Chapter 1

A poet once wrote: "For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these: 'It might have been'"

Of course that poet had never heard his wife say, "We have to talk."

But first things first. I am Jeff Grundvig, and I lost my job on August 23, 2007. At the time I thought that it was one of the worst things that could happen to me, just short of the accidental deaths of my mom and dad several years ago.

In the short term it was the least of my worries. In the long term it might have been the second luckiest thing that would ever happen to me.

It was the least of my worries, because of what had been going on between me and my wife Stacy. We were nearing the six-year mark, and we were not doing well. I had no idea why, but our daily routine had become just that: routine.

I had tried to get a handle on it about a week or so before I got canned. We were cleaning up the kitchen after another less-than-communicative dinner. As had become our usual, we were both silent.

I have to say that I'm not the most observant guy in the world, but even I could see the stiffness of her body. It was if she was bracing herself just to be around me. And now that I saw that so clearly, it dawned on me that she'd been like that for months.

That chilled me. Why? What had gone wrong?

At last I said "Stacy? Can I ask you something?" She put the last dish into the dishwasher and turned with a questioning look.

"Honey, what is it? What have I done? It's obvious that I must have done something that's pissed you off? There's been something very wrong between us for months, and I have no clue what brought it on."

For a long second she looked at me with a strange expression. I had the fleeting feeling that she was biting back something she wanted to say. But the feeling and the moment passed and her expression went neutral.

She shrugged and said, "Jeff, get a grip. There's nothing wrong between us or with our marriage. Get realistic. All marriages get a little bland and routine after a while. It can't stay all honeymoonish forever."

Well I knew that. But it didn't have to be that way, I thought, and I told her that. I wanted to make an effort to rev it up, to bring back a little bit of that old excitement. But she waved her hand dismissively and said she was fine with the way things were. As we continued to get the house locked up and ready for the night, I thought I could see her darting glances at me when she thought I wasn't looking.

When we were going to bed later, she delayed climbing in for a few seconds. She stood there in her sheer sexy nightgown, looking at me, seemingly pensive. But then she laid herself down and pushed against me with a hot hungry mouth and searching fingers. We made love with an intensity that had been missing for months. I was made content. For a while.

That was typical Stacy, a person of contradictions. Stacy was, by nature and unhappy experience, a reserved and aloof woman. She was markedly like that when I first met her, both of us burned by previous marriages to unfaithful spouses.

We met at work, Amalgamated Conglomerates Corporation, AGC for short. I manage the Technical Literature Support Group. Well. I used to manage it. And I do again, sort of. Only not so much manage as ... well, I'll explain that later.

AGC is a cobbled together clump of a number of companies, the result of a binge of acquisitions and takeovers during the '90's. Because of that history, we, that is AGC, make a lot of widgets and provide varied services.

For almost every widget of any complexity there are operator's manuals and parts lists, and service manuals, and installation guides, and so on. For most services there are user's manuals and reference guides and tons of brochures. It was ... it had been my job to keep all that technical literature up-to-date and in stock, and to get the publications out to service reps and clients who asked for them.

It was Technical Literature, called TechLit, for short. Everything had to be reduced to a short name or acronym; some kind of law, I guess. AGC set a high premium on customer support, and TechLit was considered to be very important for customer satisfaction. And I thought my little two-person group did a damned fine job.

When I first went to work in the TechLit Support Group, Stacy had been my secretary. Well, secretary was a misnomer. She had really been my all-around assistant. Someone up in the higher echelons was uncomfortable with the notion of a manager with one person to manage. But there were managers with secretaries who had no one else reporting to them. Odd, but true.

I do my own letters and such, and answer my phone, so the secretarial title was a dodge. Stacy was there to help me do my job. I ran the big picture; she followed through with the details. It took two people to do the job, and both people had a full day's worth of to- do's every day.

We were both pretty lonely when we started working together. I was like a drunk who had taken the pledge, only in my case it was against women. I had vowed "Never again," after my crippling, near-neutering marriage to Nicci Stempler.

Never again would I let a woman get me by the gonads. From bitter experience I knew that when she rips them out, the heart comes out too. It's funny; you wouldn't think that such small things would have tendrils that go way up into your chest. But they must, because I could feel the hollowness after the Cardioectomy. I swear I could hear the wind blow through it on cold lonely wintry nights.

Yes, I was a hollow, angry, wary man. Recreational sex was the only level of relationship I was interested in, and my occasional partners were like-minded, or they were gone. At least that's what I said, and what I thought I believed.

So how did we wind up married? Well, someone once wrote about how the heart has its reasons that the mind doesn't understand. And most men and women are simply not meant to be alone. At least that's my reluctant conclusion.

