Snagged Read Online Free

be made in all different colors and, worst of all . . .”
    The board members braced themselves.
    “ IT DOESN’T RUN OR SNAG !”
    “But madam,” Leonard White, a distinguished octo-genarian, began. “Five million dollars is an awful lot of money, and we don’t want it to compete with our other lines.”
    Ruth slammed her fist on the table, causing the ashes to fly around like the fake snow in a watery Christmas-scene paperweight. “What, are you crazy? Who’s competing? These panty hose will never see the light of day. Remember our motto: ’Repeat Business.’ We buy the formula, own the patent, and then put it away for safekeeping. Over my dead body will a panty hose be marketed that doesn’t run. As for the five million dollars, we figured he could get a lot more than that if it goes to auction. We want to offer him a figure he’ll take right away. It’ll cost us a lot more than that if someone else gets their hands on it.”
    White, the only brave one in the group, cleared his throat. “But can we be sure it’s so durable? You’ve only had them for a month.”
    Ruth narrowed her beady eyes and tossed back her shoulder-length brown hair. “I wore them for a week straight, and went down to wash them in the Laundromat’s battered machines every night. Beach towels get chewed up in those things. The next morning when I put them on it was like they were fresh out of the wrapper. Then I gave them to the lab to test. Every test so far has come out positive. Irving is supposed to give us an update at this meeting, WHERE IS HE?”
    The door at the back of the room opened and Irving Franklin, a thin, bespectacled man in his early fifties, wearing a white lab coat with a pair of black panty hose draped over his arm, stepped inside. Irving had been with Calla-Lily since the start of his career as an engineer and had seen them through the transition from stockings to panty hose and all the other crises in between, including the year of the fishnets. “Hello, Ruth. I’m here now.” There was no trace of nervousness in his manner. He was the one employee Ruth couldn’t bully, and she knew it.
    “Talk to us, please,” Ruth urged. “I’ve been trying to tell them . . .”
    Irving walked to the opposite end of the conference table and reverentially laid the panty hose in front of him. He took off his glasses, pulled a tissue out of his pocket and began to clean them, holding each glass inside his mouth and giving it a good “hahhhhhh,” before returning them to the bridge of his nose. The board members fidgeted in their seats and Ruth finally exploded.
    “Irving, would you please hurry up!”
    Irving stared at her.
    Ruth slunk back in her seat.
    “I have completed most of the tests,” Irving began. “It seems to me we have a breakthrough. I liken this to the discovery of nylon, which of course revolutionized the stocking, for the most part replacing the use of delicate silk. I can’t swear, but they seem to be perfect. I even gave them my own personal test.”
    “What was that?” an up-till-now silent board member croaked in a barely audible voice.
    “I lent them to my mother-in-law. She hasn’t been to the chiropodist in years.”
    Murmurs rippled through the boardroom, many of whose members knew firsthand the importance of monthly visits to the foot clinic.
    “My mother-in-law wore these for three days, which is an endurance test equivalent to any of us competing in a triathlon,” Irving pontificated as he walked around the room, “and not even breaking a sweat.”
    More murmurs.
    “These panty hose survived so well that my thirteen-year-old daughter, who weighs about one hundred pounds less than her grandmother, was able to borrow them for a teen dance and not worry about bagginess. These things snap right back into shape. Yes, I must say that these are the first ’one size fits all’ that don’t look cheap.”
    “I told you!” Ruth yelled. “We’ve got to buy them before they do to us what