Chapter 1

I should have been pissed but I wasn't. I should have wanted to kill the bastard, but I didn't. I should have wanted to do a lot of things, but I found out that I just didn't care enough so I let things be. Well, that wasn't completely true. There was still a small kernel of need to get some sort of revenge and I knew I would eventually.

Marie and I had grown up together. I was seven and she was six when her family moved into the house next door to us. There were four kids in the family and she was the only one I got along with. Her brother Alphonse was three years older than I was and he was a bully. He soon learned that he would be well advised to leave me the fuck alone. He was bigger and stronger than I was and he could whip my ass, but there wasn't any 'quit' in me and if he started something it didn't end until some grown ups pulled us apart.

I had my dad to thank for that. I'd gotten beat up once when I was in the first grade and I had run home crying. After I'd told him what had happened he asked me what I had done to the other kid.

"Nuthin" I had sniffled and he had gotten mad as hell.

"You don't run away Tony, you never ever run away. You fight back until you are too tired to get your arms up and then you use your feet or your teeth to tear the other guy's throat out, but you don't quit. They will all soon learn that about you and they will leave you alone. If you cut and run they will never stop picking on you."

It took three fights before Alphonse got the message, but he did get it.

Marie had two sisters, Veronica was four years older and Rosario was three years younger. Veronica, being three years older than me had no use for me and Rosario being four years younger was just a baby as far as I was concerned. There were no other kids in the neighborhood our age so Marie and I gravitated toward each other and by sixth grade we were a pair.

We grew together, we played together and we stayed together. It remained that way all the way through middle school and then high school. We were inseparable, joined at the hip, yin and yang. There was no other boy for her and no other girl for me. I had never asked her for a date, we never discussed going steady and I never asked her to marry me. Didn't need to do any of those things because we just 'were'. It was that simple — we just 'were'. All I did was ask the question:

"When do you want to get married?" and she said, "Not until I finish college" and that was it. Three months after graduation we were married.

The next twenty-four years were your basic middle class marriage. We both started out working and saving our money for a down payment on a house, bought one and after our second child Marie decided that she wanted to be a stay at home mom. She raised our three kids as I worked hard to provide for the family and when they were all off to school Marie went back to work.

One by one the kids left for college and Marie and I were alone again, but something had changed somewhere along the way. I don't even when it happened or what had happened, but the connection was gone. We lived together, the affection was there, but there wasn't any passion anymore. We kissed each other goodbye as we left for work in the morning. We sat at the table and discussed each other's day over dinner, we watched TV or read in the evenings and then went to bed. The urgency for lovemaking wasn't there anymore. Marie just didn't seem to want it and I didn't push it. It got to where we made love maybe two or three times a month, but nothing fiery. It was almost like each of us was doing a duty, fulfilling a requirement. It wasn't until much later that I finally figured out the disconnect between us, but by then it was too late, way too late to repair the damage.

We both had jobs that sometimes required us to work late and it was one of those late nights that caused everything to come crashing down. It was one of those rare nights when both of us had to work late. I finished two hours sooner than expected and on a whim I drove over to where Marie worked to see if she might get done early too and maybe we could hit a restaurant for dinner.

The place was locked up tight, no lights were on and the parking lot was deserted. Marie had obviously finished up earlier than she had expected also. I drove on home and was surprised to see that Marie wasn't there. Since her office was closed when I got there she'd had more than enough time to beat me home. I checked the telephone answering machine, but there were no messages. Maybe she had stopped for a drink with the girls she worked with. She didn't usually do things like that, but there is always a first time. I fixed myself some leftovers for dinner, checked the TV Guide and saw that there was nothing on worth watching (was there ever?) and so I picked up a book and settled down on the couch to read.

I was engrossed in the book and had lost track of time and it wasn't until I heard the garage door opener start to run that I put the book down and looked at the time. It was ten-thirty. Minute's later Marie came into the room and saw me sitting there.

"You still up? I thought you would be in bed asleep by now."