See, despite my steely resolve, I found that I couldn't keep from reluctantly thinking about Stacy when I was away from her, and covertly eying her when we worked together. She was very attractive, but as I said before, aloof and wary. Her attitude was like mine, only more so. She dressed down for a severe look that hid her figure. She wore no makeup and hid her pretty face behind big glasses.

Her story, which came out slowly, was that once upon a time she had met, fallen for, and married a hunk. Unfortunately, the hunk turned out to be a cheater, and four years into their marriage, she caught him in the sack, hunking with one of her friends. At the end of that story she had sworn off men.

Sound familiar?

I was gun-shy too for similar reasons.

When I first got into the job market after a stint in the Navy and then college, I took an offer from a firm in a small town. While there I met...

and then married...

and then was betrayed by...

and then fled from a woman who could be on the recruiting poster for unfaithful wives. I wound up here in Endicott City

I found work as a Tech Writer/Editor. Seven years ago, the firm I was with lost their contract and I lost my job. I went down to the State Employment Office to apply for unemployment. I never collected a penny of it, because their referral service sent me to interview for an opening at AGC, and I jumped at it.

I was in the Writing/Editing section of the Publications department, merrily writing and revising TechLit when the current TechLit Manager got careless and greedy and got caught scamming the company on his expense forms. AGC took a dim view of that. They fired him, and asked me to come down to the front office for a little talk with a guy named Harley something-or-other. Harley ran the Pubs department, which included both Writing/Editing and TechLit. He was heavyset, balding, and not that impressive-looking, but he was sharp. Two minutes of conversation showed me that.

In the Navy we would say that he had all his shit in one sock. (Yes, I know it doesn't make sense. A lot of stuff we said in the Navy didn't make sense. You had to be there.)

We chatted for a few minutes, nothing very specific, but it seemed like he was feeling me out. It was nothing at all like a formal interview, much less a job interview, and yet the upshot was that he promoted me to TechLit Manager, and I inherited Stacy as my assistant.

Harley moved up a few years later and they brought in a new guy to replace him. I was decidedly uninterested in AGC politics and paid no attention to who was where in the hierarchy. A few years later they promoted that guy, whose name I don't even remember. He had his secretary pass on any edicts. Her name was Amanda, if I remember rightly. It could have been Brunhilde; she would have made a helluva Valkyrie.

About two years ago, they promoted the guy who'd replaced no-name guy and decided to reorganize the support functions, and that was how I wound up working for Cedric Jennings. The reorganization kept him away from the big functions, and even I suspected that was no accident. He had TechLit and a few other piddling little groups. It was a fairly small domain for a manager, and I swear that it looked like the idea was to minimize the potential damage that he could do. Seemed like a strange way to run a business. Why have him as a manager at all if he was apparently so incompetent?

He spent most of his time kissing his boss's ass and buttering up some of the other executives. I had no idea why they let him hung around with that level of management. I appreciated that they did, because that meant I had to spend less time with him, explaining over and over why his ideas for TechLit were stupid.

In a nice way, of course.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Obviously, Stacy and I spent a lot of time together on the job, and after a long period of standoffishness, she slowly, slowly began to open up. At first it was verbal.

We went from "Good morning Miss Markey / Good morning Mister Grundvig" to "Hi, Stacy / Hello, Jeff."

Then we began to get more comfortable around each other and I began to get to know her a little. And despite her marital disaster and her foreswearing mankind, I came to suspect that behind that cold façade she was lonely and a little bit frightened. As I said before, most men and women are not meant to be alone.

Unfortunately, her immediate reaction to any interest from a man was to stiffen up and shut down. Despite her good looks, there weren't many guys who could sustain an interest in her, given her coldness and lack of response.

Despite my own demons, I could not resist becoming interested in her. But unlike the pussy hounds, I was interested in her for more than her body. We talked on the job between busy times. We ate our sandwiches and swapped our sad stories. We talked about honesty. We talked about fidelity, and how neither of us had broken our vows or ever would. We had been on the other side and knew all too well the pain that infidelity created.

I liked a loose work environment and so we started joking around, first me, and then her giving it right back. It was innocuous and occasionally juvenile, but it loosened both of us up. Finally I asked her out on a real date. She got up and practically ran to the Ladies rest room. When she finally came out, she said she was scared. She said that she was being honest. That she liked me, but that she was afraid of making another mistake. I said that was the same for me, too, but that I still wanted to see her.

Stacy looked down at her shoes and shyly said, "I'd like that too, Jeff."

