The Right Kind of People

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance by any character or situation to any actual person or event is purely coincidental. All characters presented in this narrative are over the age of 18.

This entry is specifically for the Nude Day Story Contest 2023.

The Right Kind of People

By Royce F. Houton

Evelyn Meriwether was already having a bad morning. She didn't need this.

As her husband, Troy, could tell anyone who dared ask, his bride of 12 years was not someone you should trifle with until she had the first of her two or three morning cups of coffee. And those cups come early. Evie is hardwired to wake at 6 to get their two boys off to catch the school bus and then make sure Troy doesn't forget his wallet, watch and keys before trooping out to the family's four-year-old Chevy Impala for the 12-minute commute to his job as a middle-management employee of the Arkansas Department of Motor Vehicles in downtown Little Rock. Unpleasant things happen if she hasn't had her first cup of joe by then.

So when the frayed cord to the 1950s-vintage percolator her mom handed down to her popped and smoked when she jammed the prongs into the wall socket as she had every day, this mid-July day in 1974 was already off the rails.

Then, as Troy dressed, she heard him groan her name. "Eeee-veee!" he cried out, an annoying whiny quality to it. "Eeeee-veee, not my favorite tiiiie ..."

She bolted up the steps to the top-level of their tidy tri-level starter home in North Little Rock's Fornix Falls Estates subdivision, a development of cookie-cutter houses from essentially the same blueprint on neat half-acre lots. When she first saw the neighborhood, Evie's mind recalled the lyrics to a Pete Seeger tune from several years earlier: Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky, little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same.

There, in the bedroom doorway, Troy showed her his favorite red-and-blue striped tie with the unmistakable singed imprint of an iron. She shook her head, her shoulders slumped and he sighed in dismay.

Evie was fairly certain it was not a mistake she had made; her first thought was the cleaning service Troy had hired as a Mother's Day gift to her. She had told the three women who showed up that she did not want them to do any laundry (she had a special way, special cleaning products for the children's hypersensitive skin and a particular way Troy liked to have his shirts and ties arranged). But she had a bad feeling upon learning that only one of the workers spoke only a little English, and the other two were Spanish speakers only. Troy's favorite tie, she feared, had been lost in translation.

"Sorry, babe. We'll get you a new one," she said.

"But that's the one the boys gave me for Father's Day," he said, not maliciously but again in his galling, plaintive whimper, as was Troy's wont.

It's a fucking tie, Troy. Man up and grow some curly hair on your cod pod, Evie muttered to herself, hoping that none of it actually crossed her lips.

After Troy made do with a less flashy blue-and-gray patterned tie, gave Evie a peck on the cheek and squeezed one of her butt cheeks, he backed the Impala into the cul-de-sac and was gone, Evie loaded a hamper full of dirty underwear, T-shirts and pillowcases into the washing machine and started it. With the boys entering the second week of their three-week summer camp in the Missouri Ozarks, this was when Evie would relax with her second or third cup of coffee, sit in the recliner and flip on the TV to channel 7 for the KATV morning news, lately preempted by those monotonous Watergate hearings in Congress. Still, a little Evie time was the gift she gave herself.

Without caffein, however, it wasn't working. Restless, Evie scrounged around in her pantry for some of the Folger's instant coffee that her mother-in-law preferred when Troy's parents visited from Illinois. She found none of that, but she did find a half-empty jar of Sanka. It took all her might to twist off the lid to the jar whose origins she could not recall. Nobody in this family drank decaf, and damned if she could recall any of her friends who did. But, hey, it had to at least taste a little like coffee, right? And wouldn't that be better than nothing? She poured boiling water from a Pyrex pan into the brown powder in the bottom of a mug and took a sip, and the answer was instant. She spat it into the kitchen sink, dumped the whole mug and took a swig of tap water to rinse the taste from her tongue.

Half an hour later, she heard the washing machine complete its final spin cycle and give off the telltale buzz that it was time to empty and dry its damp contents before they mildewed.

The swelter of the stifling July morning covered Evie like a steaming towel the instant she stepped out of the air conditioning into the blazing haze of an incandescent sun. A sheen of sweat formed on her brow and forearms before she reached the clothesline in her professionally landscaped, immaculately turfed and highly private backyard sanctuary.

