“Get the coffee, alright?” Sam said.
“No way,” Kit shot back, “it’s your turn. Shotgun always makes the run.”
“Can you just get it?” he growled in a tone he generally reserved for scaring youths off of private property. Kit’s face soured, but she relented. With a disdainful shake of her head, she climbed out of the squad car and slammed the door. “I’m sorry,” he called after her. “I just need a minute.” Kit just blew a raspberry over her shoulder as she marched into the coffee shop. As soon as the door closed behind her, Sam opened his phone and made a call.
There were four painstaking rings before a woman answered in a harsh voice saying, “What do you want, Sam?”
“Hi, Angela,” he said with a passable attempt at genuine enthusiasm. “How are you?”
The enthusiasm was neither believed nor returned. “Why are you calling,” she asked.
“Alright, listen,” he said with a sigh, “I know this is kind of coming out of nowhere, but I need to ask you something.”
“What, Sam,” she asked in the tone of a brusque goodbye.
Like ripping off a band-aide, Sam hesitated, and then rushed all at once, saying, “What do you think my underwear says about me?”
A pause. Sam wondered if Angela actually had hung up the phone. Then with almost a hint of a laugh, she said, “Excuse me?”
“Look I know it’s a weird question, but . . . it’s kind of important,” he mumbled.
“Are you drunk?”
“Am I—it’s the middle of the day,” Sam said, raising his voice even more. “Why would you think I’m drunk?”
“Are you?” she asked with probing sharply.
“No,” he retorted. “I’m not drunk. I’m on the job.”
“Did you just say you’re drunk on the job?”
“I—what?” Sam said, growing more flustered. “Angela, I’m a cop.”
Her shrug was practically audible. “You hear a lot of different things about cops these days.”
“Will you just answer the question?”
Having been annoyed by the conversation since the moment she answered the phone, Angela sighed and said, “I don’t know, Sam.”
“Okay, but one year, for my birthday,” he said hurriedly, “you gave me a pair of silk briefs. Did that mean something?”
The next sigh was much louder and more pointed. “It meant I thought you would look good in them.”
Sam watched the coffee shop door anxiously, knowing that his partner would return at any moment. “Alright, but then one Christmas you gave me a pair of boxers with footballs on them,” he said, still speaking quickly. “What about that?”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“Whatever,” Angela answered. “I guess I thought they would be fun. Football was one of the only things I ever saw you get really excited about, so I thought you might like some boxers with footballs on them.”
“But I always wore boxer briefs,” Sam said anxiously, “not boxers.”
“Well the store only had that pattern on boxers. Would you have worn them even if they were the right style of underwear?” Sam made several noises like he was trying to speak, but no answer ever came. “I thought so,” Angela said at last.
“So what does that say about me?” Sam asked, exasperated that Angela couldn’t answer some simple questions about the significance of his undergarments. Her icy attitude was also frustrating. Obviously, their history made things complicated, but she was the only person who had ever been able to offer him comfort on the rare occasions that he reached this level of emotional distress. It seemed reasonable to Sam that a dead real estate tycoon wearing his style of boxer briefs was significant enough to warrant a breach of their usual silence.
Of course, he hadn’t explained any of that to her. So when Angela’s answer came, it had an air of calm finality. “I think you lost the right to ask me questions about your underwear when we got divorced.”

* * *

Underwear is an ongoing series:
First // Series

Story by Gregory M. Fox