Now, unlike her Ex, I was not exactly what you'd call a hunk. I'm about 5 feet 9. I seem a bit shorter, because of the stocky build I inherited from my dad. Strong legs, broad butt, wide shoulders, and a barrel chest, that's me. So I look shorter. Ok, ok, so I lied. I am shorter. Maybe 5 feet 8 ... and a half. I'm neither handsome nor ugly, just pretty ordinary in the looks department. I'm not a likely candidate to be anyone's Prince Charming, certainly not a looker like Stacy. But see, she'd already done the hunky Prince Charming thing. Been there, done that and had the broken heart to show for it. I had to assume that she was a bit more realistic about what's important and what's not.

Or so it seemed to me at that time.

We started to date on the QT, partly because it was against company policy, and more because we didn't want anyone to know. We didn't need comments or pressure from anyone outside of the two of us; we had enough personal demons to deal with.

We moved from casual to interested, to involved. Finally, one day I confessed my feelings for her. I told her I wanted to take our relationship to the next level and make love with her. She said she felt the sexual attraction as well, but she was afraid of making another mistake.

We danced around it for several weeks and ultimately decided to get together. We were tentative in our love-making at first, but we both found pleasure and fulfillment in it. We gradually lowered the rest of our barriers. I had a strong growing feeling for her, and eventually I told her I loved her and asked her to marry me.

Well, I was ahead of her on that. She pulled back and put me off. She said she had feelings for me, but still was afraid of getting into something that wouldn't last and getting hurt again. She said that if she ever got married again, she would be 100 percent faithful, and she wanted to be absolutely certain that her partner felt the same. I guess I did a pretty good job of convincing her, because eventually she said yes, she would be happy to marry me.

I was like: "Oh frabjous day, callooh, callay!" I thought I was the happiest formerly gun- shy man in the world.

That was six years ago.

Fast forward to recently. For a long time, we still had the physical side going pretty well. We were practiced and caring, and it went way beyond mere sex. We settled into maybe three or four times a week, with lots of oral involved both as foreplay and as an end in itself.

It was good, but, well, recently sometimes Stacy wasn't always really there in some way. Oh, she liked the sex ok, no doubt about that, but it got to be that once we were done, she was done with me. Just a quick rollover and right to sawing wood. Very guy-like.

Well, I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I guess I'm a girly-man kind of guy, in that I like the after-sex cuddling. I thought that was part of it. Stacy did too, at first. When we were first married, we wound up wrapped around each other when we fell asleep; it was very important to both of us. Now, if I persisted, she sometimes got snappish and irritated.

It crossed my mind that Nicci had been like that too. Wild free sex and then just roll over to get away from me.

Stacy told me over and over that she was happy and comfortable in our relationship. Well, maybe so, and I was glad to hear it, but actions speak louder than words. It was getting so that sometimes I wondered if she even really liked me anymore. Forget about loving me, did she really even like me, other than in bed. I wondered. She said she was comfortable and trusted me, but I worried about the rest of her feelings toward me.

And then we had that little after dinner conversation, the one in which she got the strange expression and almost said something, but stopped. And after which we went to bed and made better love than we had had in a long time.

I kept getting the sense that we were living a semi-parallel pair of semi-detached life- styles. It wasn't my idea. I kept seeking togetherness. But Stacy seemed to want to keep some of Stacy to herself. Some of that old aloofness had come back. But that had been a defense mechanism. What was she defending herself from now? Me?

I began to wonder if there was some deficiency in me that I couldn't keep a woman happy. First Nicci, and now ... Stacy?

About one year before the conversation and the hot lovemaking and the next-day canning, there was a time when Stacy's love-making altered and became almost bipolar.

Later, when Gloria and I began to piece it all together, I realized that it began after she had gone back to work in the AGC travel office.

Who's Gloria? I'll tell you in a bit. And no, I didn't cheat with her. Well, not intentionally, and neither of us had any idea of cheating. Hell, she'd have smacked me silly for even thinking about making a pass! Whether she had feelings for me or not was beside the point. I was married!

Back to the bipolar thing. When Stacy and I actually made love, it didn't seem much different than before; we were used to each other's wants and needs. I always tried to meet hers and that usually led to meeting most of mine. But we weren't doing it as often, and the drought seemed to come in batches.

One week we might make love three or four times. And it would be full-bore lovemaking with all the trimmings.

Then there would come a string of nights on weeks when she worked late. I could understand her being tired. But she had worked late many times before and had come home horny. Maybe she would just let me go down on her to where she climaxed. I didn't have to get off every time, you see? It was a way of showing my love for her.

But now, she didn't even want that, where all she had to do was lie there.

Come Monday night and Stacy would grimace and hold herself apart and say she was too tired.

Then Tuesday, she'd say she had cramps, but it wasn't anywhere near her monthly. Then it might be a sudden Wednesday night headache. Then the next night something else; I don't know, the vapors, or the collywobbles, or the marthambles. She developed complaints that aren't even in the damned dictionary.