It's not as though there weren't hot days in the Cleveland, Ohio, suburb where Evie grew up, but there wasn't the unbroken string of suffocating, humid days that she had encountered in the 10 years since she and Troy moved to Arkansas. "Jeez, it's like we're a 10-minute drive from the surface of the sun," she muttered to herself and no one in general.

She was finishing up with the last article of laundry, the 300-thread-count, queen-sized cotton fitted sheet to her mattress, when she heard a click behind her and a spitting and hissing sound as cold water sprayed from the lawn several sprinkler heads of the irrigation system that Troy had paid a company to install in late April.

"Oh for fuck sakes!" Evie cried out in frustration, utterly pushed to her limit by her morning of shitty surprises.

The watering system had done wonders to nurture the deep, soft carpet of fescue that Evie and Troy prized, but two months later, neither Troy nor the installers had managed to set the system to go off during the optimum watering hours just before dawn. The more Troy tried to read the manual and adjust the settings, the more haywire it got.

Evie stood there, her fists clenched, seething as the sprinklers soaked the gauzy, cotton shift she wore as a housedress during these hot summer days, usually with nothing underneath. Behind her, the laundry she had hung out to dry was now dripping with water from the nozzles that had popped up from their locations strategically implanted in the ground for optimum coverage of her perfect lawn, including the clothesline and the area around it.

She was torn between the impulse to cry and the urge to scream in rage. Crying did no good, she reasoned, and only heightened her feeling of helpless victimhood. Crying is exactly what the gremlins merrily watching their handiwork were hoping for. Evie could feel the rage boil within her as she looked at the soggy laundry behind her, now twice as heavy as the merely moist cloth she had brought outside and hung on the line minutes earlier. She looked down at herself, at the thin, cotton material of her house dress now plastered to her skin.

"Aaaaaaagh!" she screamed to the uncaring sky, a primal, angry exclamation that neighbors two or three houses away certainly would hear, particularly anyone who was also outdoors. It didn't halt the sprinkler or the water gently pelting her. It didn't remove the singed imprint from Troy's power tie. It didn't repair the shorted-out electrical cord to her percolator. But at least it exorcised some of the wrath building within her.

What's the fucking point? Evie reasoned to herself. She flung two wooden clothespins she was clutching in her right hand against the chest-high boxwoods that lined the 6-foot-high privacy fence encompassing her entire backyard, interspersed with blooming crape myrtles between the hedge and the fence that extended a visibility barrier to a good 14 or 15 feet.

With her anger still simmering, she kicked the plastic basket she had used to carry the damp laundry from the bottom-floor/basement laundry outside to the clothesline. The basket skittered and bounced a good five yards over the lush expanse of grass before coming to rest upside down.

The clammy feel of the soaked housedress, though a cooling alternative to the burning sun and humidity that had already driven the temperature to 93 degrees before 9 a.m., was also annoying Evie. She snarled and grabbed the top of the garment at the start of the slope of her breasts and yanked it forward and downward — hard — until the two oversized buttons on its front panel that secured it to the shoulder straps popped off and spun onto the grass. She also heard the thin material tear somewhere under her left armpit as the garment went limp, leaving Evie to grasp the ruined dress and press it to her chest to keep it from dropping in a soggy pile around her ankles.

Evie looked around, suddenly aware that she'd either have walk indoors with the dripping tatters of her dress falling off of her or just let it go and stand defiantly naked against a day that had been out to get her. Surveying the tall, dense screen of fencing and greenery, she concluded that no one in the low-slung houses abutting hers could possibly peer over it into her backyard. Outside of a hovering helicopter, she could do as she pleased totally unseen in her plush little patch of heaven, so she let the dress fall.

The sensation was immediate and electric. The water spraying onto her tits, still standing proud after two breastfed sons, and her protruding, mocha-colored nipples already tightening under the sensation of the cool water and the warming sun, was surprisingly arousing. The freedom alone—naked in her backyard in the shank of the bright summer morning with the whole day awaiting her—was in itself an aphrodisiac, generating a flushed feeling, a new sensitivity down below.

