When Callie was in her mid-40s, she was still a Victoria’s Secret customer. She’d started when she was 33 and in love with the man who would be her second husband; he took her to the store and bought her the lingerie he wanted her to wear. Callie thought that shopping trip was sexier than most of their intimate time, which wasn’t bad either. If good sex had been the only requirement, she’d still be with him.

But it wasn’t and she isn’t. By the time they broke up she wasn’t buying teddies any more. But she liked the bras and panties; she kept her Victoria’s Secret credit card. This was in the middle of the 1990s and the store then featured a fabric they called Second Skin Satin. It was glossy and slick but it had a little stretch. It was opaque but almost seamless in its construction. Callie will never understand why it was discontinued. She had to toss pieces as they stretched out or wore through over time, but even now, almost 64 years old, Callie owns two racer-back bras and one pair of high-leg panties made of the stuff.

The bras are handy when she wants to expose her shoulders. She doesn’t do that often, because she hasn’t found a way to show shoulder without brandishing her flapping upper arms, so the bras are in pretty good shape. But the panties are shot. They are still a nice red color, but the cotton crotch in each pair is starting to fray, and the underpants have stretched to old-lady dimensions.

Those red panties have been her Monday choice for the last few months. She put on 20 stress pounds this year, she’s always at her peak weight on Monday morning, and the old VS panties are the comfortable underwear in her drawer. Until now.

Her college boyfriend just paid a visit. Their breakup was amicable and they’ve stayed in touch over the decades. It had been a year since they’d last seen one another. Kevin drove from his Fresno house to Callie’s Oakland condo on Saturday, for a nice dinner out, a platonic sleepover, and Sunday morning conversation.

Kevin and Callie don’t have a sexual relationship. They did in college; in fact, they were each other’s first. But that was Berkeley around 1970 so of course they weren’t each other’s only. They stayed together, mostly, through college, but then Kevin went kind of nuts. After diagnosis and some treatment he settled into depression and bipolor disorder, which are not nuts, but his treatment toned him down in all ways, some of which were personality-altering. He became dismayingly humble and gentle. To Callie it was almost like altering a cat.

Kevin hasn’t married. Callie has twice. They haven’t resumed having sex, not even long after she became single again. But they’ve stayed fond of each another. One or the other of them occasionally considers “what if?” but they’re never in sync enough to proceed.

He showed up around 2:30. They hugged, he brought his bag inside, and then they took a walk. It wasn’t until after a good dinner out, when they were seated on her small couch watching a movie, that Callie’s nose first detected an unfamiliar odor.

She lives in one room. She’s naturally neat and not a collector. She knows her home with all her senses. Discreetly she checked out her own armpits – no. Then she assumed she was smelling some critter gift; the yard in which her cottage sits is home to all sorts of urban varmints. It wasn’t death, but might it be some shit? No – too musty.

When she walked Kevin to his car at noon yesterday, they bear-hugged. She felt his little pot belly against her stomach (in the old days Kevin was lanky and Callie was plump, but over the decades she has gotten into exercise and he has gotten into sitting). Tightly they embraced and chastely they kissed, but not before Callie concluded that Kevin was the source of the smell.

She thought about that during the afternoon and evening, as Kevin’s spoor dissipated. She had given him a towel when he arrived, and she offered her compact facility that morning, but he said he didn’t necessarily shower daily: just when he sweated.

Clearly Kevin should shower. Callie doesn’t know if the smell is on account of the anti-depressants he takes or age or both, but it is probably not a necessary smell. She knows she would mention it to him if they saw one another more often, but as it is, as they are, she is unmotivated to give somatic advice.

The mustiness was gone by this morning. Callie woke to her usual Monday environment, feeling fat. After exercise and her own shower, she opened her underwear drawer and pulled out the red panties.

And noticed them. They were humongous. They were old. They were no more okay than Kevin’s smell.

Callie made her habitual Monday morning diet promise, knowing as she vowed that it wouldn’t stick. But she did something new, too. She walked to the foot-operated garbage can in her single room, and she dropped those old panties inside.