Last night my husband made love. To a man. And I watched. The whole thing. From the bed. As the two of them went at it. For half an hour. It was, to put it nicely, quite disgusting. I hope I don’t ever have to witness something like that again.

After it was over, The Husband, who sat at the computer with his back to me typing away, started to say, “I can not believe-“

“That you just made love to a man?” I interrupted, because that’s exactly what had happened, and I could not believe it either.

The Husband just laughed. But he wasn’t laughing earlier when we pulled up our flight itinerary to Italy and saw that we’d made a mistake. Actually it wasn’t we, it was he, who had made the mistake of booking our return flight from Rome to New York on the 14th, instead of the 13th. The plan was to leave Rome on the 13th, pick up The Kid from grandma’s house, and then head back to LA on the 14th. The problem was The Husband had us landing in New York with just an hour to spare, and that could only happen without The Kid, and we kind of needed to take The Kid with us.

“$400!” my husband exclaimed, several times, when he found out how much it was going to cost to make the flight change. “That’s more than the ticket itself!”

“Just pay it,” I said, and then yawned. It was late.

“Pay it?” he asked, swiveling around in the big leather chair to face me. “Are you kidding me?”

I laughed. “What choice do we have? We have to pay it. And anway, the tickets were cheap!” I said, knowing full well what he was going to say next. I mean I’ve only heard it a million billion times before.

That’s when he said pretty much exactly what I thought he was going to say, and more. “Do you even know how long it takes me to make $400?”

Actually I did, and I tried not to laugh as he went on and on about how long it takes him to make that kind of money, which wasn’t that long, really, not compared to how long it takes me to make the same kind of money.

“Do you really want to book another night in Rome where the hotel costs $350, without tax, and then don’t forget meals. We need meals. Three of them. Face it, it’s cheaper to just pay the damn fee,” I said, because it was true, it was WAY cheaper to pay the fee.

“I’m not paying it,” he said, and turned back to the computer. That’s when The Husband’s little brain went to work and his charming self picked up the phone.

“Hello, Roger, My name’s-” The Husband said. And the courtship began. They talked, they laughed, they even teased each other with traveling stories, and this went on and on and on as I sat on the bed rolling my eyes.

In the end, the man I married, the man who can talk an Eskimo into buying ice, did not get Roger to wave the fee, and now The Husband, who would not give up without a fight, knows more about Roger than anyone ever wanted to know, including Roger’s wife, and his three teenage kids. That’s how well the two of them got to know each other. And now I think Roger, who lives in North Carolina, might fly down to join us for dinner when we get back from Italy.