As her enmity at the morning's vexing circumstances cooled within Evie, the tightness in her shoulders began to ease and she unclenched her jaw and gave her gritted teeth a break. Evie's rational mind began to reassert itself.

OK, now what? she asked herself. Nope, she had not thought this through. Here you stand with your lady bits and tits shining in the sun and getting an unscheduled outdoor shower. What's next, hot stuff?

Damned if she knew. Now she felt a little drained, having vented her fury to an uncaring universe. Normally, she'd go inside, make up the beds, pour herself another cup of coffee, pick up the morning newspaper, the Arkansas Gazette, off the sidewalk and then read the front page and do the crossword puzzle. Maybe she'd do that as she listened to soft rock on FM radio. But she had been denied her morning coffee, she wasn't sufficiently attired to stroll to the sidewalk and fetch the paper, and she was, frankly, interested in exploring the novelty this moment of nudism afforded her.

So, comfortable that she could soak up the sun for a while out of the reach of prying eyes, she unfolded one of the cheap, aluminum chaise lounges that were stored just inside the backyard shed, pulled it out of the range of the irrigation system and lay on her back facing the sun.

▼▼▼

Pastor Pete was doing what he usually does on a Monday morning: counting the coins, paper currency and checks that had been dropped into the plate the previous morning at the Holiness Apostolic Tabernacle. And business was good.

Peter Redmond had formed the church when his attempt to essentially stage a coup and oust the lead pastor at Grace Baptist Church had failed and he and a cadre of his sect of hard-core charismatics were expelled from the congregation.

After his foiled attempt to commandeer a mainstream Baptist congregation and install himself as it leader/prophet, he struck a deal with a local funeral home to rent its chapel Sunday mornings for his growing sect's worship services. It worked for a time because Sunday mornings were the one spot on the weekly calendar when funeral services were rare and the undertaker could earn some extra revenue from rent, but Sunday afternoons were a different story. When the services, which began at 9:30, were still going past 12 and into the afternoon in violation of the terms of the agreement with the mortuary, Redmond and his flock were told to find another location.

They settled on a discount retail store in a down-on-its-heels strip shopping center on the eastern periphery of North Little Rock that had been vacant for two years since the failing business was bought out by a new competitor, an aggressively expanding discount chain owned by the Walton family in nearby Bentonville. Redmond — known to his followers and friends by the friendly title "Pastor Pete" but in his church's promotional materials as "Apostle Peter" — persuaded church members to turn over their children's college savings, sell possessions including cars and take out second mortgages on their homes to come up with the large, empty storefront for the price of $22,000.

The congregation grew in spite of Pastor Pete's constant appeals for cash and pressuring of his enthralled disciples for "a deeper measure of financial discipleship." Most remained with him after several alleged scandals, one of which recently landed two prominent members of Pastor Pete's handpicked Council of Elders in federal prison on tax evasion, wire fraud and obstruction of justice convictions.

Now, about the burst from the seams at the former discount store and adjacent properties that the Holiness Apostolic Temple had bought and annexed, Pastor Pete was working on building his own showplace mega-church on a wooded 100-acre expanse of wooded hills south of Little Rock that would include a retirement village where devoted senior members of his flock could hold for the rest of their days and have all their needs attended to in exchange for consigning their pensions and Social Security benefits to the Apostle and his Temple. There were plans for a water park with an option to purchase another 100 acres of adjacent land should he ever wish to create a sort of evangelical counterpart to Six Flags. There would be in-house broadcast production facilities in hopes of one day syndicating his services nationally or beyond. Indeed, his worship services would originate from a coliseum-sized soundstage at the heart of the development, replete with full broadcast production and satellite transmission capabilities. And last but not least, the site would be home to a 12-bedroom, 16-bathroom, 25,000 square foot mansion just for God's own "apostle" and his wife, Sharon, who spent an extraordinary amount of time at a Minnesota clinic for "needs she has from time to time" from singlehandedly putting away a fifth of vodka every day.

