Hi Folks. For those of you who didn't like the ending of last week's story, I'm sorry. But you have to remember that these are only stories. You may not like the way they end, but they are fiction. No real people ever die in them. Anyway if you didn't like the way last week's story ended you probably won't like this one either. I also made a terrible word choice in last week's story. I just wanted to let the person who told me about it know that I will not do that again and to thank them for opening my eyes to how hurtful it could be. Lastly I want to thank Mikothebaby for going beyond the call of duty in helping to get this story ready. I've said ti before but it bears saying again. Without her I couldn't do this. SS06.

Remember when we were younger and all of the stories started out with ... Once upon a time? Well my story does too. Once upon a time, I was in my driveway on a bright sunny November day washing my 2008 Bullitt Mustang. There are guys who like to relax by playing a round of golf and others who like to just take a nap, but for me, washing the car relaxed me and let my mind sort out the answers to my problems. I was living on borrowed time and I knew it. The strange thing was that what I thought I knew and what was about to happen were two different things.

The weather man had predicted that this late fall warm snap we'd been experiencing might last for another week or two. That would give me at least seven to fourteen additional days of driving the Bullitt. Following that though, I'd have to put her away for the winter and drive my jeep.

I had all of my favorite Turtle Wax Ice products arranged on my cart and was just about to finish up the interior and then start on the outside, when a car driving erratically moved down my street and lurched to a stop in front of my house.

I recognized the driver, or at least the person behind the wheel as my wife's mother, Judy. She got out of the car leaving it on an angle in the middle of the street and ran up my driveway. As she got close, I noticed the tears in her eyes and she threw herself at me. She buried her head in my chest and started crying her eyes out.

"Come on Judy," I said softly. "Let's get you inside the house and you can tell us all about it." I walked her inside the house and sat her down at the kitchen table.

"He's such an asshole," she cried.

"Judy, would you like something to drink?" I asked.

"Do you have any tea?" she asked between sobs. I nodded and got her a cup and started the tea.

"Judy, give me your keys so I can move your car out of the street before someone hits it," I said. She handed me the keys and I moved her into the living room where she'd be more comfortable. I yelled upstairs and called for my wife Penny to come down.

I slipped out the back door and moved Judy's Accord into the driveway behind my Mustang but not too close to it. I didn't want my car getting pissed at me. When I got back in the kitchen, the tea was ready, so I took it and a tray with sugar and milk and a big piece of the chocolate cake that Judy had brought over herself the day before, into the living room.

I put the tray down in front of Judy. I looked at the two women sitting there with their heads together and was astounded. Every time I saw the two of them together it was shocking. They looked more like sisters than mother and daughter. Penny, at twenty five and her mother, Judy, at forty three years of age looked almost identical. Of course, if you looked closely enough Judy had a few lines on her face and if you caught her between salon sessions you might see a gray hair or two, but the resemblance was uncanny.

If you looked deeper the tables turned though, because Judy ran every day and her muscle tone was actually better than her sedentary daughter's and she was a few pounds trimmer as well. Both women were on the taller side and kind of willowy. I'd say Judy's boobs were a little bigger, but Penny's were perkier. Nine times out of ten, you'd have to call the contest a draw.

"Thank you Donnie," sobbed Judy. "Pen, you're so lucky to have HIM. You'll probably never have to worry about finding out that your husband is cheating on you AGAIN," she said.

I was shocked. I couldn't believe that Ed, Pen's dad would cheat on Judy. For her age or any age, she was hot. She was also the most caring person I knew. I wished that her daughter's personality was as nice as hers. I knew that Penny loved me, but she was kind of spoiled. I guess though when you came right down to it, I'd caused that.

I started to walk away but Judy grabbed my hand. "Donnie, you're part of the family too," she said. "And I want to talk to you."

"Okay, Judy," I said.

"Why?" she asked me. "Why does he do this?"

"Why does he do what?" I asked.

"What is it about you men, that just makes it necessary for you to cheat?" she asked. I started to feel uncomfortable.

