It was a Friday night poker game, held, this time, at Jason Billing’s office in the ‘Billings Waste & Disposal’ building. The Mayor was there, as well as one of the County Commissioner’s, as well as a few good ol’ boys who rotated in and out of the game, drinking coffee and kibitzing. They had all known each other forever. It was always a friendly game; no one got in too deep and the stakes were kept low. They knew that the police wouldn’t be busting this illegal gambling game. The fifth player was the Sheriff.

Jason’s wife walked into the room with a tray of ice-cold beers that she put onto a side table where the players could help themselves. Then she turned to leave.

“Okay guys, I’m going home now. Jason, you be home before midnight; remember you have a doctor’s appointment at 8:00 A.M. tomorrow morning.

“See you all later!” she called out as she left the office and closed the door behind her.

“Jeez, Jason,” asked the Sheriff, watching Jason’s voluptuous, gorgeous, red-headed wife as she walked out to her car, “How did you ever con Amanda Svenson into marrying you? She must have been drunk or something, because she is clearly out of your league!” He guffawed at his own witticism.

“Asshole,” replied Jason with a smile on his face.

“Let’s take a break and I’ll tell you about how I barely avoided making the biggest mistake of my life, and instead found the best wife a man could ever have...”

Jason Billings was looking at his fiancée, Jane Jones, and her father with a look of total disbelieve. Jane had asked him to come over to her parent’s house for a ‘small talk’.

“I can’t even believe this shit!” Jason exclaimed with a bitter and angry look on his face, holding up several sheets of paper that he was waving in his hand.

“You wait until two weeks before the wedding and then you try to lay this on me?” he stated, the question being strictly rhetorical.

“Listen son,” Roger Jones started, not knowing that calling Jason ‘son’ irritated him to no end.

Jason and Jane had been together for almost three years — their last year at the University and two years since then. Six months before, Jason had asked Jane to marry him and she had enthusiastically accepted. Since that time was planning the grandiose (overly so in Jason’s opinion) wedding.

Everyone seemed to think that they were ‘right together. Jane was around 5’ 5”, slim and athletic looking with medium tits and a tight butt. She had that classic oval face framed with light brown hair. She had hazel eyes, was quick to smile and her smile was inviting and generous. Jason also had an athletic build that he maintained with running and a regimen of weights, not to bulk up, just to keep as buff as he had been in college. He had a rugged face, with twinkling blue eyes, and a dimple in his chin. He stood at 6’ even and his head was capped with a crown of curly hair — just a shade lighter than Jane’s. He was a couple of years older than his peers due to the hitch he spent in the army after High School.

Needless to say, it was a rather unpleasant surprise when an envelope arrived at Jason’s house one Saturday with two documents enclosed and an ‘invitation’ to visit at his future in-laws place and discuss the contents. He had been out with Jane on Friday night, but she had gone home to her parent’s house, where she was going to work with her mother on details of the wedding.

Inside the envelope was a proposed pre-nuptial agreement as well as a document suggesting how the financial responsibilities should be split between the couple, as seen through Jane’s eyes — or more likely, her father’s.

Jason was not a lawyer, but he had a couple of business law classes and had read a lot of contracts as part of his job. He sat down to read the documents with no preconceptions, his attitude a tabula rasa as it was. He wasn’t particularly upset at the idea Jane might want to spell out whose assets were hers and which were his in the (he hoped) unlikely case that they split.

That was, until he began reading the proposals in detail. Ah! The devil himself.

So it was that on Sunday, exactly at 2:00 PM as the note specified, Jason was ringing the doorbell of the Jones’ residence.

Jane’s mother, Iris, who had always been somewhat tepid, albeit polite, towards Jason, answered the door. Jason tried not to be curt with her, but he was not feeling especially warm towards her or her husband at that moment.

She showed him into the living room where Jane and her father were seated.

Jane’s father, Roger, looked up at Jason, trying to look pleasant, and even before he was seated asked, “Well? What do you think? Have you signed it?”

Jason looked back at his prospective Father-in-Law with a grim and angry visage.

