It’s funny how much you can still learn about a person even after you’ve known them for years. Colette and I have been together for quite a while now, and I think I know her pretty well, but she still manages to surprise me. And sometimes these surprises, to be perfectly honest, they can kinda scare the crap out of me. Just a little.

Allow me to explain.

A few days ago, we went out to eat. She paid, because she’s the woman, and when I tell her to pay for my damn dinner, she pays for my damn dinner. Either that or it was because I had already blown through my monthly budget and she hadn’t. But that’s not important. What is important is that the next day, she was looking at her account balance online when she noticed something.

“Hey,” she said, “that restaurant over-charged me last night.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, wondering what she meant.

“The bill was only $35,” she said, “but my account is showing a payment of $50.”

She was right about the original amount; I remembered seeing the receipt. I looked at her account and noticed that the transaction was listed as “pending.” I told her that it might get fixed when it clears. I’ve seen restaurant transactions do that. But usually the amounts go up when they clear, not down, because the tip usually isn’t included in the pending amount. I’d never seen a transaction amount go down when changing from pending to cleared.

We both wondered if maybe the waitress had given herself an extra tip at our expense, hoping we wouldn’t notice. This got her blood pressure rising more quickly than if she’d discovered me trying on her underwear and stretching them all out. “I can’t believe that,” Colette said. “She ripped me off for $15. That’s a bunch of poodoo!” She didn’t actually say “poodoo,” but you get the point. Plus, I like using the word “poodoo.” It’s Star Wars and bathroom humor all combined into one awesome word. So rules.

At any rate, we both realized we needed the receipt from last night’s dinner. Colette was certain she had it in her wallet and said she’d just seen it earlier that morning. But after tearing apart her wallet, then her purse, she found no receipt.

This only advanced her mood from irritation to outright anger. “This is total poodoo!” she said. “That stupid waitress gave herself a big fat extra tip! I don’t believe this!” She was speaking entirely in exclamation points. I thought about mentioning the possibility that it was an honest mistake, but sometimes holding one’s tongue is the best way to avoid being punched in the spleen.

Colette couldn’t figure out where she could have left the receipt. She was convinced that she’d seen it earlier in the day. The problem was that she couldn’t remember what she did with it. She had gone through her receipts in the morning, but when she found her pile of discarded receipts in the trash, the one from the restaurant wasn’t among them.

Anger was morphing into something not unlike a grab-your-pitchforks-and-we’ll-go-kill-it sort of mood. She wanted to call the restaurant and yell at the manager. I offered to make the call, mostly because I thought it might be a good idea to be a bit of a human shield for the manager. Plus, I wanted to help at least a little bit. Lacking the ability to excrete perfect replicas of lost receipts, this was my next-best option.

I left a slightly scathing voice mail. I was very proud of myself.

A few minutes later, Colette came into the room, looking very excited and a tiny bit burn-it-burn-it-down-burn-it-all-down. “I think I know where the receipt is!” she said. “I had it in the car. I remember now. And when we stopped for gas, I threw it out, along with some other stuff. It was all in a Hardee’s bag you had on your floor.”

I waited for a punch line. None came. “How is this helpful?” I asked.

She pulled a rubber cleaning glove out of her purse. “I’m going to go get it.”

Now, at this point I should note for the record that I am not averse to recovering things from the trash. I have even been known to eat things that have come out of a trash can, provided they are not furry or ketchup-smeared. But that’s me. I’m a guy. I have back hair and laugh at poodoo jokes. Colette is all womanly and stuff. You know, soft hands and pretty smells and whatnot. Imagining her digging through a trash can, at a gas station, was sort of like the thought of the Snuggle bear getting a job at a slaughterhouse.

“You sure you want to do that?” I asked. But she was already gone. I feared the worst.

Twenty minutes later, she was back. “I got it!” she shrieked. “I went up there and asked if they’d already emptied the trash cans by the pumps, and at first they said they had, then the one guy remembered that he was super-lazy and hadn’t emptied them yet, and I put on my glove, and the guy unlocked the trashcan lid for me, and there it was, the Hardee’s bag, and I grabbed it and found the receipt and then I went ‘Woo-hoo!’ and I did a little dance like this.” And she did this little dance that, I’m certain, made the afternoon very memorable for the male gas station attendants.

Since I work close to the restaurant in question, I took the receipt with me, tried to avoid smelling it, and promised to take it there on my lunch hour if the transaction cleared and was still wrong.

As it turned out, when the transaction cleared, it changed back to the correct amount. Whether my sternly worded voice mail had any part in that, I don’t know. It could have just been a quirk of the system. Either way, all turned out well, and I didn’t have to take a stinky receipt anywhere.

The whole thing was a little unsettling, though. I’ve never thought of my wife as a delicate flower, exactly. Far from it. But in this case, she practically grew thorns and cloven hooves just to reclaim her $15. She even dug through gas-station trash to defend her fiscal honor. I can honestly say that I’d rather have sacrificed the $15 before shoving an appendage into gas-trash. She popped on a glove and dove in with reckless abandon.

Which reminds me. I need to take out the trash. It’s not all that full yet, but taking out the trash is one of my jobs around the house, and I don’t think I want Colette to get mad at me. She still has that glove, you know.

Bob Rybarczyk (brybarczyk@sbcglobal.net <mailto:brybarczyk@sbcglobal.net> ) writes stuff. He laughs in the face of St. Louis summer humidity, especially after the heatstroke has set in. Look for his first novel, “Acoustic Kitty,” at area Borders stores and at any online bookseller.