A Year And A Day Ch. 01

Paul reached out to touch my arm. Instinctively, I recoiled into myself.

"Y-yes. Just send me the details later."

Paul stared at me for a moment.

"Look Andy, you wanted this. You said you needed it."

He wasn't lying. I said that. I really did.

He muttered something under his breath.

"I'll never understand women like you - hot as a whore on a bed of dicks one night, then when it's all over you act like we shot your damn puppy."

He was obviously annoyed at me, but what he said was accurate. I didn't have anything to add so instead I just stood there wishing it was time to take another Xanax. Eventually he got the hint I was done with the conversation and moved away. Fucking bastard.

I walked past Maggs, not even acknowledging her and John, and stood in front of the huge plate glass window overlooking the tarmac. A plane was taking off on the runway - leveraging its speed and thrust to ascend into the heavens. Oh, how I wished that was me. I would give anything to fly away from the disaster I've made out of my life. I wanted to be a mom again. To be at home with my little babies, changing diapers, playing the ABC game, taking them to the park, cleaning up their adorable little faces after lunch. Waiting for Mark to come home, to get foot rub, a kiss, all four of us together on the couch cuddling. The feeling that swelled up in my heart when I came into the living room and found Mark passed out on the floor with a sleeping angel tucked under each arm.

If I knew then what I know now, I never would have started talking to Paul Jackson again. I never would have gone back to work at RBS. I never would have betrayed my family and myself as utterly as I have.

I needed to pull it together or I was going to start breaking down while the plane was boarding. I looked at my watch - almost time for another pill. It'd help. It'd help me not care about the pit I was in, the pit I could never dig myself out of.

I sighed and took a deep breath. I knew I'd be okay. These transition times were always hard for me. Either manic excitement or crushing depression, I never knew which I was going to experience, but once I crossed over the threshold and got on that flight, the thoughts and feelings would go back in the box. It was a nice box - big, heavy, and dark. It made it easy to not look too closely at what was inside.

I knew about Hawaii. I knew it was coming up, but I could shove it in that box until I had to deal with it. I could focus on other things - like being home with Mark and the kids. Kissing them. Hugging them. Basking in their love, the security of home. It's all I ever wanted.

That's not true. I wanted more. I really did, but then something horrible happened - I got it. And now, I can't seem to get rid of it no matter how much I want to.

They're calling my row. I better put on my game face and get going. Shove it all into that box and pray to God that there's still enough room in there to keep the lid on this fucked up part of my life.

Mark Lewis

I was sitting in my favorite puke green armchair. We had found it in the garage when we first moved in, probably a cast off from the previous owners and it looked like it had been in service since 70's. Still, it was comfortable, and it reclined, and it was the place I liked to sit when I had a need to think very, very hard.

Today, however, it was very, very hard to think.

My wife, Andrea. I didn't know what to do about her. I didn't know what she was doing, at least not really. I now knew she had been lying to me - well, more accurately I had already discovered she had been lying to me before she left on her most recent business trip. The actions of my grousing brother and his pneumatic wife merely made the betrayal more real. It's a funny thing, you can ignore problems that you can't see, or you can rationalize them to be smaller than they really are, and that was probably the path I was going to take before my sister-in-law sent me the videos she had managed to record over the weekend.

Maggs, naked and in bed with some strange man wasn't really a surprise. It might be a surprise to Frank when, or if, I shared the video with him, but I had always known that Maggs was a slut. It wasn't a huge revelation. In retrospect, I should have worked harder to separate Andrea from her, but I think I was lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that Maggs hardly ever came around when Andrea was still at home with the kids. I didn't think about what going back to work with her at RBS might entail. I should have, but I didn't. Hindsight, as they say, is always 20/20.

And as for Andrea... what did I really know? Oh, I knew about her business trips, or at least that she was lying to me about where she was going. I knew she had lied over the phone to me and the kids multiple times this week about where she was at and what she was doing. It was, after all, difficult to spend the day shopping in Chicago when you were actually in Canada.

But I had video now. Her and her coworker, arriving together at the gate leaving Chicago for our home in Houston. I have probably spent an hour watching less than a minute or two of video, pouring over every action, every gesture. Trying to see - was she wearing her wedding rings? Did she smile at him? Were they intimate? When he touched her, it looked like she recoiled slightly, but was that because she was surprised? Was it because of guilt?

The answers I had sought had only brought me more questions. I was, at least nominally, an investigator of sorts. Bad backs, false statements, forged medical records. But nothing like this. However, I did know how the process works. I knew how to get to the bottom of this... but did I want to?

