Chapter 24

After they left, I dished out some fresh ice cream for the four of us, finishing off what I had in the freezer, much to Doris’s amusement. “You actually went out and bought an ice cream maker?” she laughed. “I didn’t think you would.”

“We most certainly did. We tested it out yesterday. If we hadn’t run you dry this morning, we’d be interested in getting a supply to make more,” Jane said proudly.

Brad loved the ice cream and the rest of us agreed. By the time we were done, it was time to deliver them back home so that she’d have Brad settled before his father returned from work.

After that, I took Jane to dinner. We had sushi and then caught a movie together. It was a nice date and we had the theater to ourselves since it was a Monday night. She took the opportunity to climb into my lap and curl up there while we watched the movie as if we were sitting on the sofa at home. Neither of us watched much of the movie although we avoided doing anything that might get us kicked out if the staff caught us.

Jane wasn’t really in the mood for heavy sex that night, pointing out that she really was still a little tender from Saturday night’s sex.

“You kinda did a number on me, Lover,” she told me with a smile. “It’s a good ache, but the only reason Barb was able to walk comfortably after that was because she’s using the parts regularly. I’m a little unused to being fucked that hard.” She kissed me and the two of us crawled into bed together, naked and just as eager to touch each other as we were for sex.

The next day, Doris told us that she’d started her period the night before and didn’t feel like sex, so we returned to the house for her workout, had lunch and she resupplied our depleted supply of breast milk. We made some fresh ice cream before we took her home, but made sure to save enough in case Barb followed through on her threat to talk to us. That didn’t happen until Thursday.

Jane and Doris were working out in the gym and I was about to make lunch when my phone rang. I looked at the number and sighed, going upstairs to answer it. “Hi, Barb,” I said softly, hoping Jane wouldn’t hit the roof when she found out Barb was calling. “What’s on your mind?”

“Well, I called to see what you were up to later,” she said. “I was hoping we could talk now that things have cooled down a little.”

“Jane and I were just going to have a quiet night in,” I told her truthfully.

There was a moment of silence from the other end of the phone before she recovered her equilibrium. “Does that mean you’d rather I not interrupt you?” she asked tentatively.

“I’ll ask her if she wants to talk to you tonight or if she’d rather pick another time,” I said, going back downstairs. “Jane,” I called out. “Your sister’s on the phone. She wanted to know if she could stop by tonight or if you had something planned for later.” I wanted them both to know that it was Barb on the phone so nothing got said that she could overhear.

They both looked at me, surprised that I was talking to her, but Jane responded. “I think that’s okay,” she said. “Ask her what time she’s stopping by and we’ll either plan dinner or coffee afterwards.”

I nodded and retreated back upstairs before Brad gave us away and returned my attention to the phone. “Tonight is fine,” I told her. “Were you planning to drop in for dinner or sometime after?”

“I’d love to have dinner with you,” she said sounding sincere, or at least as sincere as Barb ever sounded. Maybe that wasn’t fair, but since this whole thing started, I took everything she said as a lie and waited for proof. If she’d said water was wet, I’d check for myself.

“Alright,” I said. “Sometime around six, then?”

“I’ll be there,” she promised. I was less than overjoyed. I immediately started making plans for dinner and then stopped. I’d told Barb that I’d prepared the last meal I’d ever make for her, so instead, I decreed that tonight was pizza night. I’d even order a Hawaiian pizza for her. I’d try not to hope she’d choke on it.

The three of us ate lunch, talking about what Barb would want to say to the two of us and wondering how the meeting would go. Doris made time to pump a fresh supply of milk and we spent part of the afternoon making ice cream in case Barb stayed through dessert. All three of us liked the thought of feeding Barb a dose of Doris for dessert.

We finally took Doris and Brad home, cleaned up the house and put away Brad’s growing supply of toys and his playpen before Barb could show up. We’d decorated the house with a tree, lights in the windows and a variety of festive touches that didn’t look nearly as polished as Barb’s decorations, but were a lot more personal. We had the lights lit up and the pizza had just been delivered when Barb’s Lexus pulled into the driveway.

I waved to her and took the boxes inside, leaving the door open for her. “Company’s here,” I told Jane when I got to the top of the stairs and she breathed a heavy sigh.

Barb joined us a moment later. “Hi,” she said quietly, coming up the stairs. She seemed subdued, but that could just be because this was very clearly becoming our home. She glanced into the living room at the decorations and studied them curiously, comparing them to the results that she got from the service she hired. “The decorations look good,” she said diplomatically. I think she was more attached to the designer look that she got from the coordinated decorations, where we’d gone for a lot of traditional touches that were downright tacky outside the holiday. The colors on the tree clashed and there were candy canes and Santas and reindeer and snowmen everywhere. We hadn’t gotten a chance to shop for each other yet, but we’d promised to keep it small and simple. Jane was still in college and I didn’t want her spending a lot of money on me. She’d made me promise the same thing, so that our gifts matched in scale. The tree was surrounded with several packages though. I’d shopped for Doris and little Brad. I was sure that their Christmas here would be far better than what his father would bother with.

