De Minimis Non Curat Lex
- a romantic story by WTSman

The law does not concern itself with trifles. Tormenting a young
woman just because she’s no Anna Nicole Smith was nothing the law
would deal with. George’s childhood friend Bex studied law to
find some other way to get even. Revenge was brutal and not as
sweet as Bex had hoped. The best revenge is to live well. George
saw to that.

______________________

		There was a young lawyer called Bex,
		Whose chest was quite flat for her sex;
		When charged with exposure
		She replied with composure,
		"De minimis non curat lex."

The limerick sits neatly printed on the wall in our bedroom. The
trifles aren’t all that small any longer – two pregnancies have
taken care of that. Still, they are fairly moderate in size. They
were at their absolute peak just when the babies were born. Also
on the wall, on either side of the framed limerick, are two
papier-mâché casts of Bex’ torso that we made just days before
she gave birth. They were fun to make.

Most people notice the huge belly first (particularly the second
cast when Bex carried the twins) and then the breasts. Not Bex.
She will always have a thing about breast size which no amount of
loving can make go away even though I assure her I never cared. I
mean, my first wife could give the late Anna Nicole a run for her
money – and Leona was all natural, but I wouldn’t want to go back
ever. Leona was a scheming cheating bitch with a room temperature
IQ who caused me nothing but grief. Bex loves me unconditionally
(and has done so all her life – I was just to dim to notice). She
is bright and sweet. She is a fantastic mother, and she is my
best friend and confidant in addition to being my wife and lover.
Life is good.

Bex thinks so too. At least most of the time. And when she has
one of her rare black moods and disses her breasts, I will
usually demonstrate how wonderful they are. Bex is one of those
fortunate women whose nipples are so sensitive that she can
orgasm from breast stimulation alone. After a dozen or so
breast-only induced orgasms we usually have a long period of time
where Bex doesn’t complain.

But getting to where we are today has been a long, and at times
painful, journey. This is the story of that journey.

______________________

The story of Bex begins around the same time as the story of me –
we were born only four days apart in the same hospital, but you
can definitely say that our backgrounds were different. Actually,
for the story of Bex to make sense we have to go back a bit
further and start the tale a little over a year before she was
even born

Bex’ father was a lawyer with the impressive name Archibald
Theodore Anderson. All his friends – and he had many, including
the entire legal fraternity, the judges and court staff, most
businessmen in the district, the doctors, the school principals,
the pastors, you name them – called him Archie. Archie was a
large jovial man who had a large jovial house, a large jovial
wife and two large jovial sons who were both also lawyers and in
partnership with their father. And they ran the biggest, most
influential law firm in our part of the state.

When Archie was 64, Margaret, known as Dot – his wife of nearly
40 years and the mother of Albert and Eugene, better known as
Bert and Gene, lay down for nap after lunch one very hot summer’s
day and never woke up. According to the doctor, Dot had a massive
coronary and never felt a thing. It was sad and unexpected, but
life’s like that sometimes.

Being alone didn’t suit Archie. Bert and Gene had long left home,
of course – they were 35 and 37 respectively. Both were
bachelors, although especially Gene was known to be something of
a ladies’ man. No way were they going to move back home to look
after their father. But Archie had never made a bed, never sorted
the laundry or as much as boiled an egg in his life so he knew he
would have to get a least a housekeeper and soon.

Salvation was near – for twenty years Archie’d had the same
personal secretary. Miss Constance Hastings joined the firm when
she was a shy slight spinster of 22. Now she was a shy slight
spinster of 42, unbelievably efficient and competent and utterly
devoted to her boss. She didn’t quite faint when Archie proposed,
but it was damned close. Her secret dream had come true and less
than a month later she was the new Mrs. Archibald Anderson.

Where Dot had been large and, well, curvy, and even in her
sixties still showed clear remnants of a remarkable beauty,
Constance was very slight of build, noticeably flat both at the
rear and especially at the front and, for lack of a better word,
desiccated. Given the age of both partners, no-one expected their
union to be, well, fruitful. But Archie was a lawyer and made
sure the marriage was legal. Before the honeymoon to the US
Virgin Islands was over, the new Mrs. Anderson was neither so
virginal in manners nor quite so desiccated to look at – she had
put on ten pounds in flattering places and she kept putting on
pounds for the simple but highly surprising reason that she was
pregnant.

Surprise or not, Archie and Constance were delighted and a few
days after Archie’s 65th birthday, his now 43 year old new wife
gave birth to a tiny little girl who they named Rebecca Constance
Anderson. At least that’s what her birth-certificate says. No-one
ever called her anything but Bex.

______________________

I know all this from Mom. As I mentioned, I was born four days
before Bex to Millie and Todd Henderson, both 23 and both natives
of our city. They had been sweethearts since grade school and to
this day remain as much in love as then. Dad was an independent
motor mechanic in partnership with one of his and Mom’s old
school friends, Leroy, who I always knew as “Uncle Leroy”. Mom
had been a shop-assistant until shortly before I was born and
never rejoined the workforce even though I remained an only
child. At that time they had bought their first home (which they
are still in) in an ordinary middleclass neighborhood but
bordering on the more affluent part of town.

When I say “bordering” it is in a literal sense: At the end of
our garden was a tall, forbidding wall that surrounded the
grounds of the huge neo-gothic mansion where the Andersons lived.
The summer I was two I “broke through the door in the wall”
(according to Mom – it must have been in dire need of repairs if
a toddler could do that!) and went exploring in the garden next
door, finding Bex playing in a huge sandbox.

This is where my bemused but slightly embarrassed mother found me
ten anxious minutes later. She had only gone inside to go to the
bathroom; having left me in what she was convinced was a
“toddler-proof” enclosed area. She almost collided with the very
bemused Mrs. Anderson who had gone inside to fetch drinks,
leaving Bex in what she was similarly sure was a contained area;
a fence having been put up to protect Bex from their large pool.
They left us to play, sat down to talk and struck up a close
friendship of the kind that mothers all over the world forge from
no other common ground than simply being mothers. According to
Mom, Bex and I both howled miserably when they finally separated
us and a repeat play-date for the next day was hastily agreed.
From then on we were inseparable.

Naturally I cannot remember any of this. In my consciousness Bex
has always been there.

Over the coming years we kept on playing and playing and playing.
We went to kindergarten and then school together and we were also
always together outside school. Our parents laughingly referred
to us as “the twins”. Bex was a waifish tom-boy who ran wild with
me and the other little boys in the neighborhood, climbing trees
– her garden had some fabulous climbing trees and Bex got to the
top of them before anyone else, building cubby houses and so on.
She may have been ostracized by the girly girls at school already
then; I didn’t notice. Bex was one of the gang – end of story.

Unknown to me, of course, Dad and Uncle Leroy were very
industrious and successful. They gained college qualifications at
evening school and expanded their business, taking over a
moribund dealership and turning it into a roaring success. Uncle
Leroy ran the showrooms and Dad the workshop. From a very early
age, I was fascinated with cars and motors and I was a frequent
guest at the workshop – as was Bex.

Dad and Uncle Leroy’s business model was as simple as it was
successful: They sold cars in all price ranges, maximizing the
potential customer base. In addition, having both the dealership
and an all-make workshop, they could hedge their business against
economic fluctuations. When times were good they sold a lot of
new or premium second hand cars. During lean times, the workshop
was doing well because people wanted to run their older cars
longer.

Uncle Leroy never married. He was gay. That cost him all contact
with his unforgiving bible-bashing family. We were his family.
When he died much too young there were rumors it was AIDS, but
that was false. He died from testicular cancer. Over the loud
protests of his “loving family” he left everything he owned,
including his half-interest in the business, to Mom and Dad. That
left Dad in charge of it all and he had to spend much more time
in the showrooms than he really wanted to. Dad was a guy who
wanted to get his hands dirty at heart, but now he spent more
time in a suit than in overalls.

I was unaware of all that too. All I knew was that Uncle Leroy
was gone and I felt terribly sad about that. But that is just
about the only negative memory I have of my childhood. It was
otherwise safe and happy. We may not have been wealthy in a
classical sense but I was never in want of anything important. I
was immersed in love from my parents. And instead of siblings,
which never came, I had Bex.

______________________

The innocence of childhood ends of course. Puberty hit me around
the age of 13. I grew tall and strong in no time, taking after my
father in build. I developed quickly in other areas too. Like
boys through the ages I started waking up with wet pajamas pants
on occasions, worrying that I might have peed my pants. Having
always felt confident that my parents where there for me for
anything, I mentioned it to Mom one Saturday morning. She smiled,
reassured me that all was well and got hold of Dad to explain
things to me. The “talk” – apart from the usual warnings and
admonitions to be responsible – contained a lot of practical and
useful information about the joys that my “new equipment” could
bring me. When Dad had left for work – the showrooms were open on
Saturdays – Mom added her bit, essentially telling me that since
it was bound to come out anyway, I might as well have the
enjoyment from triggering it myself, rather than have it happen
in my sleep! I quickly found out that she was spot on there.

Speaking of spots, my practical and anything-but prudish mother
discreetly placed a dish-towel together with my clean pajamas the
next week. After only a few moments of puzzlement I got it. I
might have blushed – who knows – but it was neater than the socks
or tee-shirts or whatever else teenaged boys use to catch their
almost limitless semen emissions.

And boy was it neat to have parents so utterly devoid of hang-ups
regarding sex.

Growing tall and strong quickly was an advantage socially too,
especially when it came to sports. I dare say I have the build to
be a football player, but I lack the psyche. I just don’t care
for the game. I did play a little baseball and was good at it,
but it just wasn’t my thing either. It’s not that I am a loner or
otherwise anti-social, but team-sports were just not me. I did
much better in athletics and being ahead by a year or more in
physical development compared to my peers made me a bit of a star
through grade school. Only when the true jocks caught up in high
school did that end, but at that stage my interests were
elsewhere. I was an all-round kid; middle-ground in everything.
Good, but not shining grades. OK, but not exceptional looks. And
pretty content with life.