I held up the book, "I got into it and I didn't realize how late it was."

"Well I'm ready for bed, I'm beat. I didn't think we would ever get that inventory to balance. I was afraid I was going to have to sleep at my desk tonight."

I stared at her. "You have been at work fighting an inventory problem all night?"

"Yes, and I'd still be there if Sarah hadn't found that the problem was that the wrong data had been fed into the computer. The old GIGO problem — garbage in, garbage out."

I put a bookmark in the book to mark my place, put the book down and went to bed. I didn't sleep well that night; I didn't sleep well at all.

It was three days later when Marie said she had to work late again.

"There's a tuna casserole in the fridge. Give it four minutes in the microwave. I should be home by ten," she said just before she kissed me and left.

I was outside her office in a borrowed car at four forty-five. Her normal quitting time was five so I only had fifteen minutes to kill if she wasn't really working late. At five after five people started streaming out of the building and at five-ten Marie came out and walked to her car. She pulled off the lot and I let three cars get between us before I pulled out and followed. Ten minutes later she pulled into the parking lot of the Sea Breeze Motel and sat in her car and waited. Five minutes later a black Dodge Ram 2500 pulled up next to her and Tom Hennesy got out and walked over to Marie, who had rolled down her window, and he leaned into the car and kissed her. Then he went to the office and five minutes later he came out and walked to room 134. Marie got out of her car and joined him and together they entered the room.

I guess I was wrong about Marie not being interested in sex anymore — she just wasn't interested in having it with me. I wondered how long she and Tommy had been hanging horns on me. No matter I thought, the marriage hadn't been much more than a comfortable existence for a year or so anyway.

I was surprised at my reaction to finding out. A couple of years earlier and I would have kicked down the door and beat Tommy within an inch of his life, painted a big red A on Marie's forehead and then thrown her naked out into the street. Now, for some reason I just didn't care enough to expend the energy. I took the borrowed car back, picked up mine and went on home.

I sat in the living room staring at the wall and taking stock of the situation. I was forty-six years old, had a decent job and a cheating wife. I was living a comfortable life and the question facing me was did I want to disrupt it. Confronting Marie would only lead to divorce. There was no chance for forgiveness or reconciliation because I just didn't care about her enough anymore to make it worth the effort.

Divorce would mean selling the house and splitting the assets and knowing about divorce courts in our state I knew I would get the shaft and end up having to pay for her lawyer and mine. I would end up living in a one bedroom apartment somewhere. Fuck that shit! The simplest solution was to ignore what Marie was doing and get on with life, but how was I supposed to do that? How could I just ignore things? I couldn't. To continue on would mean that I would still have to have sex with Marie even if it was only two or three times a month. It would mean that I would still have to be, or appear to be, a loving husband. I could pull that off, but no way was I going to be fucking another man's whore.

For the next five weeks I followed Marie on the nights she said she had to work late and each night she met Tommy at the Sea Breeze. I was not punishing myself, just trying to establish that Tom was the only one she was seeing.

Twice during that five week period Marie indicated that she wanted to make love and both times I avoided it. I stopped cuddling up to her in bed, but if she snuggled up to me I didn't push her away. I still kissed her goodbye in the morning when we left for work, but it was more of a 'kissing your sister' kind of kiss than a loving one. I did absolutely nothing to let Marie know that I even suspected something.

A year went by during which I faked a medical condition known as "acute erectile dysfunction" to keep from having sex with Marie, but it was also a year during which I had no sex at all. One day I asked myself, "What the fuck is wrong with you? Just because Marie is a whore is no reason for you to be celibate. You don't owe the bitch fidelity anymore. She trashed her vows and that releases you from yours."

And then there was the revenge factor. After a year of thinking about it I decided that for my own piece of mind I needed to do something to get back at Marie and Tom, but what? The answer came to me one Saturday morning as I was shopping at Safeway. I was digging through the steak section at the meat counter looking for just the right size steaks for a barbecue when a voice behind me said: