“Care to explain, Peggy?” Kyle asked quietly. Peggy flinched when he spoke, jerking around to face him while he was still in the process of standing. Her face was pinched and white. A guilty defiance began to build on her features.
“Explain what?” she said, stalling. Kyle’s lips twisted with annoyance. He saw Megan just inside the door and didn’t say anything. Only just barely avoiding shouldering his wife aside, he ostentatiously repositioned Megan’s 8X10 in the middle of Peggy’s carefully folded nightgowns and zipped the luggage closed.
“There!” he said dramatically. “Megan, yours and Todd’s pictures are going with your Mom on her trip,” he assured her. Grinning happily, Megan raced out of the room and was soon plunging down the staircase to find her brother and let him know what she’d done. She was that way. She never did anything at a slow pace.
Kyle stood back and stared at his wife. She was someone he didn’t know anymore. He wished someone would introduce them so they could get on with their lives.
“What’s going on, Peggy?” he asked.
Peggy had been taught the old axiom by her mother that the best defense is a good offense. She followed that advice as often as she could.
“Nothing’s going on,” she answered firmly. “What’s wrong? Why all these questions?”
“Peggy, you’ve got all your best evening wear all packed up and ready to go,” Kyle remarked, “along with your best jewelry, all the sexy underwear you own and two pair of dancing shoes. Every other business trip I’ve seen you go on, you’ve taken an old flannel t-shirt thing to sleep in and told me it was all you needed. You’ve got enough stuff here to go out every night of your stay and then get into your sexiest nightgowns to keep on partying. That is what you have in mind, isn’t it, Peggy?” His wife had begun shaking her head no before he was half finished.
“No, that’s not what I have in mind,” she retorted. “Look, in case you haven’t noticed it, I’m moving up in the firm. I have to be ready to attend formal…functions at a moment’s notice and I have to look good when I do. That’s part of being in management, you know.” Her voice was challenging. She figured she had a good argument to throw at him. “And I wanted to take my nightgowns…hell, I don’t know…because I just did,” she added.
Kyle didn’t bother to ask about the sexy underwear and thigh highs. He took the plastic bag from the bureau top where he had tossed it earlier and opened it slowly. He threw the pack of twelve condoms on the bed in front of his beloved wife. Her eyes followed the arc the package followed in the air. When it settled on the bed, she recognized what it was and her face flushed a brilliant crimson.
“I…I don’t know where those came from,” she said. She must have heard how lame it sounded even as she said it. Kyle took the two sheets of paper from the bag and pretended to read them.
“Well, the cash register receipt is dated yesterday, my dear…and this copy of a credit card receipt has our Visa credit card number on it,” he told her in icy tones. His wife wilted, sinking to a seat beside her two bags.