If puberty was easy for me, it was hell for Bex. She too was hit
by hormones around the age of 13. That is in one sense normal,
but kind of late in another. Unlike her peers there had been no
signs of budding breast on her completely flat chest and
practically nothing happened there now despite the onset of
regular screaming-agony periods. Poor Bex got all the pain and
none of the fun.

She didn’t add much in height either leaving her out of most
sports except gymnastics, at which she excelled. Her hips never
flared and her bottom stayed little-girlish. At 13, she didn’t
stand out too much. Some girls needed bras. Other had them for no
reason. Bex was still enough of a tom-boy not to care.

At 14 those with tits looked down on those without. Although
we’re talking a long time before the obesity epidemic that has
now hit the US, very few of Bex’ 14 year old peers were as flat
as she was and none were as short.

At 15 it was unbearable. Bex was mercilessly teased about being a
baby. She was teased about having elderly parents. Her social
life had dried up completely; none of the other girls wanted to
be seen anywhere near her and her former friends amongst the boys
were now well and truly into girls who looked like girls.

She still had me, of course, but not in the same way. We were
friends, and close friends at that, but I had my sports, an
afternoon job at my dad’s workshop and more than my fair share of
girlfriends. Adhering to Dad’s lecture about responsibility and
Mom’s about fidelity didn’t stop me from having a rich sex-life.
It just meant that all my sex was safe and always only with one
girl at the time. (OK, I have on one occasion broken up with a
girl over the phone just moments before I drove out for a date
with the next one, but that’s still technically monogamy, isn’t
it?)

Bex on the other hand had no sex-life whatever. No-one invited
her out. The closest she got to dates was hearing about mine. In
retrospect that was cruel, but she asked and I never withheld
anything from her. She developed a strong dislike for the golden
girls. I couldn’t agree with that – I dated them and from shortly
after my 16th birthday bedded a lot of them. I wasn’t boyfriend
material for the true A-listers who preferred the top football
players, but I was a reasonable athlete so it wasn’t a social
disgrace for a girl to be seen with me. Besides, girls talk. I am
well-equipped both when flaccid and especially when erect and I
know how to use it. So I “sinned above my station” on many
occasions.

______________________

It was not just the kids who were cruel to Bex. One particularly
stupid biology teacher going through human genetics and various
non-fatal but debilitating chromosome defects mentioned Turner’s
syndrome where girls have just one X-chromosome. Those girls tend
to be small and undeveloped sexually. The way the cow presented
it she might as well have said straight out that Bex was a Turner
girl and that rumor now ran around school in no time. During the
next class I asked pointedly if a Turner girl would have periods.
When the teacher replied “Of course not”, I just said “I thought
so…,” looking pointedly at Bex. She was menstruating – clearly in
pain and with fairly bad temporary acne. The teacher got
flustered and I got a bad grade for the rest of the year.

And if I’d hoped that at least this particular rumor about Bex
would now stop, I was sadly mistaken. The busty head cheerleader
Stacey Stevens and her close friend Leona Ingleby whose tits were
even bigger kept up their endless banter about “the titless
wonder” and how she was a “genetic freak” which according to them
was no wonder since “Bex’ parents were ancient when they had
her.”

The cruelty of that came in to perspective shortly after. Early
in our junior year both Bex’ parents died within a few weeks of
each other. Archie had been ailing for a while – he was 82 and
well and truly old. The very hot summers didn’t agree with him
either and he suffered a series of strokes. He survived the first
two, but the third one killed him – which was possibly a mercy;
the second one had left him partly paralyzed and unable to speak.
Unknown to everyone Constance had terminal cancer and she only
outlived her elderly husband by three weeks, dying a few days
before her 60th birthday.

To say that Bex was distraught would have been an understatement.
How she got through it I don’t know. She knew she wouldn’t have
her father forever and with the first two strokes there had been
a kind of warning, but losing her mother was a jolt that came out
of the blue. I tried to the best friend I could – to the
annoyance of my girlfriend at the time who found my affection for
Bex “weird” even though she knew it wasn’t sexual and that she
had no cause for jealousy.

Mom and Dad were fantastic too and offered to take Bex in, as in
actually adopting her. It was obvious that the Anderson house
would have to be sold; it was outrageously big for a family of
three. Having a 17 year old girl living there alone was not an
option. I think Dad was most keen on the adoption solution, but
Gene and Bert were adamant that they could and would look after
their half-sister. They were both still single and shared a huge
apartment above their offices. Bex moved in with them. With no
women in the Anderson brothers’ life it could have been difficult
to get an OK for the arrangement, but they had a housekeeper
coming in on a regular basis and their secretaries were also
listed as appropriate female role models. I’m sure it helped that
Gene and Bert are both top lawyers…

I would have liked to be able to tell you that the merciless
teasing and outright persecution of Bex stopped after the sudden
death of her parents, or that it at least was toned down. Not so.
Small-town American kids can be angels, or they can be vermin.
Our peers largely fell in the latter category. Within days Bex
was no longer “the titless wonder” but “the titless orphan” when
Stacey and Leona had introduced the new term. Some half-baked
intervention from the school curbed that heartless abuse a bit.
But only a bit. Over the next year and a half both terms were
used gleefully to Bex’ face, but rarely when a teacher would hear
it.

______________________

The ultimate humiliation of Bex occurred at our Senior Prom. Mike
Dupres, one of the minor stars on the football team, had started
chatting Bex up. That surprised everyone – he was otherwise
thought to be going steady with Stacey, but now he was all
attentive to Bex and the absolute shocker came when it got known
that he had asked her to be his date at the Prom. Bex’ status
went from ridiculed non-entity to someone girls talked to and
wanted to be seen with merely on the strength of that invitation.
I didn’t see her all that much – being busy with sports and
girlfriends and my job at Dad’s workshop (not to mention
occasional school work), but the few times we talked she seemed
very happy and talked endlessly about her Prom dress, the planned
corsage, the limo that Mike would come in to get her even though
she lived only half a mile from the school, the after-Prom
parties and so on.

I would like to claim that I knew something was fishy, but I
didn’t. I had been as surprised as everybody else, especially
because nothing was known about an alternative date for Stacey,
but high-school couples do split up and I knew better than anyone
that apart from the lack of breasts, Bex was very pretty and also
very sweet and exceedingly bright. So I was happy for my friend
and said so.

And then it all came crashing down. Bex, all dressed up at her
brothers’ apartment, awaiting her date with the limo and corsage,
did just that. Waited, I mean. And waited and waited and waited.
It was all an elaborate hoax as the entire senior year, minus
poor Bex, discovered when Mike strutted in fashionably late with
Stacey on his arm.

“What happened to Bex Anderson?” I asked loudly. My question was
met with general laughter – no one picked up the edge to my voice
apart from Ingrid, my date, who kicked me on the shin and
muttered “Shut up! You’re here with me!” under her breath,

“Why would I go with a flat and skinny little girl when I can
have this?” Mike laughed as he groped both Stacey’s huge
mammaries from behind to much laughter.

“Because you invited her, you prick!” I hissed. Few people heard
me, but Ingrid did and we argued about it for so long that she
eventually very pointedly went to sit somewhere else.

Forget it, I thought and left. I walked over the Gene and Bert’s
apartment. I had expected to find Bex in tears and there were
certainly streaks on her face after a lot of crying, her makeup
smeared and her eyes puffy, but she was remarkably calm when I
arrived. “What happened to your Prom?” she asked.

“Didn’t feel like staying,” I replied, sitting down next to her
in the couch. “The company was unpleasant.”

“Including Ingrid’s?” Bex asked in a forced light tone. She’d
never liked Ingrid much – in fact she didn’t like any of the
golden girls – but she had never criticized any of my girlfriends
to my face.

“Especially Ingrid’s,” I replied. “She doesn’t rate loyalty to
friends very highly. I do.”

“Thanks George,” Bex said and there were tears in her eyes again.
“Your loyalty means the world to me.”

Then she wiped the tears away once more, steeled herself and
yelled “Gene, can we sue the prick?”

He looked startled and came over, followed by Bert. “I don’t
think so Bex,” Gene said. “It’s not like we could use breach of
promise or anything like that – you were not engaged to the
bastard, only invited to a Prom.”

“But he didn’t show – he broke that promise,” Bex argued.

“True,” Gene agreed. “But your participation in the Prom was not
dependent on him being there. You could have been admitted on
your own. The only material thing he failed to deliver, apart
from a rose, was the transport – and the school is just up the
road.”

“De Minimis Non Curat Lex,” Bert added. “The law does not concern
itself with trifles. We don’t have a case. There are no legal
avenues to pursue.”

He put his hand on Bex’ shoulder. She looked up almost startled –
physical affection was rare in the Anderson family. “If Gene and
I were thirty years younger we would have beaten the crap out of
the bastard. But it is not really an option at our age.”

It brought a reluctant giggle from Bex and a hearty laugh from us
three men. Gene and Bert may have been football players in their
high school days, but now they were pretty much the archetypical
soft and sedentary middle-aged lawyers. In all likelihood Mike
could wipe the floor with both of them if they tried anything.

“I could take him on,” I started to say, and I meant it although
I didn’t fancy my chances, but Bex held up her hand to stop me.

Her face hardened. “I don’t want either of you to do anything.
I’ll take care of that. Even if it takes all my life, I’ll find a
way of getting even. It will be legal – if only just so. But it
will be merciless. Now I want to sleep. Good night.” She stood
up, turned on her heals and strode down to her bedroom.

Bex’ brothers and I just stared. There had been something
dangerous in Bex’ voice. Something hard. Something totally
unforgiving. We finally pulled ourselves together. “I’d better
get going,” I said and got up.