Pastor Pete still looked first to his members for most of the monetary backing of his grand designs but was increasingly taking his appeals public. He had purchased airtime on AM radio stations in North Little Rock, Pine Bluff and Jonesboro to broadcast pre-recorded worship services from 8 a.m. to 10 each Sunday morning and was negotiating for similar slots with stations in Hot Springs and Fayetteville.

That's why he took very seriously his mission of meticulously — and singlehandedly — tabulating the tithes and offerings in the privacy of his home study, recording amounts by name and address in a large ledger book when the donations were made by check or in sealed envelopes. It was a job that most congregations assign to a paid secretary with prior accounting experience, but at the HAT — the widely used acronym for Redmond's aspiring church empire — this was a solemn and seldom-questioned prerogative reserved solely for the Lord's own anointed. That way he could divert as much as he wanted in raw, undesignated and unattributed legal tender to a business account under the name Hat Trick Inc. that only he knew about and controlled at a small savings and loan in Conway, a short drive north up the Interstate that he took by himself every Monday afternoon with a nice, fat all-cash deposit — one never reflected in any of HAT's books.

He had been at it with his pencil and his calculator for more than an hour in his private study when he heard what he thought might be the f-word shouted from somewhere nearby — maybe from the next-door neighbors who had consistently rebuffed his efforts to proselytize them. He imagined that they were always up to the devil's work and that they erected the high wooden fence, the boxwoods and the crape myrtles in an effort to hide their perfidy from him, and he was only partially right. The Meriwethers wanted to shield themselves from the prying eyes of gossips and nosy busybodies who were their neighbors in the Fornix Hills Estates subdivision.

After a few seconds, Pastor Pete shrugged it off and resumed the serious pursuit of counting his loot. Then, moments later, a louder and more anguished cry that left no mistake that its origins were in the adjacent property's obscured backyard.

OK, what are those heathens up to? This might be worth a look-see, Pastor Pete reasoned and walked outside into the blazing heat of his own backyard. At first he tried standing on a metal milk crate to peer over the fence at several points, but the crape myrtles were too thick and high to afford him a view. He tried looking beneath the fence, but leaves and mulch piled between the ground and the gap between the ground and the boards made that impossible. Then he spotted an area where the vertical boards of the fence had bowed, leaving a nearly half-inch gap about three feet off the ground, and he decided to give it a look. Inside the fence, at a level too low to be obstructed by the crape myrtles' foliage or blooms and in an area where the boxwoods had not yet fully grown together, he saw movement in the middle of the yard. Rather than bend from the waist, he knelt as though praying, putting his eye at the correct level and pressing his face against the rough boards, shutting his left eye to give himself a better view through his dominant right eye. Pastor Pete gasped at what he saw.

▼▼▼

Evie Meriwether would never be a swimsuit model. At five feet, three inches tall, she would never have the height to strut the runways of Milan or Paris, or to don a barely-there swimsuit and grace the pages of Sports Illustrated. Her hips were a bit wide. Two pregnancies had expanded her waistline an inch or two beyond the 22 inches it had been when she and Troy met at a fraternity party at Southern Illinois University 14 years earlier. Her ass had resisted the sag she saw among some moms her age. Her breasts had slowly regained most of their bounce and firmness since her boys, nine-year-old Corbin and seven-year-old Tyler, were weaned, though her nipples had taken on a fetching prominence that they had lacked before, a change that she and Troy both enjoyed.

Sex was something that had not lost its zest and zing for Evie and Troy. The sight of her in a negligee or just stepping out of the shower was still enough to plump Troy up. A sensual kiss in the car, during a walk in the woods or in their own bed would reliably spring-load his erection and dampen her pussy, and — conditions permitting — result in satisfying orgasms as soon as they could find a suitably private venue to act on their arousal.

Except for the weeks following the birth of their two sons, the Meriwethers couldn't keep their hands off each other's bodies and weren't shy with each other about it, at least not behind closed doors. While her post-partum vagina recovered, Evie obliged Troy's needs with an occasional handjob. Other times, when she was too exhausted even for that, Troy would go into the shower and rub one out on his own. He had an old copy of Penthouse magazine to help him out when Evie was away, but he disclosed the skin mag to Evie and let her know why he had it and where he stashed it. She found it a bit creepy, yes, but appreciated his forthrightness.