"Mom, when I was in college we learned that men are genetically predisposed to spread their seed to as many willing fertile females as possible. Maybe Dad has an abundance of predisposition. Maybe it's not his fault. Men are just born that way. And maybe some women are too. Society even laughs and looks the other way when men do it. They say he's virile or a ladies man, but when a woman does it she's a slut," said Penny.

"I'm not talking about men in general," said Judy. "I'm talking about your father, who swore to be faithful to me and love me and he keeps..."

"Mom, you know that Daddy loves you," interrupted Penny. "He loves you more than anything else in the world. But he just has that need to spread his seed. You can't fight nature. All you can do is to try to work with it."

"When he married me, he swore to put my needs and our marriage in front of nature," said Judy. The sound of the doorbell ended the conversation, at least temporarily.

"I've got it," I said, happy for a chance to get away from the painful and emotionally charged situation. It wasn't that I didn't care. I liked both of Penny's parents, but all I wanted to do was to wash my car.

As I opened the door I came face to face with Penny's dad, Ed. He looked like a dog that had been kicked. Ed was about 5'4" and stocky with a balding pate and what appeared to be a single eyebrow that managed to span his forehead. Why a guy that looked like him was even with Judy, let alone married to her was a subject that was better left in the hands of sci-fi authors, because it made no sense. But for that same guy to cheat on her made even less.

"Hi, Don," he said softly. "I uhm ... saw Judy's car in the driveway. Is she here?"

"They're in the living room," I said. I pointed the way and he walked in slowly. I went out the door that he'd just come in, shaking my head.

I picked up the hose and started to hose down my car to remove any loosed particles of dirt and debris from the finish before I soaped it up and washed it.

I was just getting into to it and telling the car how nice she was going to feel when she was squeaky clean and waxed again when I heard a giggling from behind me. Just as I started to turn my head to see who it was two slim arms wrapped around my waist. A head full of brown hair fell onto my shoulder.

"Donnie, do you love me?" she asked.

"Of course I do, Penny; you already know that," I said.

"Well, I'm having a family crisis here, Honey," she said. "I need some help. I need you to grill some steaks and help me talk mom down off the ledge. This time they really might be heading for a divorce."

"He's done this before?" I asked.

"Several times," said Penny. "The two of them love each other so much, but they keep going through this. I can tell that Daddy is really serious about stopping this time. He even suggested that they get help. All the other times, he kept talking about how he didn't need a shrink playing with his head, but he's finally realized that maybe he can't quit on his own. And my mom knows that he loves her. None of those other women ever meant shit to him, it was just sex. But she seems to have drawn a line in the sand."

"Maybe she should do more than that," I said.

"What do you mean?" asked Penny.

"Look Honey, they're both adults. They're older than we are. They know that they have to be responsible for their own actions and the results of the choices they make. So maybe if your mom had refused to put up with this a long time ago, she wouldn't be going through this now. And maybe if she had, your dad would have realized that if he continued to do it, that in the end it would cost him."

"I don't get you, Honey," said Penny.

"Okay, let me put it simply," I said. "If I were your mom, the first time I caught him cheating on me, I'd have divorced him. I heard what you were trying to tell her about his nature and all of that, but to me it's just a load of bullshit. It's like you were making an excuse for what he was doing. And he needs to realize that every time he goes out and does it, that there's a chance that he'll lose his wife and his family."

Penny looked at me as if she was shocked. Then she set her lip and it quivered. I knew that she was going into her fight, flight or tears response.

I watched as she said nothing and then the tears came out. I wrapped my arms around her and told her to calm down. I'd do anything she wanted.

"Donnie, this is easy for you. It's not your parents that are talking about splitting up. Your parents were perfect, so you've never been through this. I don't want my parents to split up and I don't want them going through the rest of their lives alone. When we have kids, I want them to have two grandparents who love them and I want us all to have one big happy family. I don't want to have to worry about having a birthday party or a barbecue and not being able to invite one of my parents because the other won't come if they're there," she cried.