“OK,” Bert said and Gene just nodded. As I was heading for the
door, Gene spoke up.

“Thanks for being such a friend to Bex,” he said. “In many ways
you’ve been a better brother to our sister than we ever have.”

“That’s OK,” I replied, slightly embarrassed. “We’re more of an
age and I do love her like the sister I never had.”

“We know,” Bert said. “Don’t do anything that you’d regret or
that would jeopardize your future. In short: Don’t do anything
illegal.”

“And if you do,” Gene added, “don’t go to any other law firm than
ours for your defense.”

The brothers were still chuckling when I left.

______________________

I went home. Mom and Dad were surprised to see me so early. And
aghast, mixed with some pride, when I told them why. Mom was
crying for Bex – not the first time she’d shed tears for my
friend – and Dad was livid. “Mr. Dupres came in yesterday fishing
for a traineeship for Mike. It’ll be a cold, cold day in hell
before that swine joins my pay-roll and I’ll tell them why to
their slimy faces.”

“Todd!” Mom exclaimed. Dad very rarely swears.

“Don’t you Todd me Millie,” Dad shot back. “We’re talking about a
girl we tried to adopt only last year. I love her just as much
and you and George do!”

“I know,” Mom sniffled. “Just don’t do or say anything that could
land us in trouble.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” I said slowly and mentioned the
Anderson brothers’ offer.

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” Dad said. We all agreed and
went to bed.

On the Monday Bex showed up for school at the normal time. There
was some unpleasant derisive snickering, but the new hard-edged
Bex from Saturday night was now very much in presence and she
stared everyone down. For the next few months she was an avenging
angel. Rather than school work which went on auto-pilot, she used
her superior intellect to snoop out as much damaging information
about the jocks and the golden girls as she could and used it to
devastating effect. She undermined the fragile confidence of the
hangers-on, broke up several relationships and friendships
through massive and deliberately undiplomatic use of gossip,
rumors, and half-truths, and caused fear, uncertainty, and doubt
all around. The whole juggernaut took a life of its own when most
of the misfits gleefully started feeding her with the information
they had gleaned. They had never before been empowered – now they
saw a leader in Bex who could help them avenge the indignities
they had been subjected to. Personal happiness may be the best
there is but if that is unobtainable then the tormentors’
misfortunes are not to be despised seemed to have been the motto.

I stayed largely out of it all, except telling Mark in a very
public setting that my dad had told me to ask him and his dad to
come to the showrooms on Saturday morning to discuss something.
That startled and pleased Mark, who had been expecting a
confrontation with me, I’m sure. He bragged to his peers all week
about getting a job as a trainee, but Dad was as good as his word
and the two Dupres men received a very loud and public
humiliation when told why Mike would never be accepted as a
trainee.

Bex’ brothers also chipped in. Their law firm managed virtually
all the local scholarships for college.  Usually the awards are
handled quickly, going more or less automatically to the progeny
of the old established families. Not this year. Gene and Bert
managed to disqualify almost all the golden girls and jocks who
otherwise felt entitled to these funds. They did it on personal
character grounds and made sure that the decisions were leaked
which in turn poisoned the ground for other scholarships. Many a
middle class kid saw their future evaporate like a mirage that
spring. Their past derision of “the titless wonder” became
costly.

Bex had avoided going after the ringleaders – Mike, Stacey and
Leona – except indirectly. When Loretta, one of the second
ranking cheerleaders, who had lost a scholarship she would
otherwise have been almost certain to get, yelled at Bex that it
was her fault and that Bex was only jealous about not landing
Mike after all, Bex shot back “Sure, but at least I was spared
getting chlamydia. Mike caught it off Stacey who caught it off
Pete C at Easter. God only knows which slut he got it from. Could
be anyone from what I hear.”

Loretta blanched. Pete Cummings was her boyfriend and her world
collapsed. A lot of relationships went down the drain when one of
Bex’ new friends – a distinctly weird girl called Alison – put a
“Chlamydia Alert” poster up several places in the school urging
anyone who’d had sex with six named seniors, or whose partners
were cheats, to be tested. I learned that the campaign was
successful when Mom’s friend and neighbor Liz, who works at one
of the main doctor’s surgeries in town, told Mum in hushed tones
that the number of high school kids seeking chlamydia testing had
suddenly exploded. In those days the tests were not nearly as
easy as they are today and the sampling procedure much more
unpleasant for both sexes.

That most of the tests came back negative was irrelevant – the
social damage had been done. Amongst the casualties were Stacey
and Mike’s relationship.

The mayhem died down around the time of the final exams. Bex was
floating around aloof – despised and feared by the jocks and the
golden girls, a hero to the outcasts and someone you didn’t quite
know what to make of to the rest of us. She didn’t care. When I
argued to her “You can’t go around hating everyone forever – it
will eat you up,” she simply replied. “I won’t. I don’t care
about the hangers-on. It was fun to see them squirm; now it’s
time to move on. But the gang of three? I’ll hate them forever.
Even if it takes me all my life, I’ll get them.”

The gang of three was her code name for Mike, Stacey and Leona of
course. This was the second time she had declared she would
pursue revenge indefinitely. Somehow I never doubted she was
serious: She was very good at what she set out to do. She got a
perfect entrance score for college. And she had loads of money.

______________________

We finished high school and started making decisions about what
to do with ourselves. A lot of our peers had no idea but for Bex
and me it was easy.

Traditional college was never on the cards for me. I’m not stupid
and my grades were fine, but I’ve always preferred to do things
with my hands. So instead I did a year-long course at an Auto
Tech Mechanic school and at 20 I joined Dad’s firm as the
youngest certified mechanic. I was, and am, even if I say so
myself, good at it and before long I was one the leading
mechanics. Like Dad and Uncle Leroy before me, I also did some
evening classes locally to start to learn the business side of
things since I was destined to inherit the company.

Bex went away to University to do pre-law (no surprise there).
She had top-grades, top-ambitions, and virtually unlimited funds
after her parents passed, so naturally she went to a top-school.
She lived in dorms (at first because it was compulsory, later
because it provided a social setting she liked), and got her nose
down in the books. She had gone as far away from our town as
possible and was rarely home. As I mentioned, neither of her
brothers ever married and their shared bachelors’ apartment,
while nice and exceptionally spacious, was not really geared for
a young female, nor did they have much to say to their
half-sister. They were always more than nice to her – don’t think
otherwise – and they were genuinely thrilled that she also wanted
to do law, but there was a full generation or more between them
and very little common ground outside law.

Bex and I promised each other we would stay in touch. We did keep
each other up-to-date with fairly frequent letters for the first
two years, but then in the course of just a few months my life
changed radically.

Leona – the big boobed cheerleader, who had been if not the
tormenter-in-chief of Bex, then at least one of the ring-leaders,
came into the workshop one Friday afternoon with a car that was
coughing and spluttering and sending out blue smoke over the
entire neighborhood.

It turned out that Leona had broken up with her live-in boyfriend
Rick – a promising football player who hadn’t quite delivered on
the promise. She was a little vague about why they’d split. Could
be she didn’t see him as the provider she’d hoped for when he had
star ambitions. Could be she’d cheated on him. I have no idea and
I am not being charitable, so don’t read too much in to this. I
honestly don’t know.

Anyway, I digress. Rick was gone. And with him any sense of
little details like keeping a car in oil and so on. I was told
about that while attending in person to the poor vehicle and with
us having a shared past, if being class mates for 12 years can be
called that, the conversation turned personal. Leona told me
about her time with Rick and I told Leona about my future plans,
quite possibly laying my prospects of being a successful business
owner in the near future on a bit too thick. That bragging was to
cost me dearly, but hey! – we’ve all been young and stupid, and I
was mesmerized by those fabulous tits that kept threatening to
spill out when Leona leaned over to look at whatever I was doing
to her car with pretend-interest.

Lamb to the slaughter! The car needed major servicing, it was
close to close-of-business and somehow or other I ended up
offering to drive Leona home. Less than three minutes after being
invited in for a drink, my pants were off and my rampant dick in
Leona’s mouth for one of her famous Major League blowjobs. For
the next many hours we screwed like bunnies. I had her in every
orifice and even tried titty-fucking – something for which
Leona’s anatomy was immensely well suited.

When I finally couldn’t get it up anymore and we fell into a
stupor, I was totally in lust. When I woke up the next morning it
was to Leona sucking my morning wood like a popsicle and the lust
got another notch upwards. Over the weekend I must have emptied
my balls in Leona’s agile pussy at least a dozen times – in
addition to the many times when my ejaculate entered her mouth,
bowels or ended up as a pearl necklace. Ah, to be 21 again.

I still had a small apartment at work (over the original
showroom), but I practically moved in with Leona. It made me late
for work several mornings – Leona was working in a bank and
didn’t s start until 10. Dad was not pleased and told me so, so I
cleaned up my act a little. He was also less than enthusiastic
about Leona, but I ignored that and needless to say the guys at
work loved her – she was better looking than most of our calendar
girls and flirted openly and unashamedly, but no-one was stupid
enough to make a pass at the boss’ son’s girlfriend.

______________________

Did I say “girlfriend”? So it would seem. I don’t know quite how
that happened. But I do know how she was upgraded to “fiancée”
and then “wife” in very quick succession. A positive pregnancy
test brought that about. She said she “forgot all about taking
her pills” after the previous boyfriend left. Was it to trap me?
You decide on that. But that was irrelevant: There was no doubt
in my mind – and no room in my upbringing for any doubt – that I
had to do the right thing, so we got engaged and married in
record time.

