At times, her attitudes caused more significant conflicts. There was the time, for instance, when Kyle caught her in a fib about where she’d been when someone dented the fender on the car. She’d actually been buying a new dress at the mall, not the supermarket like she told him. At the time, they couldn’t really afford for her to buy that dress but she was afraid it wouldn’t be there when they could. It had to be that exact dress, so she’d gone back and gotten it after telling Kyle she would not.
Kyle had had his suspicions. There was something odd about the way Peggy was acting when she told him about the supermarket parking lot, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was. When the police report they had to submit with the insurance claim gave the lie to her whereabouts at the time of the accident, Kyle asked his wife some pointed questions. He was completely unprepared for the onslaught of verbal volleys that were hurled at him.
When he got mad at the undeserved treatment and fired back, Peggy refused to talk to him for two solid weeks. Just because she wasn’t talking didn’t stop Kyle though. He fell into the habit of making extemporaneous, rhetorical remarks about the incident whenever the mood struck him.
For instance, he made much of the fact that she wouldn’t have gotten into the accident if she hadn’t been doing something she’d promised she wouldn’t. He didn’t get an explanation. Peggy had sworn to herself she would not talk to him for a long time and that period was not yet up. Her self-imposed inability to even respond to her husband made her mad. That she couldn’t counter the logic of the remark infuriated her even more. When he got on to her for lying when she professed to loath people who did that, Kyle earned himself another two weeks of the silent treatment.
She’d taken the dress back, only to have Kyle put it on layaway and buy it for her when things calmed down. He ate bologna sandwiches for two months at lunchtime to be able to do it, but he thought it would be worth it. He figured it would be a peace offering, but Peggy went ballistic instead. She hadn’t wanted a man to get it for her. She’d wanted to do it herself. The dress was on a rack stuffed in the back of her closet. It had never been worn.
Though they usually got along, the antagonism reached levels Kyle wasn’t willing to overlook on several other occasions. He loved her. He wanted to spend the rest of his life with her, but there were times when he could not put up with her ways.
They separated twice, living apart for three weeks the first time and two months the second time. The second time had been particularly humiliating for Peggy. She’d had to admit she was wrong in throwing a fit about a credit card purchase and accusing him of buying a trinket for one of the floozies in the secretary pool. When the bill came in, it was plain to see it had been for a present for her sister’s birthday and the flowers that had been sent in both their names. She’d forgotten. That had been a few months after Todd was born and things had been relatively smooth since then.