Or she'd complain that all I thought about was sex, like I was a sex fiend. What the complaint was didn't really matter. These afflictions only came on at nighttime and she would always have miraculously recovered by next morning. But they had the effect that we'd go the whole week without sex.

Then Monday would come and the complaints were gone. She'd be rubbing up against me and being apologetic for last week and said she'd make it up to me. And she would.

Well, I had no clue, but I wanted to believe it was just some phase she was going through. How early does menopause come, anyway? I was 37; she was 33. That sounded awfully young for menopause.

It wasn't one week on and one week off either, nothing that regular. In fact, there seemed to be no real pattern.

I tried to ignore it. Not to be too crude about it, but I had learned never to look a gift pussy in the mouth. Or something like that. On the other hand, why should my wife's favors be gifts? I mean, it would be very PC and New Sensibility to put it like that, but it didn't seem right. Love-making was a mutual thing, wasn't it?

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = == = = = = = = = = == = = = = = = = = == = = = =

Then came the date that will live in infamy, August 23rd: the date I was terminated from AGC.

I realized in hindsight that it was my own fault. I had been incredibly stupid. I had told the truth.

What a Maroon! What was I thinking?

What I did was say that my secretary, Gloria Halop, could do my job. I said it to the other managers in a joking manner because I was proud of her.

I'd hired Gloria to replace Stacy, who had quit so we could come out in the open and get married. No dummy, Stacy had insisted on checking Gloria out before I hired her.

Stacy met Gloria for lunch and had passed her as no threat.

I could understand her thinking, looking at the two women objectively.

Stacy was very pretty, a total knockout, the whole fantasy package, once she came out of her shell and started dressing to show herself off.

Gloria was short and plump, with an open pleasant face. She was built pretty substantially, with a large bosom and rear end. The Yiddish term "zaftig" fitted her. If she had been four or five inches taller, you would have said she had a nice womanly hour-glass figure. The old turn-of-the-century - Lillian Russell look.

No, the previous century, I mean.

Lillian Russell. Look it up.

In the normal, everyday way of things, Gloria had an intelligent, pleasant face. However, when she was happy, her smile transformed her. Smiling, she looked very appealing. That was my first impression when I'd interviewed her, that winsome smile. She was well-qualified and had an energetic upbeat personality. We weren't twenty minutes into the interview when I stopped saying things conditionally and spoke of what she was going to be doing. She realized that I was going to offer her the job, and she just beamed.

When I first hired her, I signed off on her W-4 paperwork and thought she had made a mistake by listing four exemptions. But I checked the Manager's manual and learned that you can do that if your tax situation is such that you didn't need all of the FICA taxes deducted, such as if you have heavy deductions for medical or whatever. The number of exemptions is a crude tool for setting how much withholding you really need so as to be square with Uncle Sam on April fifteenth. You could put down 20 exemptions as long as it works out on Tax day. So I didn't say anything about it to her.

When she reported aboard she was all business and I saw little of that winsome smile in those first days. My efforts to get her to loosen up made her look at me warily. I wasn't trying to get anything going. God, I would never have even thought of cheating on Stacy.

But I liked a certain loose collegial relationship at work and initially Gloria wasn't comfortable with certain aspects of that. She would just get quiet, stare at me with a kind of stubborn look and pull back. I swear it was innocent stuff, mostly verbal. I was familiar with those Sexual Harassment at Work videos and went to those in-house seminars, and nothing I ever broached would raise a ripple of concern. But Gloria had her own personal boundaries, and I learned to respect them quick, fast, and in a hurry, as the saying goes.

I tried to respect her privacy about her personal life. I suspected that she had some personal aspects of her life that she preferred to keep to herself; as she never spoke much about home. So I tried to respect her boundaries. And after a time, I think she realized that and appreciated my restraint. We got along better. And as she got more comfortable with me, she lightened up a little bit.

So, as I said, I had praised Gloria and said she could do my job. And someone, probably someone who was not a fan of mine, had told my asshole boss, Cedric Jennings, what I'd said about how Gloria could run the whole show. I had meant it, but in a general sense.

She really couldn't do both jobs by herself. Hell, neither could I; not for the long haul; there was just too much to get done each day. Hers was the detailed nuts-and-bolts planning and follow-up, mine was more the overall planning and oversight and customer schmoozing. Gloria had little experience with much of that. Plus I had the conn when desperation-time problems popped up and needed desperation troubleshooting. That was beyond her at this point. I was one of Gloria's biggest fans, and I knew that with experience she would become able to do those things. Hell, part of my job was to teach her to succeed me. Or at least that's the way I saw it.