I watched my two kids, Susie and Mark Jr, playing with the new coloring books I had bought them. They were dutifully filling in their respective scenes, intently focused, biting tongues, scribbling like mad. They were so blissfully unaware that their entire reality was on the brink of collapsing, through no fault of their own mind you, but what about me? If I did something, if I found the truth, would it be Andrea or myself who would be at fault when the final reckoning on our marriage came around?

Once I had the video, it was trivial for me to connect a name to the face of the man with my wife. Paul Jackson, executive director of sales and marketing at RBS. Nominally, my wife's boss, two levels up. According to his LinkedIn profile, he had worked at RBS for almost two decades and according to his Facebook he had been married nearly as long, with three children of his own. They looked like teenagers, probably all still at home. His wife was an attractive bottle blonde soccer mom with the requisite style and taste. Ironically, I think she was prettier than Andrea, even if she was older.

Was Andrea cheating with this man? My head was telling me it was a distinct, even likely, possibility. My heart was telling me to rip it out and end the pain.

"Daddy, I'm hungry"

"Me too!"

I smiled at my kids, the best fake smile I could muster right now.

"Alright, just a snack. We're supposed to pick up your mother from the airport and we'll get some pizza on the way home."

The announcement of Pizza for dinner was a huge hit.

I took a deep breath and puttered around the kitchen - we had remodelled last year when our income started to increase, and I still was getting used to where Andrea had stashed away half of our appliances and dishes. The sink was sleek and modern, the kitchen island a giant slab of epoxy covered walnut oak with an induction stove top that had flat touch buttons like something out of Star Trek. Andrea was so proud of this kitchen, and I was happy enough that it had made her happy.

Now, I just wanted to find a god damn plastic plate to put some apple slices on.

I pulled out a couple of small apples, the red delicious variety, and started slicing. The act of doing something with my hands, slowly drawing me out of my funk. I used a trick I had learned on YouTube a year back and made bunny rabbits for the kids. They loved it and it was a great way to get them to start loving healthy snacks. That was the kind of Dad I was, so how could I be contemplating destroying their childhood?

I needed more information. I had to take that next step, even if I didn't want to. I couldn't let the fear of knowing and the anxiety of not knowing rip me apart, make me less than who I am. Once I knew more, maybe once I knew almost everything, I'd make my decision... but by then, would it be too late?

One the fundamental truths of divorcing in America is that the legal framework of "no fault" divorce ran counter to the cultural reality that women were entitled to not contribute much more than children and childcare to a marriage without any sort of societal pressure to do more. It was a far cry from decades ago when being a "stay at home mom" meant actually working towards improving the family finances instead of finding new ways to spend money.

My own mother grew and preserved food, collected newspaper, cans and scrap to be sold for recycling. She bought solid clothes and fixed them when we wore them out, and when my brother and I outgrew them, they were ripped apart and transformed into things we could use. She had a garden. She saved aluminum foil and rubber bands. She made her own jams, traded coupons with the neighbours and earned pocket money baking cakes. And on top of all that she still had time to mother two obnoxious boys, patch up our cuts, soothe our feelings, wipe our faces, and help us with our homework. She was, just as much, if not more important to our home than Dad and when Dad left us, she became our entire world.

Sure, things have "changed" since my parents' time. I understood that, but could I call Andrea just as good of a mother as mine, even when accounting for shifting societal mores? A woman who went off to work, to be another mans wife and let another woman raise her children in her absence? A woman who flagrantly undermined the security and financial stability of her own children by practicing deception upon her too trusting husband? Without a doubt in my mind, Andrea was a bad wife, but was she also a bad mother?

The comparison made me think of my sister-in-law. I was probably one of the few people who still remembered how Amanda used to be. I was in college when we met and she seemed nice enough to me, but completely not my brothers type. She was overweight, with thick glasses, eyes like a mole and listless brown hair. I had watched her change over the years, first the glasses were gone, then the weight came off, then different hair styles and colors, then the boobs... and more boobs, and even more.

I shook my head. Sure, "Mandy" had transformed into a walking sex bomb, almost certainly at Jakes urging, but she had also changed him as well. He had matured, almost overnight, from a philandering asshole to a serious, family-oriented asshole. The man who had treated every girlfriend of his that I had ever known as nothing more than interchangeable sex holes, obviously treasured that fat mousy girl from the start. He knew something, something that I couldn't see.

The thing that stuck in my mind however is that while my sister-in-law might look like a high-priced hooker and while she earned her living nude modelling and performing on the internet, she also had never worked a day outside of her home. She was always there for her kids, she did school drop offs, pickups, sports days, ballet, gymnastics, taekwondo. She made lunches and cooked dinner every night. She had chosen a very non-traditional career, one that many people would never approve of, but outside of that her dedication to her family was beyond reproach. She was a living, breathing, contradiction in terms of everything I thought was wrong and right.

