Chapter 1

I can’t remember being this sick. I told my PA and my secretary that I was getting out of Dodge for the day and made a run (no pun intended) to the Walgreen’s near my house. Then I called my wife at her office and left a message with her secretary telling her what I was doing and why. Between the junk coming out of my ass and my mouth, I was sure that I was going to be down 50 pounds by morning. However, I managed to make it to the drug store without a disaster from either end and rushed inside to talk to the pharmacist.

“Hi. I need something for vomiting and diarrhea.”

“Oh. You’ve got that too. It’s going around. Aisle 8 for the stomach stuff although the vomiting goes away after the first day, and Aisle 9 for the Imodium. I would get that, the diarrhea can go on for days. I can save you some time and check you out here once you have your stuff,” she said in a very soothing manner.

“Thanks,” I said. I walked to aisle 9 and picked up a bottle of Imodium, figuring that the vomiting would be over and no stomach meds were needed.

I walked back to the pharmacy counter and placed the item on the counter and waited for the young lady to get off the phone. She was obviously taking a prescription and not on a social call. I was in no immediate danger of having an accident, so I waited patiently.

“Hi. Sorry to keep you waiting. We are getting so many calls for this flu bug going around. You didn’t get your flu shot this year did you?” She looked at me like my third grade teacher had every time I got caught ... at anything.

“The last couple of times I got the shot, no one else got the flu and the CDC, or whoever, said it turned out to be a light season for the flu. So, this year I blew it off.”

“And this year it turns out to be one of the worst on record. It’s all your fault for skipping this year. Karma you know,” she chuckled and asked for my phone number. She punched in the number and then read the note on the screen.

“Do you want me to add your name to your open family account?”

“My what?” I looked at her, not knowing what she was talking about.

“What is your name?” She asked nicely.

“Mick O’Dell.”

“What is your wife’s name?”

“Deb.”

“Well you have an open family account. Deb gets her monthly Yaz prescription, but it looks like she only pays cash, but we have the account listed as having been opened for a family. Shall I add your name to the account?”

“What’s Yaz?” I asked, partially in a daze.

“Prescription birth control pills. Should I add your name it to the account?”

“Yes please,” I said still in a bit of a fog. My stomach was starting to rumble.

Birth control? Deb?

“That’ll be $18.74.”

I handed the young lady a $20 dollar bill, thanked her when she gave me the change, and quickly walked to the restroom on the far side of the building, feeling more sick than before I came in. I walked into the restroom and made a beeline for the open stall. I took off my suit coat and loosened my tie before I dropped my pants and sat on the toilet, took a deep breath, let it out, and began to cry at the implications.

I told Deb on our wedding night that I wanted to have kids right away and she agreed. My dream was to have kids. My mother used to joke with Deb that I wanted kids more than any woman she knew. I made more than enough money to support an entire herd of children, but as hard and often as we tried, there were none. We have been married for three years and I was ready to get us both tested to see if there was a problem and how to solve it.

I guess I now knew the problem, but the solution was going to depend on the cause. Was Deb just not wanting to have kids? Did she just not want them with me? Was I sterile? If I was, she wouldn’t need pills. If she already knew. If she didn’t know, what then? Was she cheating on me? Was she? Were the pills a recent add or something going back to the year we lived together before we married?

I had the sudden urge and let loose what can only be described as a system flush as I shot squirt after squirt of liquid shit into the toilet. The two episodes I had earlier in the day, at work, made me feel better, this time I just felt like ... shit.

I cleaned myself up and then cleaned up what I could of the mess I’d made around the rim of the toilet before pulling up my pants and straightening my tie. I put my suit coat on and after a good hand washing, left the store. The thoughts going through my head going home just drove me crazy. Trying to think of all of the possibilities and their remedies was giving me a headache.

A few miles from the house, I had made the start of a plan. Part one, I was going to get checked to see if I was sterile. Part two, I was going to check back at the pharmacy and see when Deb’s prescription had begun. Part three, hell if I knew. I think knowing the first two would set my path going forward.

Pulling into the garage at the house, I walked through the kitchen door into an empty house. Deb wouldn’t be home for a couple more hours and as I walked through the house, I began to realize that we had a lot of stuff. And a lot of that stuff was not from my desires. This was Deb’s house. Her furniture choices. Her artwork choices. Her interior design choices. Was all of this in place of kids?

I went to the bedroom filled with her bed and her furniture and her tables and lamps. I changed into my comfortable jeans and a t-shirt and went to my home office. I opened the bag from the pharmacy and after reading the instruction, took the Imodium and then pulled out my good old fashioned Rolodex and found my doctor’s number. I picked up my office phone, called and made an appointment to test my sperm count or whatever they do to check.

He was able to see me in the morning. That would take care of Part One. Now for Part Two. I called the pharmacy and told the man that answered that I was told that my wife had set up a family account and was wondering when she set it up. I told him that she was paying cash for her prescriptions and I was wondering how old the original prescription for Yaz was.

He put me on hold and when he came back on I was stunned.

“Mr. O’Dell the choice to pay with cash was from the start and the prescription goes back to July of 2014.”

“That long, huh. Wow. Thank you very much. Bye.”

I hung up and looked off into space at the calendar in my head that said that we had begun living together in August of 2014. I first asked her to live with me in July, 2014, and that was when we had ‘The Talk’ about babies and when she admitted that she wanted to be married first. We had always been using rubbers and continued until we were married.

So she had apparently gone on the pill when I asked her to move in with me the first time, and stayed on the pill afterwards. Or maybe she was already on them, but created the account when we combined our lives. She remained on them after we got married, but never told me about it all the time I thought we were working so hard to have a baby.

It was quite obvious now that she didn’t want babies. Ever perhaps. She enjoyed being married to me. I think. She liked the things being married to me got her. It seemed. Now I had to act like everything was fine. No I didn’t, I had to act like I had the flu and was throwing up and had the shits. That would allow me to sleep in one of the guest bedrooms for a few days, so as to not infect her.

When she came home, she opened the door from the garage and called to me.

“Mick! Mick! Are you home?”

“Yeah!” I called back from my recliner in the TV room.

“How are you?” She asked as she walked into the room.

The room was the only one in the entire house that I felt was mine. It wasn’t a man cave, but it wasn’t floral like the rest of the house. It was rustic and oaky, like my favorite scotch. I now really noticed that the rest of her house smelled flowery, the TV room smelled ... manly.

Deb made me a lite dinner and served me in my room, on the TV trays we had bought so we could both watch the KC Chiefs during the football season and any game of hockey. If she was cheating, it was probably because of the sex and not because she didn’t love me. Isn’t that the cliche? It was only sex! As I sat there eating next to her, it was all I could do to not go off on her.

After dinner she asked if I wanted to come to the living room, her room, and relax.

“No, I think I’ll just put on some smooth jazz and read.”

“I swear Mick, I don’t understand you and that music. It sounds like the soundtrack from some of those porn movies we used to watch...”