by Rose Marie Zurkan
We were in Toronto to evaluate some of the restaurants in the area. We'd flown up the day before — Ed, a tall, quiet young man with sandy hair long enough to flop into his eyes, and Sally, in her 30's, pretty, and plump. Bruce had a crush on her.
"I come from Omaha," Ed told us. "Someday I'd like to move back. Permanently. My dad's a doctor, so's my two brothers. They're adopted. My parents thought they'd never have children. Then I came along. I had a great childhood, you can imagine. Lollipop Land all the way.
"Thunder Thighs and I have three kids," Chip said. "Two girls and a boy."
"Is that a nice way to refer to your wife?" I asked.
"She knows I don't mean it," he said.
He got Sally's goat. "If my husband referred to me like that," she said, "I'd tell him to take a hike."
"We've been married 12 years," Chip said.
"Then you should know better," she said.
While we observed patrons entering and leaving one of our target restaurants, Chip kept up a running monolog. Something about how he'd never cheat on his wife, how married people had to stay faithful or why bother getting married at all.
Like, what brought that up? By nodding and saying, "yep," or "uh-huh" once in a while I could focus on my own problems. My husband was out of work again. Not his fault, but still. Texas was a right to work state. As far as I could tell, that meant employees could hire people, then disappear in the middle of the night owing everybody money. My salary was sufficient — barely — but one salary meant we had no safety net, and our daughter was getting ready to attend college. I wished now we'd sent her to private school. Who knew the schools would be this bad, the teachers this prejudiced against Yankees. Molly's history teacher didn't even speak English grammatically. He said things like, "she don't" instead of "she doesn't." We weren't Yankees either. We moved here from New York.
Chip and I headed a team sent to Toronto to evaluate a business model for a new restaurant. We were sitting in the lobby of our hotel when Ed and Sally bounced in from the airport and headed our way.
"What did you guys find out?" I asked.
"The restaurant we looked at is open for lunch and dinner," Ed told us. "If they didn't have a captive audience, nobody would eat there."
"Captive audience?" I asked.
"Passengers," Ed explained.
"They put the same dishes out as yesterday," Sally added. "They looked the same anyway. Nobody would know. Different passengers every day."
"Yuck," I said. "Well, I don't know about you, but I'm beat. I'm going up and change."
"Coming down to eat later?" Chip asked.
"I think I'll get room service," I said.
We all went up to our rooms on the same floor. I said good-night, opened my door and kicked off my shoes. Then the lights went out.
In the lobby, the others were treating the electrical problem as a joke. The lights stayed out for an hour. When they came back on, I said good night again.
The next day we returned home.
"I hear you were in the hall with no clothes on," Rhonda, our secretary, said when I came in to work.
"What are you talking about?" I asked.
"I heard that the lights went out, and you ran into the hall naked," she said.
"I didn't have my shoes on. That was it. Who told you I was naked?"
"Ed."
"I'll talk to him." I meant to, but it didn't seem as important as the work on my desk, and I never did. My husband phoned and said he'd found a job, and all I felt was relief.
When Chip came in, he looked like he hadn't slept all night. "What's wrong?" I asked. "You sick?" If he was sick I hoped he'd go home, not like last time when he used my phone and I caught the flu from him.
"My wife left me," he said.
"Oh. I'm so sorry."
"She ran off with a guy she knew a long time ago. She's been seeing him for a while, I guess."
"You knew him too?" I asked.
"No," he said. "I can't believe it. After all my father and I did for her."
"What did you do?" I asked.
"She had a little money. Emphasis on little. My dad and I invested it for her all these years, and now she wants to take it all out and spend it."
I wondered if he called her thunder thighs to her face.
"She says I forced her to go to work. Everybody should have a job," he said.
"Three kids is a job too," I said. "What does she do?"
"She's a secretary."
I wondered if he had told his wife about our trip to Toronto and Ed telling everyone I was naked in the hall. I wondered if she believed it. I wondered what else he'd told her.