Luckily Dad intervened in one crucial area. He had broadly hinted
to Leona and especially her parents that the company wasn’t on
quite so sound a footing as I had claimed. It could go either way
when he retired; it was up to me to ensure the viability of it
then, so Leona perhaps ought to secure her assets with some
iron-clad pre-nuptial arrangements and separate ownership
clauses. He also deviously hinted that I had been known to be
less than faithful to girlfriends in the past (an absolute lie!)
and one way of keeping me on the straight-and-narrow would be to
put in a crushingly penalizing infidelity clause in the
pre-nuptial agreement. Leona’s parents were wealthy and Leona had
inherited a share portfolio from an aunt, so a pre-nuptial
agreement was written. It essentially said that the business was
exclusively mine, and the share holdings from Leona’s aunt
similarly Leona’s, no matter what. In case of divorce, all
communal property would be divided equally – except in case of
infidelity where the wronged party would get everything and
alimony was ruled out.

I didn’t know anything about it before hand; Dad only told me it
was because of the company, so I signed it willingly without ever
reading it too closely and forgot about it. Leona’s father – a
respected and influential businessman – was so impressed with Dad
that he spread the good word around town about what a straight
shooter Mr. Henderson senior was.

I had initially avoided telling Bex about Leona and me. Call me a
chicken, but I expected a negative reaction to put it mildly and
I was callous enough to expect that the lust would have run its
course in short order so I wouldn’t have to tell her at all. But
when the pregnancy and impending marriage scuttled that idea,
there was nothing for it – I had to tell her. When I had wasted
an entire writing pad with false starts, I gave up and decided to
bite the bullet and call Bex instead. Catching her at home on the
shared dorm phone (this was before cell phones became common) was
difficult but finally I got through to her one weekday evening.

“I’m getting married,” I said almost as the opening line.

“You’re what?” Bex gasped. “To whom?”

When I replied “Leona Ingleby” the line went very quiet for a
long time. Uncomfortably long. I had expected an explosion and
was more or less prepared for that. The drawn-out silence was
worse.

Finally I heard her swallow hard and she said just one word.
“Why?”

My reply was nearly as brief: “She’s pregnant. It’s mine.”

Another agonizing pause followed and then, barely over a whisper
and with a timbre that cut me to the bone, Bex simply said “OK.
Goodbye.” and hung up.

“Goodbye Bex,” I said to the disconnect tone.

In around 20 words a friendship of 20 years’ standing had ended.

______________________

Unlike Dad, Mom seemed to like Leona. I think she always wanted a
daughter (I never knew why I was an only child), and a daughter
in law would do just fine – especially a pregnant one. Not that
Leona ever warmed to my parents. Dad knew and the feeling was
mutual. But Mom really tried. She probably excused Leona with
being pregnant, and accidentally so (ha!) and did everything she
could for her. In fact, Mom had more input to the wedding plans
than Leona’s mother did, but got precious little by way of
gratitude in return except from me. Dad wisely stayed out of it
and Leona’s father just signed the checks.

The wedding went fine. It wasn’t huge but it was festive and most
of the time I was feeling positive about it all. OK, Leona
certainly wasn’t the kind of girl I had expected to marry (when
trying to envisage who that may be I always ended up with an
image of Bex which I promptly discarded), but she was carrying my
child and I was sure that the lust would turn to love.

The wedding night was spent at a hotel in a neighboring town. A
little bizarre perhaps, given that we had been living together
for months and the bride was already pregnant, but tradition is
tradition. A few days later we went to the Florida Keys for our
honeymoon. It was a beautiful place. It could have been very
romantic. We might have connected for real and fallen in love.

It didn’t happen. Leona was sick three times in the plane on the
way. We put it down to “morning” sickness (which can come at any
time of the day), or possibly just Leona having eaten something
that disagreed with her. Not so; on the first morning at the
resort she woke up in a pool of blood and with intense abdominal
pain.

It was of course incredibly distressing. The people at the resort
were very kind and helpful to us, assisting with getting Leona to
the Lower Keys Medical Center whose competent staff at the
gynecological ward quickly confirmed that Leona had miscarried
and that the fetus had already been expelled. They did whatever
is done after such incidents to help ensure that Leona would be
able to conceive again in the future.

I spent as much time with Leona as I could, holding her hand
while they did some of the less pleasant examinations and tests,
and generally just trying to be there for her. We looked and
acted every bit the newly wed young couple faced with a sad, but
not uncommon misfortune. The medical center staff was great and
the next morning a huge bunch of flowers arrived from the resort
management with a sweet sympathy card – and a voucher for a
complete replacement stay “when you feel up to it”.

I don’t know if Leona and I ever loved each other, but what we
had together those few days must have been close to the real
thing.

______________________

It didn’t last. When we got back the honeymoon was over –
literally and figuratively. From the moment we were met by the
fussing parents in the airport (with Leona’s mother as good as
suggesting it was somehow my fault) it all went downhill – and in
fact it kept going largely downhill for the next five years –
interrupted only by one brief period of improvement, but I’m
getting ahead of myself.

Although barely twelve weeks along, we, that is to say Leona and
her mother, had decided that Leona would quit her job and become
a full-time mother. The bank had been unhelpful, not wanting to
give her the time off for the honeymoon. I’m sure they could have
been persuaded to relent thanks to Leona’s dad’s clout in town,
but Leona told them to go fuck themselves and quit. She believed
it would be great to have time to decorate our house and get it
ready for the baby. Which house? you may ask. (What baby? you
already know the answer to.)

The house: Yes well, my small place at work was ruled out at
once, which is fair enough; it was tiny and noisy during the day.
Leona’s very nice apartment would have been fine in my opinion –
a little small with a baby, but a lot of young folks get by in
smaller dwellings and as it turned out, there wouldn’t be any
baby just now after all.

But no, it wasn’t grand enough and for the few days we’d been
away Mrs. Ingleby had been house-hunting for us and found a large
rambling place on the outskirts of town, not far from the Ingleby
residence. It needed a lot of work, or it would have been way
outside our means, even though both sets of parents helped with
both actual funds and surety for loans.

No prize for guessing who did the work. Dad helped me, as did
several of my friends and colleagues from work. Mr. Ingleby did
nothing. Mrs. Ingleby helped Leona complaining that things were
going too slowly, or that we couldn’t second-guess their
incessant change of mind regarding style, materials and color
schemes.

Of sex there was none. Fair enough right at the start; we’d been
told to give Leona’s body a little time to recover, but that
usually means “wait until after your next period”. Besides, there
are a lot of intimate things you can do even if actual
intercourse is ruled out. That didn’t happen either. In fact, we
were not very intimate at all.

It didn’t help that I worked a full day at the mechanical
workshop, and then came home to work on the house until I almost
dropped with fatigue. Leona was spending most days with her
mother, and even though I got an interim bedroom and bathroom
functional very quickly, more often than not Leona would stay
over at her parents’ place too.

With no baby coming (and the pregnancy was the overwhelming root
cause for us getting married in the first place), with no
intimacy – and with hardly any common interests, you may ask why
we didn’t divorce then and there. Simply admitting it had all
been a mistake would have been more honest. But during those
intense days at the hospital in Florida, Leona had pleaded with
me that the tragedy must not tear us apart and that we should get
a new baby started as soon as possible. I had agreed – starting
to feel I might actually really love my wife, and I couldn’t get
myself to go back on a promise willingly made when the day-to-day
incompatibility started to wear us down.

I’ve always sought solace in music. My father has been an avid
Bob Dylan fan always and I like a lot of his stuff too. During
the long and often lonely evenings doing up the house, I
regularly played “Blood on the Tracks” and of all the tormented
lyrics on that masterpiece, one line especially resonated with
me: “I've never known the spring to turn so quickly into autumn.”
It summed the situation up perfectly; “Idiot Wind” was really
Leona’s and my song. Scary, isn’t it?

______________________

It wasn’t all gloom and doom. When the house was finished, we had
a grand house-warming party and for a while we got along OK. We
resumed having sex (I can’t make myself calling it “making love”
now that I know what that is). It wasn’t frequent, but it was
there. Leona had gone on the pill again. She hadn’t mentioned it,
but she didn’t hide the fact either. It would seem that babies
were off the agenda.

I asked her point blank about it one day, and she said that she
wanted to “wait a while” – and that she was thinking of getting a
job again. That was actually welcome news; we could certainly do
with the money as I was constantly working overtime to make ends
meet. Sure, my Dad was the boss, but my hourly pay was no
different from the other senior mechanics. I may have reached the
senior level quicker than most, but as I said, I was good. I had
earned it.

Leona found a job –her old job in fact. Her previous boss had
been promoted to a management position at the head office and
Leona’s parting outburst was not recorded anywhere. Her dad’s
influence also helped. And although the income didn’t help us
directly – she kept it and spent it all on herself, it did help
both by making my income go further now that it didn’t have to
pay for Leona’s luxuries, and also by curbing the frequent
arguments over money.

I hadn’t seen or heard from Bex since that fateful telephone
call. She didn’t send a wedding present, and frankly I didn’t
expect her to. It had been over a year when I ran into her by
chance a few days after Leona’s and my first wedding anniversary.
(I had tried to make that a romantic event with flowers and
dinner at a nice restaurant, by the way, and it was a very
pleasant evening, but it was painfully obvious that there was
just no chemistry between us.)

But back to the chance encounter: I was down town on an errand at
my bank (not the one Leona worked in) when I spotted Bex in the
street. On an impulse I ran up to her, but my hand on her arm to
stop her and said “Bex! Great to see you again.”

Bex spun around and her body language more than suggested that
the delight was one-sided. Before she could say anything I
blurted out “I really want to talk to you.”

Perhaps it was the pleading in my voice, or perhaps 20 years of
close friendship did count for something for her after all
because Bex relented and reluctantly agreed. We were right
outside a café and I led her in.

“How are you?” I asked as soon as the waitress had taken our
orders. “And what brings you here?”