"Okay, Honey," I said. "I'll help. I'll get the steaks started and you can send your dad out to talk to me while you talk with your mother. Maybe by the time the food is done you two can join us on the deck and we can get them to talk."

I philosophically disagreed with what I was doing, but I loved Penny, like the flowers love the rain. I could also understand her need to try to keep her parents together. Most of us don't want to see our family splinter into pieces. We expect for our parents to be paragons of virtue. After all, they were the people who we got our examples on right and wrong from. Even when they fail, we tend to look the other way just to keep the ball rolling.

So I spent an uncomfortable afternoon chatting with my father in law. We segued from talking about my Mustang, during which Penny's father lied to me; to talking about other sports. Penny's dad told me that he had a friend who had the Bullitt Mustang that they made during the eighties. He told me about how much faster it was than the ones they make now and how he'd borrowed it a couple of times.

I just nodded my head and smiled. But I was thinking that he was a lying sack of shit because they didn't make a Bullitt in the eighties or the nineties. And as far as being faster, a 2012 V6 Mustang has more horsepower than the V8's from the eighties and nineties and a higher top speed. And they handle better and get better fuel economy.

Anyway, after that we talked about sports and how to grill the best steak. He was offering me all of this fatherly advice and trying to set himself up as an expert on how to be a man, while I should have been washing my fucking car. So after a while of shining him on, I let the other shoe drop.

"So what's going on between you and Judy?" I asked. He looked as if I had slapped him in the face. Then he broke down and almost started crying.

"I didn't mean to hurt her," he cried. "She wasn't supposed to find out."

"Well that's original," I thought. Are there any cheaters out there whose spouses were supposed to find out? And if he didn't mean to hurt her, then why the fuck would he do the thing that would hurt her, most?

I had to really work at it to keep from going off on him. I remained amazingly calm and collected while inside I was seething. Judy looked so much like her daughter, that in my mind, I just imagined him doing something that would hurt Penny too. And I didn't allow anyone to hurt my wife in anyway.

What I really wanted to do was to throw the cheating bastard off of my property. In my opinion, Judy needed to divorce his ass. He was a serial cheater and he would do this again. But I held my tongue and played nice, while the old bastard talked about how all of these women were constantly after him, as if his 5'4" fat, hairy, balding ass was some kind of sex symbol. According to him, women of all ages were offering him sex constantly.

Judy would be better off without him. I thought about both my dad and my uncle Steve. Both of them were great guys. My mom died a few years ago in a car wreck. And my aunt Millie, Uncle Steve's wife, had decided in her later years that she was a lesbian. Dad had died a year or so after mom so he was no longer with us, but either one of those guys would have given anything to have a woman like Judy in his life. And they'd be better for her than this sack of shit. But I smiled at him as I thought about it.

An hour or so later, Judy and Penny joined us on the deck. We ate and we had a pleasant meal. Ed had the whipped puppy act down to a science. He was spouting more bullshit than a herd of cattle.

"I think part of my problem is that in my later years I've gotten away from the church," he said. "I need a dose of the good book to get me back on the straight and narrow." I looked across the table from him expecting to see him get struck by lightning.

When it didn't happen, I yelled,"Excuse me." Then I ran into the house and down into the basement. I closed all of the doors behind me and buried my face in one of the pillows on the sofa down there. Then I laughed my ass off. There was no way that bastard should have had the balls to even step into a church. He was just trying to say whatever he thought would save him yet again.

When I got done laughing, there were still tears running down my cheeks and my face was red. I went back and sat down at the table. Penny was looking at me strangely. The expression on Ed's face was as pure as the driven snow. It was as if he was waiting to be made the first living saint. Judy looked at me and I felt like an asshole. The expression on her face said it all. She was truly in a lot of emotional pain. She was teetering on the brink of cutting this asshole out of her life permanently and she was counting on her daughter and me to help her make the right decision.

