He’d just got bored, Bert told her, guilt dripping down his weak chin like a cheap vanilla topping.

But he missed her, he insisted, and wanted her to know that these past few months hadn’t been easy for him, either.

 Surely the intensity of his inner struggle was obvious to her by the way he wrung his pudgy little hands.

 Tatum rolled her cornflower blue eyes, raised an elegant eyebrow and shut the front door in his face.

 Despondent and misunderstood, Bert waddled towards his bright blue sports car, gasping at the sharp twinge in his knees as he collapsed into the bucket seat he’d recently installed. Wait; had he put on weight since he ordered it?

 He sorted out his beer belly beneath the steering wheel and sped back to the dodgy area of the outskirts of Boone-Ville where Harriet, his new girlfriend, was waiting in her Pepto-Bismol pink Wyncinette nightie. Harriet had chilled a bottle of the shop on the corner’s finest Don Simon and opened the tin of recently expired olives she’d found lurking in the depths of a kitchen cabinet. That should comfort her elderly, misery-sodden man!

 Bert pulled up outside his new digs and took a deep breath.

 The world was his oyster. If only shellfish weren’t among the many things he was allergic to. 🦞