It turned out she was in town for her half-brother Gene’s 60th
birthday. We small-talked a little about her studies, my work,
our respective families – at first avoiding the elephant in the
room. Wanting to do better than during that catastrophic phone
call, I decided to face up to it and said “Listen, I am really,
really sorry about hurting you over this thing with Leona. I’ve
had reasons to regret it many times, believe me I have, but
things happened and I wasn’t going to run away from my
responsibility.”

Bex’ face turned in to an unpleasant snarl. “It sounds like you
were sucked in,” she said spitefully. “As far as I’ve heard no
baby came. Girls have been known to pull that trick you know.
Let’s face it; she just wanted you as a meal-ticket.”

The conversation nearly ended there. Never before had either of
us poured such bile on the other. I was stunned and hurt and just
a fraction of a second from getting up and walking out. But 20
years of close friendship did count for something for me too and
instead I just looked her in the eyes, held her gaze and quietly
said “Leona’s better off than me – she can buy her own meals if
need be. As to the baby, it came. It came in a pool of blood in
our bed on our honeymoon.”

The snarl vanished instantly. Bex stared at me in abject horror
and her face crumbled completely. She started crying in a mixture
of shock, shame and pity, sobbing incoherent apologies. I moved
over to the bench she was sitting on, put my arm around her and
held her while she cried. “It was horrible,” I said. “Getting
Leona pregnant was a mistake, but I never wanted something as
horrid as that happening.”

“You are still together?” Bex asked.

I made a despairing gesture. “Let’s not talk about that. I would
like us to resume the contact just like it was when you first
went away to Uni. Can we do that?”

“I’d like that,” Bex replied with a sniffle. “I’ve missed my best
friend.”

“Me too,” I said – and I felt the world had been lifted from my
shoulders. “Me too!”

We finished our coffee and Bex left for her half-brother’s
reception. She was dressed in a very nice dress. It looked great
on her slender body. Still no breasts, but right at that moment I
thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world.

______________________

I didn’t mention that observation to Leona, but I did tell her
I’d run into Bex. Not only because honesty figured prominently in
my upbringing, but also because ours is a small town, and the
café is owned by friends of the Inglebys. Telling Leona about the
meeting myself seemed like the best idea.

Leona’s reaction when I mentioned Bex was characteristically
unpleasant. “Oh, Bex Anderson the titless wonder?” she exclaimed.

I had always resented that putdown and only shrugged to confirm
Leona’s identification.

“What was she doing in town? Has she come back to stay?” Leona
asked

“She was here for her brother’s birthday,” I explained. “She is
studying out east and still has several years to go.”

“She was always pining for you,” Leona observed.

“We’ve been friends since before we could barely walk and talk,”
I replied. “My parents nearly adopted her when both her parents
died.”

“Strange creature to be friends with,” Leona said, grabbed the
remote control and switched on one of her TV shows, effectively
ending the conversation.

I decided to keep my renewed contact with Bex private. As in I
wasn’t going to tell Leona about it voluntarily, but not lie
about it either. Over the next months we resumed our
long-distance friendship. I called Bex approximately once a week.
She was still at the same dorm. The renewed relationship was at
the same time very close and not close at all. We talked about
almost everything in our lives, except my marriage. Bex’ social
life was bordering on the non-existent at first, but after a
while she mentioned this somewhat older guy, a mature-age fellow
law student, who had taken an interest in her. I encouraged her
to date – although I felt strangely jealous about it – and she
did agree to let him take her out.

At first he treated her nicely – almost too nicely, always being
a gentleman and never making any overtures or innuendos, but
after a while it looked like he finally wanted to take the
relationship to the next level. I rang her on the Saturday
afternoon after what we had both expected would be the date. The
outcome was not what either of us had expected at all however.

“So how was the date?” I asked.

“What date?” Bex was fuming.

“With Leonard,” I replied. “Wasn’t yesterday going to be the big
day?”

“It was called off,” Bex replied tersely. “You can’t go on a date
with someone who’s in jail.”

“In jail?” I echoed. “Leonard?”

“Yes, Leonard – the creep!” Bex almost yelled.

I didn’t know what to say and remained silent, but Bex didn’t
notice and started explaining without prompting.

“He wanted me to wear a pleated skirt and plain cotton panties,
no bra, no makeup at all and to have my hair in pig-tails.
Pig-tails, for crying out loud.” Bex was on a roll now. “When he
requested that my pussy be completely shaved, I called it off.”

“He sounds creepy,” I agreed.

“He was,” Bex replied. “So much so that I turned him in to the
Campus Police. I claimed I’d seen pictures of under-age girls on
his computer.”

“Had you?” I asked.

“No,” Bex admitted, “but it turned out to be true. He had
thousands of them – and he wanted to live out his pedophile
dreams with me. He was planning on photographing us with hidden
cameras in his room.”

My heart was breaking for Bex. Leonard had not wanted her as a
woman, but as a pretend-prepubescent girl. “Sounds like you had a
narrow escape,” I said quietly.

“I did,” Bex agreed. “But I’m still single and I’m still a
virgin.”

Leona came into the den and I hastily ended the call. She wanted
to tell me that she was going out with some girls from work and
that I would have to fend for myself. I had hoped we could have
done something together and offered to come along, but that was
obviously not appreciated. She was vague about who “the girls”
were, but as far as I knew Leona was the only one who was married
– the others were either single party-girls or long divorced. My
suggestion that Leona was perhaps a little out of place in that
company went down like a turd in a punchbowl.

I don’t know what time Leona came home that night. I was long in
bed. What I did notice was that Leona did the laundry Sunday
morning. Laundry has otherwise always been my domain and it did
make me wonder why Leona suddenly wanted to do it – and after a
night out, of all times. Only later did it dawn on me that
perhaps there were stains on her underwear that she didn’t want
me to discover.

She wasn’t forthcoming about what her evening had been like. My
inquiries were more or less stone-walled. I almost had to drag
out of her that she and the girls (still not specified who) had
gone to some place (not specified where) to have a few drinks
(not specified what) and dance (not specified with whom).

When I pointed out that I liked dancing too and wasn’t bad at it,
I was shut down. “It would cramp my girlfriends’ style if I
brought a chaperone,” Leona claimed.

I was speechless. My obvious follow-up questions about Leona’s
style were left unasked.

______________________

The following year – Bex’ fourth and last as an undergraduate,
she thought she’d struck gold. Some “absolutely gorgeous” guy –
an International Relations major who apparently could give a
Greek God a run for his money in the looks department, an
Olympian in physical development, a Nobel Prize winner in brains,
a Diplomat in social graces and disgustingly rich to boot – was
chatting Bex up all the time, almost stalking her and pressing a
full-on courtship that swept Bex off of her feet with flowers,
chocolates, dinners and shows and sweet little notes (we’re
talking pre text message romance here).

While pleased for her – and telling her so frequently and at
length, I must confess I got a little tired hearing about Howard.
He sounded too good to be true and, truth be told, made me feel
more than a little inadequate. Was I also jealous that he’d won
Bex’ heart? I’m not sure. My relationship with Leona was going
from bad to worse and I realized that my rare chats with Bex on
the phone were the happiest moments in my private life. That
should have told me something.

Anyway, one night when Leona was engrossed in some particularly
obnoxious and brainless TV show, I snuck down to the den and
called Bex “just to hear how she was”.

In the immortal words of Eeyore, Bex was not very how. I got a
long litany of problems with her courses, her thesis, her
professors, her fellow students, her dorm, her brothers, and so
on and so forth.

“Well, how is fair Howard?” I asked when I could finally get a
word in, hoping to cheer her up by getting her to talk about her
favorite subject.

Epic failure! “You mean fairy Howard,” Bex replied gloomily.

“You’re kidding!” I exclaimed.

“No, Howard prefers boys,” Bex said in a very measured tone of
voice. “Howard’s rich Christian Right parents do not like
homosexuals, so Howard picked me as a compromise. I am a girl, so
his parents would be happy. And I look like a boy, so Howard
would be happy.”

The phone went quiet.

“Oh Bex,” I said – not knowing what else to say.

“At least I’m not a virgin anymore,” Bex said, and I could hear
in the strain of her voice that she was fighting for control.

“You’re not?” I asked – feeling, and no doubt sounding,
surprised. After all, Bex had just told me that the guy was gay.
The jealousy returned with full force and I regretted asking the
question. I’m sure I really didn’t want to know. The answer put
me partly at ease.

“At least not anally,” Bex said – and then broke down sobbing.
“He wouldn’t touch my pussy or my pathetic excuses for tits.”

She was crying now. “To Howard, going all the way meant
graduating from blow-jobs – which I disliked – to anal sex, which
I detested. It hurt like hell and it left me feeling used.”

Bex was hurting – and I was hurting with her too. I suddenly
realized I wanted to tell her that I wished I was right there
with her so I could take her in my arms and comfort her, but I
heard Leona coming down the corridor and I hastily ended the call
without offering any comfort. I felt like shit.

Leona was there to argue, which was all we seemed to do these
days. She wanted a newer, bigger car. It was a favorite subject
of hers. While Dad gave us nice discounts, tax-laws precluded him
from giving his daughter in law a new car every quarter, had he
wanted to. He didn’t, so it was up to me to finance our cars in
the normal way. Last time Leona had been trolling Dad for a new
vehicle, he maliciously mentioned that perhaps we would soon need
something with room for a baby buggy. Mom seized on that remark
and her one-sided conversation rambled on for a long time about
how she hoped there would be grandchildren soon and asked if we
had considered seeking medical assistance if nothing happened.
Leona was not impressed with the subject, so now she took the
car-nagging to me.

“Why do you need a bigger car?” I asked. “We live within walking
distance of your work, we have no children and I usually do the
shopping?”

It turned out Leona wanted the bigger car so she could take her
girlfriends out in style. The discussion deteriorated to a full
blown argument and I moved my bedding to a spare room.

