Chapter 1: The Raccoons

Joe Williams---If you had told me yesterday that my wife was cheating on me I would have laughed in your face. Not Cindy the love of my life, my wife of 8 years and the mother of our two kids. No way! But there was the proof laying right there in front of me! We’ll get back to that proof. First I want to tell you about us.

As you know I am Joe Williams. I met Cindy when I was a junior in college. I was in the School of Engineering and she was a sophomore taking Liberal Arts courses. She wanted to be a writer.

We met in the student center when she was looking for a place to sit in the crowded cafeteria. I offered a chair and helped her arrange her books. Cindy seems a lot like me. A nerd!

She was wearing big black rimmed glasses, like me, and she seemed a little shy, like me.

Long story short we talked, I asked her out she accepted. We dated for 6 months before we had sex. She was my first and I was her first. We made plans to marry after she graduated. She was going to write the next great American novel and I would build sky-scrappers.

In the spring Cindy had really bad allergies. Just before my graduation she announced she was pregnant! Plans changed. We married. I took whatever job I could find. Instead of building tall buildings I was the ‘on-site engineer’ for a construction company building a housing development just outside town. Yeah, I was a construction worker!

Cindy quit school and we rented a house. In the fall we had our first boy. I got promoted to an office job! Things were looking up!

Cindy was a good stay at home mom. She actually liked it. She said it gave her time to write.

She finished her first book and off it went to the publishers. Rejection letters started coming in the mail. She did not let it discourage her. She started another book. It was springtime again. More allergy medicine and again she is pregnant! The second boy was born! I got a vasectomy!

She finished her second book and again rejection. I suggested maybe she should write short stories. Good idea! Same results.

Then one day I came home and she was all excited! She has found a web site that publishes stories on line. She wrote one and posted it that very morning. She could not wait to show it to me.

I sat at the kitchen table and opened my laptop to the site. I found her story and read it. Not bad, not good either. But she had left it open for comments. They were brutal! I wanted to delete them before she saw them but it was too late. As she read them she started to cry.

“Don’t let what these people say bother you.”

“They are right! I tried to write a romantic story without any experience. Just like the comment from this guy, “You don’t seem to know what you are talking about.” Or this one, “This would never happen in real life.”

They are all right! I have no ‘life experiences’. We were virgins when we met. You were my first boyfriend!”

I held her until the crying stopped and it was time to feed the boys.

That night we made love. Nothing more was said about her writing or lack of ‘life experiences’.

I was clueless about what was going on in her mind!

We had bought a house in that development I had helped build when I first started work. It backs up to a game preserve. There are lots of trails for walking and we see deer in our back yard all the time. There is one problem, raccoons. They seem to enjoy getting into our garbage. That’s why I discovered what I did this morning. As I was cleaning up the spilled garbage I found two used condom wrappers! I put the two packages in my pocket and finished cleaning up the mess.