Arm candy

 

At a restaurant table near where I was eating a hamburger, there was a couple. This was a few years ago.

He was probably in his 50s, she in her late 20s. They had matching rings on their right hands, so I doubted they were father and daughter.

His full head of gray hair was manicured. I suspected every hair was in place when he got out of bed in the morning. His clothes included a perfectly ironed baby-blue shirt, khakis pressed to where a wrinkle would not dare to mar the surface and a white tennis sweater tied around his neck. His loafers were polished to mirror quality. He looked bored and avoided the woman's eyes. She talked, he said nothing.

She wore expensive mommy clothes, a high-ticket brand name sweat suit and sneakers that would need a loan to pay for if one was of a normal income family. I suspected the Mercedes outside was theirs. 

She wasn't bored. She was trying to keep a whiny two-ish-old happy. It wasn't working. 

My writer imagination went wild as I concocted a story for them. 

He was a successful executive who had worked his way up or the owner/CEO of a successful company (fill in the type of company in the edit). 

At Harvard he had met his wife who helped him get his MBA. They had had four children and she'd decided not to pursue a career to raise the family and support him in his climb to success. Of course she had gained some weight.

Five years before, the woman, I'll call her Amy, went to work as his personal assistant. 

He would watch her and think she was everything his wife wasn't. She laughed, wasn't uptight about the children and when they were on a business trip when he insisted she come along, discovered she had no stretch marks. 

She made him feel young again. 

The inevitable happened and he left his wife and family and bristled when he overheard people calling her his "arm candy." 

Within six months of his remarriage, she became pregnant and refused to get an abortion. He thought what the kid was in university he would be in his seventies. He had had enough of diapers, sleepovers, PTA meetings, badly-played school concerts, a wife too tired to pay attention to him. But that was what he saw. 

His future matched his past.

His arm candy developed stretch marks.