From then on the conversations with Bex constituted the only
private life I had besides talking to my parents. Bex went back
to her usual focused studying – the last year of that degree is
apparently very busy. We talked occasionally and I felt – and
hoped – that those conversations meant as much to her as they
meant to me, but the sparkle had gone out of her voice.

And whatever sparkle there had been in my marriage was definitely
gone too. Leona and I were barely talking to each other. Deep and
meaningful conversations had never been at the core of our
relationship, to make the understatement of the century, but now
we hardly acknowledged each other’s presence. The longer this
went on, the less likely it was that I would ever return to the
master bedroom.

______________________

But I did get back in our bedroom, in Leona’s good books – and in
her pussy. It happened about six weeks after the row and was all
very sudden. Leona had been unwell for a couple of days – a
common flu, nothing more dramatic than that, but unpleasant
enough. She had gone to work all week, but Friday morning she was
too miserable to get out of bed. I heard her bone-rattling cough
and brought her a cup of tea and some toast. I told her to stay
in bed, keep in fluids and I would call the bank for her and
report her illness. Her gratitude was graceful and natural and my
peck on her cheek was accepted and appreciated. She was still my
wife after all.

I duly rang the bank when it opened and during my lunch break I
zoomed home and made Leona some soup. OK, it was ready-made
instant stuff, but she appreciated it. I sat with her and had a
bowl full myself, realizing that this was the first meal we’d had
together for weeks. Just before leaving I helped her to get to
the bathroom and while she was there I freshened up the bed,
cleared away sundry debris and replenished the water carafe.
“Thanks George,” Leona croaked when she returned to bed. “You can
be so sweet.”

It looked like she wanted to say more, but a bout of coughing
stopped that. I was late getting back to work, so I simply
smiled, stroked her cheek and placed a gentle kiss – this time on
her lips – and told her to take care until I got home.

Although we close the workshop early on Fridays, I usually stay
on to do admin work and quite often end up having a beer or two
with Dad and a couple of the showroom people, but that day I
begged off, saying that Leona was sick and I had to get back to
her. Dad looked a little puzzled, but didn’t comment. He would
have been drowned out by the clucking of the secretaries anyway.

Leona wasn’t worse but she sure wasn’t better either. She had
more soup and then fell asleep. She was coughing frequently
though – I could hear her in the living room where I for once
watched TV, and later from the spare room where I was still
sleeping.

Come to think of it, it wasn’t unusual for me to watch TV on
Fridays – since Leona was almost always out with “the girls” on
Fridays. That was of course out of the question that night, and
as it turned out, it saved her from a major catastrophe: The
sleazy club they were frequenting got raided and four of her
girlfriends from the bank were amongst those arrested for
drug-possession and/or use. They were dabbling with cocaine like
so many were – it was around the time that this particular drug
had started flowing freely even to small places like ours – and
the local DA had decided to get tough on drugs and conducted a
number of raids where everyone was arrested, searched and tested.
Two of Leona’s colleagues who merely had cocaine in their blood
streams ended up getting off with a caution and a fine, but the
other two who had sizeable quantities on them were charged and
did time. I’m sure they were just unlucky that they didn’t have a
chance to drop the stuff (a lot was found on the floors we later
heard on the news), but they were sitting close to the door where
the task force burst in and that was that.

All this happened during the night while we were sleeping.
Saturday morning Leona was so much better that she got up, had a
shower and got dressed. She didn’t have energy for much, but we
generally just hung out and talked. Nothing deep, but it was
still a dramatic change compared to our recent complete
non-communication and I enjoyed it. We had a light lunch and were
resting on the couch – not exactly touching, but sitting close –
when the phone rang. It was Catherine, one of Leona’s other
girlfriends from the bank, and she was completely hysterical.
When Leona finally started making sense of what Catherine was
saying she blanched and grabbed the TV remote control. When the
picture came on we could see the tail end of a press conference
called by the ambitious DA outlining the previous night’s raids.
The station kept showing footage of patrons being led out in
handcuffs. Clear for all to see, and easily identifiable in a
community as small as ours, was pictures of Leona’s four friends
who were marched out first. Those four all had done drugs, but
several of the others shown were innocent and there was a big
controversy about the footage afterwards.

But that’s an aside. Leona was shocked to the core. “That could
have been me,” she kept muttering. “If I hadn’t been sick, that
could have been me.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Do your snort cocaine too?”

“No!” Leona replied instantly and so vehemently that I believed
her. “But I’ve seen them do it and I could have been with them.
Besides, don’t you think I would have been arrested too, like
everyone else, for just being there?”

I nearly said something about the company she was keeping and the
risks involved and reaping what you sow, but refrained. Instead I
asked “Where do they get the stuff from?”

“I’m not sure,” Leona said evasively. “I think they get it from
Mike.”

“Mike Dupres?” I asked. “Is Mike Dupres a drug dealer?” It didn’t
surprise me that the punk hadn’t made an honest life for himself.
I always knew he was into shady affairs, but drug-dealing was
something else.

“I’m not sure,” Leona repeated. “But I think so.” Then she broke
down. “Oh God George, I’ve been such an idiot running with that
crowd.”

I couldn’t agree more, but once again I refrained from
commenting. Moments later I had a sobbing Leona in my arms. She
stayed close to me all day, barely out of physical contact except
when either of us had to use the bathroom, and that night she
begged me to return to the master bedroom. I agreed and Leona
attempted to fuck me to death. She was still recovering from the
flu, so she fell asleep first, but not until we’d had more sex in
this one session than the previous entire year combined. I was
laying in the dark wondering if we had turned a corner for good,
or if the change in Leona was only temporary – the combination of
being sick and the shock of the narrow escape. I hoped it was
permanent. I will still hoping we could make it.

And at first the prospects looked good. Leona returned to work
Monday which was appreciated by the bank. The four colleagues who
had been arrested were all released again – two of them on a
caution, pending the results of their blood tests and two of them
on bail raised either by themselves or their families. They
showed up for work too, putting on brave faces and pretending all
was well, but soon after the bank had opened it became clear
their position was untenable. When the third customer had loudly
declared that he or she would not do their business transactions
with a drug addict, the bank manager had no option but sending
them home and starting dismissal proceedings on “gross
misconduct” grounds.

It was a tired and shaken Leona who came home from work that day.
A quick dinner and a long passionate night in bed helped restore
her. Tuesday and Wednesday were much the same.

On Thursday it was Mom’s birthday and we were invited for dinner.
I say “we”, but no-one had expected Leona to come when the
invitation was issued. She was however adamant she wanted to go,
had bought some really beautiful flowers for Mom and was the
model sweet daughter in law. Mom hastily set another place at the
table and Leona herself made a point of that, saying she had some
atonement to do. While she helped Mom clear up the kitchen after
dinner (in itself a first), Dad took me aside and asked me with a
grin who this woman was and what I’d done to the real Leona. My
whispered explanation about the shock over the drug-bust had him
nodding. “Perhaps that’s what the girl needed to grow up,” he
said quietly. Just then Mom and Leona brought the coffee and we
dropped the issue.

______________________

The extreme passion only lasted a couple of weeks, which is OK I
suppose. I was kind of worn out after that and could easily
settle for less. I mean, I was happy just to have any regular sex
with Leona again. What was even better was that we were also
talking constantly – talking about everything, including personal
hopes and dreams. When a month had passed and there was no sign
of a reversal, apart from the aforementioned welcome
normalization in the bedroom fervor, I broached the subject of
kids once more. Leona’s reaction was completely different from
previously. She said she thought it was a nice idea and would not
restart the pill after her next period.

She didn’t get pregnant during that first month of unprotected
sex. I’m told that’s not unusual or anything to worry about, and
by the time the next cycle rolled up, things were changing again.
With four fairly senior colleagues summarily dismissed, the bank
was leaning heavily on Leona and Catherine (the only other female
colleague not busted) to take on responsibility for supervising
the new hastily recruited staff. It was a significant promotion
and an excellent opportunity and we, reluctantly, decided that
those babies could wait a little longer. I told Leona I was proud
of her and I once more started to feel close to her.

Did I love her? I’m not sure. But we remained close – we even
occasionally went out dancing together on Fridays, often with
Catherine and her fiancé Lars, and our sex-life remained active
and good.

I continued to stay in touch with Bex. She went to Yale for Law
School. Only the best for the best; she cruised in. She got even
more focused on studying and no mention was made of her love life
– or lack of same – for the first year or so. And I had never
mentioned mine – neither when it was bad, nor when it, like now,
seemed quite good. I did however tell her about the drug-raids,
including the suspicions about Mike Dupres. She asked how much
proof there was and I had to admit there was none, apart from
what Leona had said. Bex seemed very interested.

The fact that Bex didn’t have a love-life to talk about didn’t
mean she wasn’t trying. She just wasn’t successful. “Guess what?”
she said one day several months later. It was her calling which
was unusual.

“I can’t – enlighten me,” I replied. That was a routine exchange
of ours that we’d used since one of us learned the word
“enlighten” and taught the other – probably around the time we
started grade school!

“Lesbians are also mainly interested in big tits” was the
astonishing statement.

“How would you know?” I asked, genuinely surprised. “You are not
a lesbian!”

“I know,” Bex said. “Or at least I think I’m not, but I thought I
might at least try if I was and perhaps get a little loving that
way. So I went to one of the lesbian bars in town a few times.”

“Oh,” I said. I didn’t realize Bex was so desperately lonely that
she would try that. I couldn’t imagine seeking out another man
myself just because I had problems with finding the right woman.
I have no issues with homosexuals – my beloved Uncle Leroy was
gay and a very good friend had once wistfully remarked to me that
“it was a pity” that I was “so keen on girls”, but I wasn’t at
all offended – just flattered. I suppose if you’re bisexual then
you have in a sense more options, but Bex had never indicated
that either.

