PART ONE
My husband announced it over breakfast like an order, not an invitation. ‘You are coming with me tonight,’ Fletcher said, barely glancing up from his Wall Street Journal. ‘The new CEO will be there.
Morrison Industries just got bought out, and I need to make the right impression.’
I paused in the act of refilling his coffee, the pot trembling just a little in my hand. ‘Are you sure you want me there?’ I asked. ‘I do not really have anything appropriate to wear to something that fancy.’
Fletcher finally looked at me, gray eyes full of that familiar impatience.
‘Find something,’ he said. ‘Buy something cheap if you have to. Just do not embarrass me.’
Do not embarrass me.
Those three words had been the soundtrack of our twenty–five year marriage. Do not embarrass me by talking too much at dinner. Do not embarrass me by mentioning your family background.
Do not embarrass me by existing too loudly in rooms where he wished I were invisible. I had married Fletcher Morrison in my twenties, in the suburbs outside Denver, Colorado. He was twelve years older, already a businessman with big plans and bigger suits, the kind of man who read the financial pages over breakfast and talked about commercial real estate like it was a war he could win with enough loans and charm.
I, on the other hand, was the wife who stayed home. The wife who pressed shirts, planned meals, and lived on the two hundred dollars a month he allotted me for personal expenses. Clothes, toiletries, gifts for his colleagues’ wives at Christmas all came out of that allowance.
Everything else was his domain. I spent the rest of that week combing thrift stores and discount shops around Denver with those same crumpled bills. After twenty–five years, I was an expert at finding decent clothing for almost nothing.
The dress I finally found was navy blue with long sleeves, modest but clean–lined. The saleswoman at the consignment shop swore it had come from an expensive department store downtown. It cost forty–five dollars.
I pressed it carefully at home and hung it at the back of my closet, already bracing myself for the ways Fletcher would find it lacking. The night of the gala arrived faster than I wanted. Fletcher emerged from his dressing room in a black tuxedo that probably cost more than I spent on clothes in an entire year.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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