"So, Donnie, do you think that counseling might be the answer?" she asked. I looked at Ed who was very subtly nodding his head at me. And I looked at Penny right beside him who was trying to save her parents' marriage. She too was nodding almost imperceptibly. Then I looked into Judy's eyes. Hers were the only ones that held no trace of deceit. And I did it. I did it for purely selfish reasons. I did it because I knew that Penny would be upset with me and I wouldn't get any pussy for a long ass time. I lied.

"Counseling is supposed to help you sort out the problems in a marriage," I said. "If you get a good therapist, they can sometimes help you see things both about yourself and the relationship that would otherwise go unnoticed. They help you to see patterns of behavior that aren't apparent to the average person."

It wasn't really a pack of lies. I'd heard it on a show about therapy on the science channel, so in some situation somewhere, it was probably at least partially true. Judy looked into my eyes and she trusted me. She nodded her head and said, "Okay, we'll give it a try."

She reached across the table and took Ed's hand and smiled at him. Penny was beaming at me. I felt like hammered shit. I am a carnivore. There are sometimes when I only eat meat at a meal and just don't eat any vegetable so I can cram more steak or more roast down my throat, but that day I almost vomited my steak. I felt like shit for what I'd just done.

"I hate to interrupt you two love birds," I said. "But I need to show Ed one more thing about my car."

While the ladies cleared the table and put the dishes in the dishwasher I led Ed out to my garage.

"Hey your car isn't in the garage," he said smiling. "It's in the drivewaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa..."

I grabbed him by his throat and slammed into the wall of my garage so hard that the clock on the wall inside the garage fell and shattered on the concrete floor.

"Motherfucker, that's the first and last time I ever lie to save your rotten cheating ass," I sneered. "If you ever cheat on her again, you'll have more than a divorce to worry about. Do you understand?"

He shook his head rapidly. I slammed him against the wall again just for emphasis. Then we went back in the house.

"They didn't make them like that in the old days, did they Ed?" I asked as we stepped back into the kitchen. This time it was me who was all smiles. Ed was trying to fake it but his head hurt and he was shocked. No one had ever spoken to him like that before.

Penny came out from the pantry and noticed something that I hadn't. "Daddy you have a bump on the back of your head," she said. "Where'd you get that? Are you okay?"

"Ha ha," I laughed. "While we were in the garage, that clock fell off of the wall and landed on Ed's head. His head is hard as a rock. It broke the darn clock. He's a tough old bird."

Ed nodded his head woodenly.

That night Penny tried to fuck me to death. Long after I felt like she had stripped the skin off of my dick, she was still going. I fell asleep with her sucking my dick to get it up just once more. I guess the thrill of her letting me do absolutely anything I wanted to do to her, wiped out a bit of my guilt.

Only a month and a half later, three days after Christmas, I'm holding her hand and have my arms wrapped around Judy as we step into the morgue.

We walked forward into the unexpectedly cool room and came face to face with a man who looked to be every bit as alive as the people he cared for.

"Sorry for your loss," he smiled. If his smile was supposed to be friendly or comforting, he failed on both counts. His smile in that situation just came off as being creepy. He ushered us over to a raised table. I noticed that by then it was Judy and I helping Penny as she took faltering steps.

As the attendant pulled the sheet off of the body, he did it with a flair that a lot of stage magicians would be hard pressed to match. I almost expected him to leap onto one knee and shout, "Ta dah!"

From that point, as we looked at the lifeless body before us, our reactions varied. Penny slumped to the floor and began bawling. Judy nodded her head and looked away. I went into shock with my mind throwing out hundreds of ridiculous thoughts per second.

As I looked at the body formerly known as Ed, I marveled at first how clean it was. It didn't look dirty and grimy and bloody as I'd expected. Then my brain kicked in and reminded me that they'd probably cleaned the body for the autopsy they'd be performing soon. I wondered how much an autopsy cost. Couldn't they save money by not doing it since Ray Charles could see that the gunshot wounds were what killed him?

