all started with mushrooms.
Of course, lots of bad things start with mushrooms, but these were the non-hallucinogenic
variety. My wife Helen despises mushrooms. I mean, she loathes them with every ounce of her
being, and while she’s admittedly a rather petite woman, she's able to cram a lot of loathing into
those ounces.
I myself am no big fan of mushrooms or other fungi products, although in college we had a
lot of fun with fungus when my best friend Roger got Athlete's Foot. We called him "Itchy
Roger" over and over and over and over again. I have to admit that it seems a lot less funny now
than it was at the time, almost a bit pathetic in fact, but trust me, it was hysterical and kept us
entertained for hours on end. The next semester, we entertained ourselves by playing darts with
slices of pizza.
Anyway, I was thirty-three and long out of college (well, not that long, but that's another
story) and I'd spent the evening out drinking with Roger. Of course, we were drinking coffee,
and only one cup each because that stuff was expensive as hell. I'd been given two tasks to
complete before I returned home:
a) Purchase a jar of spaghetti sauce.
b) Ensure that the jar of spaghetti sauce did not include mushrooms.
When I got to the grocery store, I selected a jar of sauce. It had fancy calligraphy on it and a
drawing of a smiling man in a chef's hat. The part of my brain that should have been saying
"Hey, dumb-ass, don't forget about the no-mushrooms rule!" instead said "Gee, I wonder if this
place has any sour gummi bears?" I bought the sauce and the gummi bears and left the store.
As it turns out, the drawing was not a smiling man in a chef's hat. It was a giant mushroom.
Damn those poofy chef's hats.
Now, I don't want you to think that my wife is the kind of person who would throw a
screaming temper tantrum over me purchasing the wrong variety of spaghetti sauce. Instead,
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