I had to admit that for most of my marriage, I had felt superior to my brother because of Andrea. Sure, she wasn't as drop dead gorgeous as Mandy, but she was natural. Real. She was honest, loyal, mindful of propriety, dedicated and trustworthy. I couldn't see how Jake could trust a woman like his wife - with her obvious libidinous nature and her proclivities for showing off her body in the most intimate of ways to thousands of faceless men. Surely, he must be wracked with insecurity.

Oh, how the worm has turned.

I walked back into the living room and placed the plate of "bunnies" in front of my kids, they smiled excitedly and started playing with the treats, showing them off to each other. The reaction made my heart smile. I would miss being able to be with them every day, but it seemed like that was the only future possible at this point as I doubt that once I confronted Andrea with what I knew, that either of us would want to remain married to each other.

As I sat back down in my puke green recliner, the advice that Jake had given to me on the night I called him suddenly came back to mind.

Don't fall on your bayonet.

Andrew had thrown me, and by extension our marriage, a mile high in the air and that's where I still was, floating aimlessly in the sky, drifting and pondering. I knew that eventually, like everything else, what goes up, must come down. But I had a choice, didn't I? I could choose where I landed. I could choose to fall on that bayonet, or not.

One of the many things I've done this week was spend an inordinate amount of time researching family law in Texas. I knew that I could file for adultery and while it didn't necessarily mean anything in terms of division of assets, it also didn't hurt. Especially depending on how flagrant or damaging to the family the adultery was. I also knew I didn't need to have video or photographic evidence - the standards in family court were much lower than criminal court. Things like receipts, testimony, emails, text messages and such were more than enough to settle the matter. But still, I would probably need more evidence than I currently had. I could gather it though.

But what about the division of assets and custody of the children?

Money, I had decided, wasn't that big of a deal. I could force the sale of the house, split everything equally and still have the opportunity to make more money later. If the adultery ruling came through, I might not even have to pay support directly to Andrea. After all, she had a job, she could just get more hours. The child support wasn't something I minded, they were after all, my children, and so long as the money was being used for their benefit, I was happy with that.

Custody however, well that was a big issue. Right now, almost certainly Andrea would get primary custody. There was still a family bias that women were better caregivers for children than men, even fathers, but on a more practical level, Andrea worked less hours than I did. She could easily claim that she spent more time with the kids, even if it was largely just her screwing around on her phone and chatting with her legion of faceless lovers.

Okay, maybe my imagination is getting away from me here, but the point still stands. How good of a mother she is or was doesn't really matter that much, unless she was so bad that it might cause child protective services to get involved. I didn't see that as a likely outcome given where we are today.

But what about tomorrow? Or what about a month from now, or six months from now? What would the situation look like then? Certainly, if I did nothing and stayed the course, if we divorced today or a year later it wouldn't change the outcome. Unless of course, I did something about it.

I looked at the time, there was 2 hours left until we needed to pick up Andrea from the airport and an idea was starting to form in my mind. I'd have to make some radical changes and I'd have to risk alienating my wife, something that previously I had been too scared to do. Let's face it guys - most of us, when we are happy, are too scared to make radical changes, especially when it comes to our spouses. So long as she's giving you sex and acting like she cares about you, most of us would put up with a crazy amount of disrespect and neglect in other areas. It's a failing of the male sex if you ask me, but it was also a failing that I was going to work to get past.

Right now, Andrea had me on the back foot. She knew everything and I, supposedly, knew nothing. This was the current status quo in our marriage, but I was determined to adjust it, to even the playing field and then to shift the balance into my favor. It would take some time, and likely a lot of help from my friends and possibly a few professionals, but a long-term plan was taking shape before me.

By this time next year, I was going to be in position to dictate terms to Andrea. Terms that she probably wouldn't like. Terms that would probably ruin her, but terms that would also ensure the best outcome for me and the kids. My wife had become an enemy to her family and it was my turn to take the fight to her.

Of course, it was going to be guerrilla warfare and she'd never see it coming. Let the insurgency begin!

*****

This is the first thing that I've written in years, so I hope I'm not too rusty. All mistakes and stupid ideas are mine and mine alone.

My intention is for this to be the first part of a series. I don't know how long it will be, probably at least 2 more instalments until the end.

This is also the first time I've ever written a piece entirely in first person perspective (even with the shifting viewpoints). So it's a bit of an experiment for me and I hope it comes off well. Normally I write in 3^rd person present tense, so... gosh this has been hard! But I wanted to try something different and since I feel like "loving wives" stories are typically really character driven, I thought this was the best approach to take.