The Five Worst Words
My husband tormented me with these words for years
“As far as you know.”
It’s such a simple phrase. It doesn’t even seem toxic upon first looking at it.
I crawled into bed with my husband one summer night, and I realized I didn’t do the rounds of locking the doors and windows. “Hey Eric, did you happen to lock the doors and shut the windows?”
“As far as you know,” he said and rolled over to sleep.
This was not an unusual answer. Sighing, I got out of bed and checked the windows and doors. Some nights I found the doors locked, and other nights they weren’t. Once I found the basement door open to the snow, left that way after we had contractors coming in and out.
That was the “somewhat benign” way he used the phrase. It was worse when I was traveling for work. Each night we would have a phone call to catch up on our lives. After talking about our day, I would ask about our pets and chickens, and the answer depended on his mood. Sometimes I would get funny detailed descriptions of the chickens chasing bugs around the yard and the barn cat trying to befriend the chickens. Other times he would vaguely say, “Oh, I’m sure they are fine.” Then things would get painful as I tried to get more information.