I allowed a small chuckle. “It’s okay, you can say you hate them,” I told her. “They’re nowhere near the tasteful effect that you got from the service, but we picked everything out and did it together.”

She nodded. “It’s ... colorful,” she allowed, trying not to start with fighting over decorations. She joined us in the kitchen where the table was set and the pizza was laid out. She was grateful that we’d ordered her favorite pizza and the three of us dug in, leaving conversation to one side for now.

It was a tense meal with each of us sure that it was going to turn into a shooting match between our three mouths. We made a little small-talk, but it was mostly garbage about news and weather. When we were finally done eating, the three of us looked at each other and were at a loss as to how to start the conversation.

“Okay, Barb,” Jane said finally. “What did you want to talk about tonight?” she asked, breaking the ice and trying to move things along so that we could get this over and done.

Barb bit her lip and fidgeted some, awkward for the first time that I can recall. “I wanted to try to fix things so that we can all be civil for Mom and Dad,” she admitted. “I hate that we’re fighting. John wants a divorce, you want John. I feel like everything’s spinning out of control and I want us to slow it down and try to work it out.”

“I know that your perfect view of the future is that I call off the divorce talk, get myself a girlfriend and let you and your lover walk all over me,” I said, laying out how I saw things. “That view doesn’t really work for me. I don’t think you really understood how much I hate him until we talked at the dance and you watched those fights again.”

She nodded. “I know now that you’d kill him if you could,” she said. “That’s why I don’t want to bring up his name. If I knew for a fact that you wouldn’t go after him, I don’t think I’d mind you knowing, but I worry about it. Despite how badly I’ve screwed everything up, I still love you and I don’t want to see bad things happen to you.”

I nodded in understanding. If only she knew. She would soon. Doris and I had talked to Bert a few times and even met him jointly to assure him that we were coordinating our divorces together. After the news about how the commission and salary worked, Doris had quietly torn the house apart to find their tax returns for Bert to work with. The numbers had enraged her further.

“I’m not gonna ask you again, Barb,” I assured her. “I promised that I wouldn’t and I won’t. I want you to think about something though. I warned you a long time ago that his wife has to suspect that he’s cheating. When she figures it out, she’ll probably hire someone to follow the two of you. When she gets the proof she’s looking for, she’ll probably track me down to tell me what’s going on.”

I could see the wheels turning in her head as she followed that possibility down the rabbit-hole. “Hopefully, by the time that happens, things will be settled and you won’t feel so angry about it,” she said carefully.

I shrugged dismissively. “Maybe,” I allowed. “But at that point, you have to worry about her too. I may not have the urge to break every bone in his body, but she might decide to wait for you after work some night and turn your face into a jigsaw puzzle with a pipe. Or she may follow the two of you and shoot you both while you’re in the middle of playing doctor together.”

She nodded. “I guess that would be the perfect outcome for you,” she said quietly. “I’m out of the way, no ugly divorce and Jane can move right in.”

“I don’t think it’s ideal,” I told her. “I don’t love you anymore, but I don’t want to see you dead. I wouldn’t mind if HE ended up dead, but I’m not gonna lose sleep if he doesn’t.”

That took her by surprise. It was the first time I’d told her that I didn’t love her. “You don’t?” she asked, looking pale.

“No, Barb,” I confirmed. “I don’t love you. I don’t even like you anymore. You’re still a physically attractive woman, but the things that you’ve done have made you hideous to me. I think I can manage to be civil to you for family events and I can put some of the bitterness behind me in time, but you’re not the woman I married anymore. I don’t even know you, really and there’s no basis for us to even be friends. We don’t know the same people, don’t have the same interests and we have a bad history. I think our best bet is to come to a fair settlement and each of us walk away. If he leaves his wife for you, then I think we should agree never to speak or be in the same room together again.”

She looked like she was digesting that and looked down. “What about holidays?” she asked. “Can we be civil for events like that? I mean, you’re going to be with Jane. If you and I aren’t going to talk, then how are we going to work as a family?”

Jane had left the table to make coffee and I noticed that she used breast milk in it, bringing it back to the table to put a mug in front of both of us. “If you and your lover are together, leave him home or we’ll skip the event,” she said. “I meant it when I said I don’t want anything to do with him. He’s a fucking scumbag as far as I’m concerned and my opinion’s never going to change.”

“You don’t even know him, Jane,” she said, pleading her case.