The bullet holes didn't look like they did on TV either. Perhaps it was because time had passed and the body had settled and began bloating. But they didn't look like neat little circles the way they did on CSI or Law and Order SVU. They seemed to be more like ragged slits than neat little circles. And they were all over the body. Obviously, this had been done by a person who was out of his or her fucking mind. Instead of closely spaced neat little groupings located around the heart or chest, there were bullets everywhere. He looked like he'd been shot by a person with no motor control who just put bullets everywhere.

I counted at least eight or nine wounds. It made me think about that line from that Chris Rock standup routine I'd recently watched on You Tube. It's the one where he says that bullets should cost five thousand dollars apiece. That way you tell that someone had done something that was worth killing them for. Apparently, Ed had pissed someone off enough for them to pump about forty thousand dollars worth of Chris Rock bullets into him.

"Can you identify the deceased?" asked the attendant.

Both Judy and Penny sorrowfully nodded their heads. At the same time, I raised my hand. Shit, I should have yelled Eureka. At that moment I felt as if I'd discovered one of the lost secrets of the universe. If putting the bullets into Ed's body had killed him, would he come back to life if we took them out?

"Do you have a question?" asked the crypt keeper.

"Uh no," I said, realizing how stupid my thought had been.

"Again, I'm sorry for your loss. Have a great day," he said turning away. Judy and I each grabbed one of Penny's arms and led her back outside of the morgue. The detective who'd brought us there was in the waiting room. He put his hat back on his head and came to us.

"So was the deceased your husband?" he asked Judy. She nodded her head and squeezed my hand for strength.

"When he didn't come home from work last night, I got worried. Ed does a lot of things but he always calls to let me know what's going on," she said.

He seated us around his desk and asked if we wanted coffee or anything to drink. I took one look at the rancid looking coffee maker and said, "No thanks."

"What happened to him?" asked Penny.

"I can't reveal the specific details of an ongoing investigation," he began. "But, hell it's going to be in the papers by the time you get home anyway. Your husband ... err ... your father, young lady was found shot to death in the Sleazy Easy motel on Sycamore avenue. Also at the scene was a naked woman who was hysterical and covered in blood."

"It took us most of the night to get her calmed down enough to talk about it and say anything coherent. Apparently, she and your father had a tryst in that motel and were discovered by her husband. He kicked the door in and discovered the two of them. He had a nine mill with one of those oversized clips. He shot your father eight times and saved the last round for himself."

"After he'd shot your father, he had words with his wife, a Gladys Turnbuckle, and then stuck the gun in his own mouth and blew his brains all over the room. It was not a pleasant sight to behold. After the autopsy, we'll release the body for burial."

"Are they going to damage his body very much during the autopsy?" asked Penny.

The detective looked at her crazily. "Why miss?" he asked.

"Well, Daddy had a couple of bullet wounds to his face and head," began Penny. "If they damage his face too much trying to pull the bullets out, we wouldn't be able to have an open casket. I want a chance to look in my father's face when I say goodbye to him. I want to remember him the way he was."

"Then you'd better go back into the morgue and say good bye now," said Judy softly.

"Ma'am, I'll ask the coroner to avoid damaging his face," said the detective.

"That's not necessary," said Judy.

"Oh, it's no trouble," said the detective. "We do it all the time and in this case there's nothing to investigate. We've got video footage of the guy kicking the door in. He still had the gun in his hand when the officers got to the scene. Your husband was already dead and there's no way the woman could have moved anywhere in that room without leaving a blood and brain trail."

"Detective," said Judy icily. "What I meant was that it's not necessary because I'm not even sure we're going to claim the body. Let them bury him in the pet cemetery for all I care. And as far as my daughter wanting to remember him the way he was, they can't bury him the way he was because he always had his dick stuck in some slut. And as far as I know, it's illegal to bury more than one body in a casket. Just put him in a garbage bag and light it on fire."

Judy got up and I got up with her. Penny looked at her mother.

"She's upset," said Penny to the detective, who just nodded his head.

As soon as we got away from the detective's office, Judy's strong front faded and she started crying all over my shoulder. I drove them both home and tried to make them comfortable. For the rest of that afternoon, people who'd heard about Ed's death dropped by to offer their condolences.