“It didn’t work,” Bex said. “The only time I got picked up, the
woman lost interest when she started feeling me up and found
nothing.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

“I went au naturel,” Bex continued. “Lesbians do, I was told.
Rubbish. Everyone wore bras. But anyway, at least I was honestly
displaying what I had – and especially didn’t have. It would have
been too humiliating if I’d gone home with her on the strength of
the padding in my trainer bras only to be rejected when I
stripped.”

It was Bex’ turn to end a call abruptly. “Sorry, gotta go – I am
seeing my supervisor this evening. He is a very busy man and
shouldn’t be kept waiting when he is offering to see me outside
office hours.”

I mumbled some farewell greeting and went back to my lonely, now
cold, evening meal. Leona was “on a course”. Again.

I guess I shouldn’t have been down about it, but over the last
year Leona was away on so many courses and seminars for work we
barely saw each other. We tried to make up for it on the
weekends, but even that was now getting strained. One of Leona’s
new colleagues – a mousey grey woman called Heidi who was a year
or two younger than us – had been called in from a neighboring
town. She was commuting and had no intention of moving since she
and her husband had just bought a house. That husband was Rick;
Leona’s old boyfriend who was now working as an insurance agent.
We found out (or rather, I found out – I’m now sure Leona had
known for a while) when they joined us and Catherine and Lars for
a Friday night out. That everyone danced with everyone was
natural and not a problem at all, but I found Rick’s very close
dancing with Leona objectionable. I could see in Heidi’s eyes
that she wasn’t pleased either, but for the sake of the peace, I
kept quiet.

______________________

Perhaps I shouldn’t have kept quiet. Perhaps an immediate protest
– or even just mentioning that Heidi had looked hurt – would have
stopped everything going to shit but I was afraid of
overreacting. Also, since that one episode with the laundry, I
had never suspected Leona of infidelity at all – and while
saddened that we had so little time together because Leona was
busy qualifying herself for her new extended responsibilities at
work, I was proud of her and actually pretty pleased with my
marriage at this point. Being sad that Leona wasn’t there was a
good thing.

But going out the next few weekends proved to be much the same –
Leona and Rick danced much too closely. I also started noticing
little looks between them that I didn’t care for much. I had very
little to go on, though and possibly wouldn’t have found out what
was going on at all if it wasn’t for running into Leona’s boss
one Saturday when I was out shopping. Hank is a nice guy. I’m
sure he really appreciated Leona and we had gotten on well the
few times we’d met so when he asked how things were, like you do,
I answered in a jocular tone, but only half joking, that I
thought he monopolized my darling wife a bit too much with all
those courses and seminars.

He seemed surprised by that. “But it hasn’t been all that much
recently – it was mainly in the beginning when she was new to the
increased responsibility,” he protested.

“What about that course every Tuesday that keeps her out until
midnight,” I complained.

“You mean every second Tuesday,” Hank defended. “It starts at
midday and since I can’t manage with Leona and Heidi away at the
same time, they take turns. But yeah, I know it goes on until
late and being held so far away it does bring her home late.
Sorry about that. But she does have Wednesday morning off.”

I mumbled some conciliatory remark and left shaken. According to
Leona that course was every Tuesday. I didn’t care to think what
she was doing the other Tuesdays after work. I particularly
didn’t care to think that Heidi was doing the course on those
nights, leaving Rick free to do whatever he wanted to.

And Leona had never told me about the Wednesday mornings off
either. All up I thought it called for closer investigation, but
before I could do that, Leona announced that her course was now
only every second Tuesday and due to finish soon. I don’t know if
Hank had mentioned our conversation and Leona wised up to me
knowing about the schedule, or if the change had actually only
happened now and Hank had just been defensive or had his
chronology wrong. The chance to find out on the quiet was gone.
Short of causing a stir and actually accusing Leona of
dishonesty, I had to let it go. But the seeds of worry had been
sowed.

And it didn’t help my suspicions that our three-couple nights out
suddenly stopped. We did occasionally still go out with Catherine
and Lars, but not with Heidi and Rick. Not that I in any way
missed the prick, but Leona never offered any explanation why
people whose company she professed to enjoy were no longer
invited.

We carried on, but the brief sparkle that had given me so much
hope after the shock of the drug raids soon faded. We were still
civil to one another, but getting over the barrier and actually
falling in love for real? Not a chance.

Around this time Bex graduated – with exceptional grades – and
she returned to our town to work at the family law firm. At first
she had to pass the bar examination (having done her MPRE while
still at law school), so she essentially just helped out clearing
up a backlog of stuff for Gene without client contact while
preparing for the bar examination. She got ready for the biannual
examination in only a few months, passing that without any
problems.

She was now ready to have her own clients. I turned out to be one
of the first.

______________________

Things had spiraled downwards at home. The civility ceased;
gradually Leona returned to her bitchy worst. It was mainly
targeted at me, but my parents were also on the receiving end of
her ire. Nothing I, or they, could do was right. Sex dried up
completely too – she even belittled my abilities in bed which was
interesting to say the least given that great sex had always been
about the only thing we truly shared. At first I tried to talk to
her which failed. Then I tried to romance her which got
ridiculed. In the end I gave up trying. We were still sleeping in
the same bed, but we never touched – any and all overtures were
scornfully rejected by Leona.

Her many courses and seminars had finished so as far as I could
tell she had little opportunity to cheat on me, and yet I was
certain that she did. I can’t explain how I knew, I just did. Of
course that kind of “knowledge” is no good to anyone. I decided
to try to get rock solid proof and requested the assistance of a
detective agency. They were very professional and totally above
board, explaining to me what was legal evidence in a court of law
and what was not. Asking me carefully about what I knew of
Leona’s schedule it was obvious that her best and possibly only
chance for sneaking around was Wednesday mornings when she didn’t
work.

Again I am possibly open to reproach. Should I have told her what
I knew or suspected? Could I live with any more scorn and
uncertainty? Shouldn’t I just have instigated divorce proceedings
over “irreconcilable differences?” Possibly. But I think I was
tired of being played the fool and I wanted my ducks in line.

Two weeks later I had a message from the manager of the detective
agency, asking me to call. We set up a meeting at the dealership
during the lunch break on the Friday. His news was disturbing:
His people had followed Leona and already on the first Wednesday
she had gone to a motel just outside town to meet with someone –
that someone being Rick, staying in a motel room for several
hours before leaving. The detective stressed that they had no
direct evidence of infidelity: They had no recording equipment
inside the room, nor would it have been legal if they did.

“So all you have is sworn evidence that my wife entered a motel
room at a specific time and left it some hours later?” I asked.
“That doesn’t help much, does it?”

“Possibly not – although we have photographs of her entering and
leaving and you might use that in a negotiation,” the detective
conceded, “but we may be able to get legal hard evidence.”

“How so?” I asked puzzled. It is only in bad cheating stories
that couples get the same room week after week and clandestine
cameras can be installed. And besides, that footage would be
inadmissible in court although admittedly excellent for that
negotiated settlement he mentioned.

“Well, you see, they went to the same place the day before
yesterday, but had to cancel their tryst”, the detective said
almost chuckling. “Your wife ran into an acquaintance and had so
scramble for an excuse for being there. My colleague, dressed as
a cleaner, overheard that. She also overheard your wife
cancelling the morning’s entertainment and suggesting they should
come to your house instead.”

I felt sick. Leona was not only cheating on me, she was willing
to do it in our marriage bed.

“I can install cameras in your house if you like Mr. Henderson,”
the detective said. “That would be completely legal.”

He had to repeat that – my head was spinning. “How soon?” I asked
when I finally returned to the present.

“Now,” he replied. “I have the equipment in my car. My colleague
is keeping an eye on your wife in case she leaves the bank for
any reason. Sign this document and lend me your keys – and the
equipment will be installed in less than an hour.”

I signed the form and handed him my house keys silently. My mind
was made up. Let the bitch fry! An hour later the detective
returned to the workshop. “It’s done,” he said. “I made a
duplicate of the key so we can retrieve the media from the
cameras. We’ll let it run for three weeks.”

I had second thoughts that weekend and tried to engage Leona in
conversation. I even brought up the unused voucher for the
“repeat honeymoon”. I got nowhere. I considered moving back into
the spare room, but decided that would just warn Leona I was on
to something going on. Could I have stopped her cheating on me?
Possibly not – only make her change tactics. Besides it might
already have been too late; I doubt she spent over two hours in
that motel room with golden bollocks playing scrabble.

The next few days were endless. On Tuesday evening I tried one
final time to save my marriage. Making up some completely
fictitious appointment with my bank, I asked Leona if we could
meet for morning coffee in town Wednesday morning. “Of course we
can’t,” she said unpleasantly. “I have to work.” That final
blatant lie sealed her fate.

Thursday afternoon I had a call from the agency. “We have
excellent footage,” he said, “but for your sake I suggest we
carry on for another couple of weeks.”

“Why so?” I asked. “Isn’t once enough?”

“Oh, you would get a divorce in the divorce court on the strength
of what we’ve got now with no difficulty Mr. Henderson,” he
replied, “but there is such a thing as the court of public
opinion. You’d be surprised how many cheating wives manage to
salvage their reputations by claiming it was only a single moment
of weakness, them falling prey to a womanizer when they were
vulnerable due to their husband’s neglect.”

“Yeah, Leona would do that,” I thought – with her bitch of a
mother and circle of bitchy friends backing her up. “Go for it!”
I said. “I’ll talk to my lawyer in the morning.”

And so it was that on Friday morning I rang Anderson, Anderson
and Anderson and asked to speak to Ms. Rebecca Anderson – the
first time I had ever used her given name.

“To what do I owe the honor?” Bex asked when I had been
transferred through.

“I need a divorce,” I replied. “Leona is cheating on me.”

