ONE PIECE OF BACKGROUND INFORMATION: The Cliftons are the people we bought our house from and they were the original owners.
During our recent home improvement project, we had some electricians working in an attic crawl space behind my husband’s closet. They had been in and out of there for a couple hours when I walked through the room. It was the day after halloween and one of the guys was sitting in the crawl space with a flash light shining on his face from below. It looked just like someone trying to make himself look scary and I commented about that to him. We both laughed.
As I started to leave the room, he said “Oh, by the way, you know that gun that was in here? We unloaded it while we are working. I’ll just sit it in the closet.”
I smiled and nodded. We don’t have a gun so he must be kidding me, right? Wrong. The next time I came through, there was a gun propped up against the wall of the closet. I am pretty sure that my heart skipped at least one beat. He wasn’t kidding!
When he saw me he said, “I know I unloaded the bullet but I can’t find it. It must have fallen down somewhere in this insulation. I’ll look for it when I finish this.”
I jumped in and said, “Don’t worry. We don’t NEED the bullet.” I really couldn’t think straight for a minute. I don’t think I had ever seen a real gun until that moment and I know I had never seen one in my own house!
I had this strange feeling like those women you see on Lifetime movies that, maybe, my husband was a TOTALLY different person than I thought he was. I have known him to be a lot of things but a gun wielding pharmacist was not one of them!
Somewhere in the carpool line and whatever else I did that afternoon, I forgot about the gun. I remembered it while we were eating dinner. Not wanting to mention that workmen had found a LOADED GUN in our attic in front of the children, I said to my husband, “Is there anything in your attic that you need to tell me about?”
Some of the color immediately left his face and he got that look like he wasn’t sure whether I was asking a trick question or not. I could see the wheels turning as he took a mental inventory of what he remembered putting in there. He replied, “I don’t think so?” but his tone definitely lacked conviction. “Maybe I should just show you,” I countered.
We told the children to stay put and we made our way to the attic where I pulled the gun out. “The electricians ran across this while they were working and it was loaded when they found it!” I was uncomfortable holding the thing and my voice was getting louder as I talked.
My husband, obviously less concerned than I, said “Well, I guess we know how Mr. Clifton planned to defend himself!”