My neighbor, Tanya, stopped by with a deli tray. She hugged me and asked me how I was holding up. Tanya is incredible. She has short blond hair and is kind of slim but pear shaped. She's that kind of woman who can sit down and talk, or stand up and play football with the guys, but then ten minutes later she's dresses up in a slinky dress and heels and looks great.

She's the kind of woman who isn't too girlie. But is still very feminine. If you saw her across a crowded room you'd be thanking God that you were married to her. I think they call it sneaky hot. And women like that only get better as they age.

"How are you holding up?" she asked. I shrugged my shoulders.

"It's okay, Honey, we're friends," she said. "I know you spent a lot of time with the old guy. I often saw him whenever he came over to visit. He'd be out there talking to you as you pampered the queen of the neighborhood."

Tanya was talking, of course, about my Mustang. She always told me that if her husband Rick spent as much time pampering her as I do my car, she'd be one happy girl.

"Actually, Tan..." I began. Then I kept my voice low so no one else could hear us. "I couldn't stand the old bastard. He was a serial cheater. It was just in his nature to cheat."

"You can't fight nature," she laughed.

"And Judy is such a sweetheart," I continued. "I don't know how she put up with it for so long. After she gets over his death, she'll be better off without him."

"You're high," she laughed. "Women are not like that; especially her generation. He was her first lover, her first husband, her first everything. Why do you think she kept forgiving him? She loved him dummy. She couldn't see herself with anyone else. She'd get angry with him and call him names and not give him any pussy for a while, but eventually they'd get back together. They're like magnets. They just keep pulling themselves back together. She'll be lost without him."

Tanya turned out to be wrong on a couple of things. As the weeks went on, Judy's anger at Ed didn't fade. She refused at first to even attend his funeral. I convinced her to go for Penny's sake. Penny ended up angry at her mother and at me. I'd told her that I didn't want to speak at her father's funeral.

I guess that she thought that I was just nervous about speaking in public, but truth be told, I couldn't think of a single good thing to say about the guy. In the end, one of his best friends did the deed.

His words were memorable. "We're all here to say farewell to Ed Bauer. Well ... Eddie was ... he was ... he was Ed. You had to know him."

Even his best friend, who'd known him for forty five of his fifty years of life, couldn't think of a single good thing to say about him.

After the funeral, Judy struggled with her life. She became more a part of ours. There were some things that she simply couldn't handle. If we were watching a TV show and a guy cheated on his wife, Judy became irate. Penny and I spent a lot of time talking about what we could do for her.

Penny seemingly got over her father's death fairly easily. We just moved on with our lives. After all, it wasn't like we'd seen him every day anyway. It must have been about three months after his death that we'd gotten together with a bunch of our friends and relatives.

We'd thought that we were being sneaky. We'd invited almost every eligible man in Judy's age group that we could think of. At forty three, Judy wasn't old and she looked like she could be Penny's sister instead of her mother. The problem wasn't the guys. They were all over her. The problem was Judy. She was sweet, she was kind, but she was a one woman man. She didn't know how to flirt or work a room. Shit, when she was eighteen and her parents allowed her to start dating, Ed, who was twenty five and had already been married twice, swept her off her feet, got her cherry, got her pregnant and married her. Ed had been the only guy she'd ever dated. Judy simply didn't know the rules of the game or the game itself for that matter.

We hadn't expected anything that first time. We'd figured we'd have to make the little get-togethers a regular thing before we hit pay-dirt. The problem started after the party.

As we were cleaning up, I noticed Penny's phone on the counter. As I got near the counter, it chirped. The chirp indicated that she had a text coming in. I figured the text was from her mom thanking us for inviting her to the party. I turned the phone on and went into shock as I read the text.

"Meet U 2mro sm plc 12p"

I scrolled back through her texts and even got a location. Penny was texting some guy and meeting him. I went into shock. For a long time I just stood there staring at her phone. I felt like my world was ending. I'd had no idea that any of this was going on or even possible. Penny and I had sex so often it was crazy. When did she have time to screw anyone else?