“Are these some sort of joke? An example of ‘lawyer humor’, because I can’t believe that you would seriously expect me to sign off on these pieces of rubbish.”

“What is the problem?” Roger replied, acting as if he didn’t understand Jason’s objection. He had expected that Jason wouldn’t actually read the documents with the small print, written in legalese, and would simply sign them. He had written them in his most lawyerly prose intended to obscure their true meaning.

“I can’t even believe this shit!” Jason exclaimed with a bitter and angry look on his face, holding up several sheets of paper that he was waving in his hand.

“You wait until two weeks before the wedding and then you try to lay this on me?” he stated, not actually asking a question.

“Listen son,” Roger started,

“We are just trying to protect my daughter on the off chance that anything should ever happen to your marriage and you decided to split,” Roger tried to explain. “A pre-nup agreement is fairly standard for people going into a marriage who are already well off, or who are expected to inherit a substantial amount of assets. That’s all this is.”

“I call bullshit,” Jason spat back.

“Jane, did you know about this? Did your father tell you how one-sided these agreements were? While they were supposed to protect you, they actually could have given all of my assets to you in the case of a divorce. For any reason. The house that I inherited from my Grandmother? You would get it. My shares in the family business? You would get them. This wasn’t an agreement to protect you — it was a crooked scheme to steal everything that I already own from me.

“And the proposal about how we would ‘share’ the expenses? I pay for the cars, the utilities, the property taxes, the insurance, the groceries, and anything else that would be an ‘us’ expense. Jane? She would pay for, let’s see,” Jason read from the second document, “Oh yes, here it is. Stripped of all of the language intended to camouflage and trying to hide the true meanings, Jane would be spending ‘her’ money on her clothes, her personal grooming expenses — nothing for ‘us’, just things for her!”

By this time, Jane, who knew nothing about what her father had written up, was a in a panic. She was crying and trying to, through her tears, telling Jason that they could get it fixed. But she couldn’t get out the words.

Roger took advantage of the moment when Jason paused to interrupt.

“Look Jason, we can fix this. Just calm down and we can negotiate...”

Jason looked at him with disgust.

“The very fact that you would try to do this to me on the eve of our marriage means I can never trust you or your family.”

He turned back to Jane and held out his hand. Jane eagerly reached back for it. But when he had her hand in his, instead of raising her up and pulling her close to him, he slipped the engagement ring off of her finger and put it into his pocket.

“What are you doing, Jason!” Jane cried.

“You didn’t think that I would let you keep my Grandmother’s engagement ring, did you?”

It suddenly occurred to Roger that he and Jane’s mother had put down deposits on all sorts of things for the wedding. Invitations had been sent. He was going to lose a great deal of money as the result of Jane and Jason’s wedding being called off.

“Listen, Billings! Calling off the wedding now is going to cost a bundle. If you do this, I am going to sue your ass off for the expenses!”

Jason pulled out the envelope with the pre-nup and the expense split proposals in it from his pocket just long enough for Roger to see that he still had it. Then he put it back.

“Go ahead, old man. Any jury in the country, when they see how you tried to swindle me, will find for me. Then you’ll be out not just the deposits, but all of the legal fees as well. And I might just counter sue for my attorney’s costs. And just imagine what this will do to your reputation when it gets out. I won’t hold my breath waiting to be served!”

And with that, he turned and walked back out through the front door, slamming it behind him. He could hear Jane and her father screaming at each other through an open window. He heard her father say, “So what! I never understood why you wanted to marry some guy whose father was a garbage collector in the first place. Just wait a few days and he will coming crawling back to you.”

That attitude probably explained some of the snarky remarks that Jane had made over the past 6-months or so.

But Jane was wailing, “But Daddy, what if he DOESN’T?”

Jason stomped down to the end of the block and went around the corner where he had parked his car.

As soon as he had turned the corner, his entire demeanor changed. He wasn’t angry anymore, in fact he was laughing as he opened his car door.

“Well? Did you kiss your fiancée off?” asked the stunning redhead young woman waiting in the passenger seat. She reached over and pulled him into a lover’s kiss.