“Lennie,” Barbie called out when she walked through the mudroom into the kitchen, where her husband was rooting around inside the refrigerator. “You’ll never guess what happened tonight.”
“You’re probably right,” Lennie testily replied as he popped open a Budweiser. “And I’m not going to guess.”
“A figure of speech.” She said what she always did.
“What took you so long? I thought you’d be home hours ago.”
“Traffic and those poor people in the nursing home,” she said. “Oh, Lennie, I made a new girlfriend tonight and have a rainbow on my minivan!”
“What’d you do, drive through a thunderstorm and now you’re gonna find a pot of gold?” Lennie gulped the beer and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.
“Are the girls asleep?” Barbie inquired as she looked inside the refrigerator, too, deciding she would celebrate her rainbow with a Mike’s Hard Lemonade. “Wouldn’t a pot of gold be wonderful?”
“Yeah, yeah. Listen,” Lennie said, “you know, one of my clients has got extra tickets for Saturday night’s race, and as you know, I got to be in Charlotte at that real estate conference. So you want the tickets, or should I give them to someone else?”
“I’ll get a sitter and maybe take a girlfriend,” Barbie replied, failing to add that she wouldn’t miss a race for the world and was delighted that her husband couldn’t go.
Barbie had a secret passion for driver Ricky Rudd, who had the most flawless creamy skin and cute blond hair. Whenever she saw pictures of him wearing that big Texaco star on the front of his colorful racing suit or watched his number 28 bright red Monte Carlo roar around on TV, she felt tingles all over her body and would send him another letter. She had been writing to him for years, sending him weekly epistles when he lived in North Carolina and then trying to figure out how she might get his phone number after he moved back to his home state of Virginia. He never answered, of course, but she believed he would if she didn’t use a pen name and fail to include a return address.
Along with Ricky, Barbie enjoyed an obsession with Bo Mann, whom she’d noticed when he was driving the Monte Carlo pace car at the 2000 Chevrolet Monte Carlo 400 last year. When Barbie made numerous inquiries in the pits and begged for her photograph to be taken with Bo, she was clever enough to trick him into giving her his address.
“If I send you the photo with a stamped return envelope, will you autograph it?” she had said to Bo as they posed together in front of the pace car, after the race.
“Sign the envelope or the picture?” he had asked, and oh how Barbie loved a man with a sense of humor.
“I heard a man got blowed up by the river tonight,” Lennie was saying. “I guess that means there’s another psycho on the loose. Let’s go to bed and have sex.”
The lemonade was mounting straight to Barbie’s head.
“Oh, dear,” she sighed. “I don’t think I’m up for it tonight, Lennie. I’ve got rainbows on the brain and just want to relax a little and bask in it, if you don’t mind.”
Lenny did mind. Frustrated, he finished the beer and got out another one. He popped the top and eyed his wife’s trim figure. She spent so much time taking care of herself, but then she didn’t want him to snatch her clothes off and explore what she worked so hard to maintain. It didn’t make sense. Why does a woman bother looking good if she doesn’t want sex?
“I think I need to check on the girls and go to bed,” Barbie announced. “Oh my! This lemonade’s making me swoon.”
“Glad something does,” he muttered as he thought of how seldom he complained about his wife’s shopping sprees or what she spent on cosmetic surgery and injections and God knows what all she did when she visited that doctor of hers once a month. Lennie was good about sending her flowers, too, even when there was no special occasion, and he never complained about babysitting the twins, Mandie and Missie, who were almost five. He just wanted his wife to let him touch her and at least pretend she liked it or didn’t mind.