“You’re right, I don’t. I DO know John though and I know how much this has hurt him since you told him. He probably hasn’t told me all the shitty things that you two have done to make him miserable this year, but he’s told me enough that I might kill him myself. At the very least, if you ever bring him to try to meet the family, I’ll wreck the whole day trying to put him in the hospital, so if Mom and Dad love him and want him around, I guess John and I will spend those holidays here or with his parents.”

That seemed to hurt Barb more than knowing that I didn’t love her anymore. “You’re my sister, Jane! Don’t do this!”

Jane shrugged and sat down with her coffee, sipping it idly. “I’m not doing anything,” she said. “I’m just not going to accept him as part of my family. If he’s part of yours, then that’s where the line is. If Mom and Dad accept him, then that’s their choice. I won’t. Not ever. I don’t care what sort of sweetheart you think he is. I’ve been in love with John since the first time I laid eyes on him and I bit my tongue and behaved for seven years because you made him happy. So you’ve had your way for seven years and I’ve kept my mouth shut about what I wanted. Now it’s my turn. John makes me happy and I make him happy. It may take me the next seven years to erase all the pain you’ve put him through. I’m not even cutting you out of my life, really. I’ll still come to holidays that you’re coming to, but only if you leave your mutt home.”

Barb nodded. She didn’t like it, but she wasn’t getting any budge out of us. Maybe Jane was right and she needed an attitude adjustment to understand that the world didn’t revolve around her. I decided to get up and serve dessert. Fresh ice cream was passed out with a small smirk from Jane as the three of us sat down with a dish of Doris’s best while we talked.

“I think that’s the best compromise that you can expect from either of us,” I told her. “We’ll both attend functions we’re invited to so long as he’s not there. You should also keep mention of him to a bare minimum, since neither of us are going to be particularly charitable about what we have to say about him.”

She nodded and sighed. “I really wanted it to work, John,” she said regretfully. “I didn’t want all the hurt feelings and I really didn’t want a divorce, but I guess your mind is made up.”

I shrugged. “I didn’t want to share my wife,” I told her. “We don’t always get what we want. I think you should know though, that Jane and I have talked and we’ve agreed to an arrangement that works for us since we’ll be apart for most of the next year and a half. She has someone at school and I’ll look into finding a friend here.”

She looked surprised and hurt by that. “I guess this means that you were telling the truth about being open-minded about opening our marriage,” she said glumly.

“Like we told Janice and Arthur, we talked it over and this solution works for us. If we decide that it’s stopped working, then we’ll talk together and figure out what works for us at that point. The important thing is that we decide together and we decide before we act.”

“Mom and Dad know?” she asked, wide-eyed. The shocks kept coming for her tonight. “What did they say?”

“Your father’s less than enthusiastic, but we talked about it in principle,” I told her diplomatically. “I think that over the past week, both of your parents have harbored hope that they could broker some sort of peace between us that would keep us from divorcing, but your father is holding onto that hope.”

She nodded. “Dad was always in my corner,” she said dismally. “So, I can’t ever make him a part of the family if I want you two to participate and there’s nothing I can do to talk you out of the divorce,” she clarified. There was just a hint of question in her voice at that.

“No, Barb,” I said. “Our marriage is never going to recover from this. It’s best if we agree to a settlement and sign the papers when they’re ready. It’s not really going to be difficult. You have your house and I have the place here. I’m not gonna fight over your car or any of the individual investments. We can split our finances relatively easily and keep things from getting more bitter and adversarial.”

She nodded. “What will you file under?” she asked.

“We’re in a no-fault state, so irreconcilable differences. I could probably make a case for mental cruelty after the past six months, but I don’t want more bitterness.”

She seemed to deflate, hearing that I’d done some investigating. “When were you planning on doing it?” she asked, defeated.

“After Christmas, but before your parents go back,” I told her gently. “That way, they’re here to help you through the first few days. Was there anything in particular that you want stipulated in the settlement?”

She shook her head. “I guess I’ll end up paying you support at the end of all this, huh?” she asked with a mirthless laugh.

“That’s normal,” I said. “I’d have been willing to give that up, but you’d end up spending it on him and I’d rather not be magnanimous only to put money in his hands.”

She nodded and sighed. “You already have a lawyer?”

“I do,” I said. “I’m asking for a 50/50 split, excluding our retirement accounts. I think you should keep yours and I should keep mine. I’m willing to flex a little if there’s specific investments you want. I keep the house here and you keep the house there. I’ll stay out of your way for the holidays and then after your folks are gone, I’ll arrange a day that I can come by for the rest of my stuff. Like I said, I won’t take any furniture or anything like that, just my clothes, a few books and pictures, my computer, things like that.”