“Hmm,” was all Bex said. “Don’t say anything to anyone about it –
especially not Leona. Come into my office on Monday and bring all
the relevant papers.”

______________________

If the beginning of the week had felt long, the weekend was even
longer. I couldn’t stand being in the house with Leona, but knew
full well that my chances were better if I could keep up the
charade for a couple of weeks. I invented some job I needed to
help my parents with – resulting in an unpleasant comment from
Leona – and managed to stay out of the house most of the time.

Monday morning I went to the Anderson law firm as soon as they
opened and was ushered in to Bex’ office. I explained what I had
and showed her the preliminary report on the motel visit,
mentioning that the bedroom in our house was now being monitored.
Bex consulted briefly with Bert who reassured us that the footage
from the house – which I didn’t have yet – would be admissible.
He also knew the agency and could tell me that they had an
excellent reputation with the courts.

Bex was very cool and professional about it all, but when I gave
her the pile of papers I had brought – marriage certificate,
title to the house and what not, she zeroed in on the pre-nuptial
agreement and her demeanor changed. She was positively ecstatic.
“We’ll skin her,” she muttered. “Shame her and skin her.”

She looked at me. “Listen carefully George,” she said with an
intensity that was almost scary. “Let me handle this. Don’t tell
anyone what we’ve got. Let’s wait until your detectives have more
and then set the train moving.”

Ten days later I had confirmation that the third set of footage
was even more damning than the previous two. I called Bex who
immediately had Leona served at the bank with divorce papers
stating adultery as the fault – and Rick was served with an
alienation of affection suit, our state being one of the few that
still has this archaic notion on the books. I didn’t expect to
gain anything from that suit, except punishing Rick and giving
poor Heidi a heads-up. It wasn’t like I was breaking up a family
for vengeance. There were no children involved and I honestly
believed Heidi would be better off without the bastard.

I had told my parents what was happening and Dad had instructed
the secretaries that any and all calls from Leona should be
directed to Bex. Two hours later Bex informed me that Leona had
gotten herself a lawyer and that a preliminary meeting had been
set up for that very afternoon.

“That was quick work,” I commented.

“The sooner she is out of your house, the better,” Bex said. “Oh,
and by the way: She has retained Marion Somersby to represent
her.” Bex sounded almost giddy. I was momentarily confused, and
then the penny dropped. Marion Somersby was the mother of Ingrid
– my date at that ghastly Senior Prom and one of Bex’ tormentors.

“Listen George,” Bex said. “Don’t mention the photos from the
house. We’ll just use the report from the motel for now. OK?”

I mumbled OK and went home to scrub up a little – hoping Leona
wouldn’t do the same.

The meeting was held at the Anderson law firm’s very impressive
main conference room. After a brief and very stiff round of
formal introductions, Bex wasted no time tearing into Leona,
berating her gross breach of her wedding vows, declaring her
conduct a disgrace for a married woman.

I was a little confused about Bex’ strategy which seemed to have
no other purpose than enraging Leona – something in which she
succeeded to the full.

“I’m not having some flat-chested desiccated spinster lecture me
on what a married woman can or can’t do,” Leona bristled. I was
surprised that Leona knew to use the word ‘desiccated’, but not
the least bit surprised that she would launch a personal attack
on my legal representative. Especially when that representative
was Bex.

But Bex was unruffled. “I am not lecturing you, Mrs. Henderson. I
am simply stating the fact that you are in breach of your
marriage vows.” Then with a calm demeanor Bex delivered a stinger
to end all stingers. “And as to my chest, consider this Mrs.
Henderson: If I so desired I could have it augmented with
implants. You try to get a brain implant.”

Marion Somersby intervened. “I must protest against this
gratuitous disparaging comment,” she blustered.

It was my turn to chip in. “I agree entirely. I see you have no
more luck at keeping Leona in check than I ever did.”

The counsel’s attempts at regaining the lost ground were at first
drowned out by Bex’ laughter.

“You may find this amusing Ms. Anderson, but we don’t”; Marion
Somersby finally intoned. “Infidelity is no laughing matter.
Completely unsubstantiated claims of infidelity even less so.”

“They are not unsubstantiated,” Bex shot back. “We have here a
report from a respected detective agency that states that your
client entered the motel room of a married man, not her husband,
at ten in the morning and only left it two and a half hours
later.” She drew out the report and two grainy pictures showing
Leona entering and leaving the motel room.

Leona and Marion Somersby exchanged confused glances. They looked
like unspoken “is that all they’ve got?” questions. There was an
uneasy pause.

“My client was meeting with a friend,” Marion Somersby
improvised. Seeing Leona’s energetic nodding, she continued. “My
client categorically denies that anything of an adulterous nature
took place during that meeting.”

“Absolutely not,” Leona agreed.

Marion Somersby was on a roll. “My client will not contest the
divorce, only the reason. She was humiliated at her workplace
today being served with divorce papers in front of colleagues and
customers. She will be counter-filing – possibly citing extreme
mental cruelty, or at least unreasonable behavior.”

I was starting to counter that this would be unwise, reaching for
the manila folder with first the two sets of incriminating
photographs from home which had not yet been mentioned, when Bex
grabbed my hand and pulled it away. She shot me a significant
glance and I shut up.

Leona and her counsel walked stiffly out of the conference room
and left the premises at once. When the two harridans had left,
Bex started laughing again – this time so loud that her brothers
came to ask what it was all about. When she had finally stopped
laughing, she waved them off and the two of us had a strategy
meeting.

“Let me handle this George,” Bex said. “Don’t worry about a
thing. It seems Leona’s parents distrusted you, so the pre-nup is
iron-clad. It’s ironic that it’s now coming back to bite them. In
this state you would otherwise have to split 50-50 – and you
could also end up having to pay alimony, but now you’ll get it
all in court.”

“Actually, it was Dad who insisted on the pre-nup,” I said – and
Bex’ eyebrows shot up in astonishment. “But why do we have to go
to court?” I continued. “Don’t you think she would back down if
we showed her the pictures from home?”

“If they ask, we have to give them the pictures under discovery
rules,” Bex said. “But asking for such material would be
tantamount to admitting that Leona has cheated on you; something
they are desperate to avoid because of the pre-nup. Besides, I
don’t want her to back down. I want her to hang herself.” There
was that dangerous glint in her eyes again.

I was about to protest, but stopped. I really wanted to hurt
Leona and her sanctimonious parents over the humiliation – and I
wasn’t going to deprive Bex a chance to revenge herself.

If at any time Leona had apologized and admitted that the
marriage had been a mistake and that we should just split up, I
would have accepted the apology and moved on. I had willingly
taken up with her and been perilously close to loving her. I
meant her no harm. Instead she was hell-bent on cheating on me
and humiliating me. If she was going to bring herself down, on
her head be it!

______________________

Boy, did it work that way. Leona walked neatly into the trap and
perjured herself. Bex opened by briefly presenting my case – that
I was seeking an express divorce due to Leona’s infidelity and in
consequence all communal assets in accordance with the provisions
of the pre-nup.

Leona’s counsel countered that the infidelity was all in my
imagination; that nothing of an adulterous nature had ever taken
place, at least involving her client, and that the frivolous suit
should not only be rejected but it’s very filing used to grant
Leona’s petition for divorce on the grounds of my manifestly
unreasonable behavior. Further, the cow argued, rather than being
penalized under the adultery provisions, due to this unreasonable
behavior, her client ought to get not only the lion’s share of
the communal assets – the separate ownership clause regarding my
present and future share in Dad’s company ought to be set aside
so Leona would get her fair share. Leona’s separate ownership was
not to be touched as that pertained entirely to her inheritance
before we married and I had done nothing to maintain that whereas
Leona should be rewarded for the substantial and vital PR work
she had done for the company over the years.

It would have been laughable if it wasn’t so mean. Our stunned
silence gave Leona and her counsel the idea that their victory
was a slam dunk.

We had called the detective who made the original surveillance as
our only witness and had instructed him that we only wanted to
talk about the motel. He testified that he had seen Leona enter
the room at 10 AM and leaving again at 12.30 PM. He did that
professionally and I don’t think that any reasonable person would
doubt that he was telling the truth.

Marion Somersby didn’t. She didn’t want to question him but
merely waved him off as completely insignificant and called Leona
to the stand to ask her about her account of what the detective
had seen that day.

“It is correct that I was at the motel room that morning,” Leona
said in what sounded like a well-rehearsed speech. “My old friend
Rick Larsson was back in town on business and we agreed to meet
and talk over a cup of coffee. I have Wednesday mornings off, so
that worked fine.”

“But you stayed in Mr. Larsson’s room, or so your husband’s
detective informs us,” Marion Somersby prompted.

“Rick’s morning appointments had been cancelled,” Leona said, “so
he suggested that rather than heading out for coffee we could
have it in his room – they are really nice and spacious – and
then go out for lunch instead. If George’s stupid snitch had
stayed around long enough then he would have seen Rick coming out
the door a few minutes after me – he wanted to change into a nice
shirt since he was having his business meeting immediately after
our lunch.”

“And you didn’t want to stay in a motel room with a man who
wasn’t your husband while he changed his shirt?” Marion Somersby
intoned.

“Off course not,” Leona said, looking and sounding very prim.
“That wouldn’t be proper.”

“And you categorically deny that you have ever broken your
wedding vows with Mr. Larsson or any other man?” Marion Somersby
asked.

“Never,” Leona said firmly. “Not with Rick or anyone else. Not at
that motel or anywhere else.”

She sat down, looking very smug.

At that stage it was Leona’s game. We had no evidence of what had
taken place inside the motel room – and even if we had, it would
have been inadmissible. Leona and her counsel knew that. But
there was something they didn’t know. Moments later they did!

“We present to the court photographic evidence recorded at the
Henderson residence at the instigation of the householder Mr.
Henderson,” Bex said and handed the manila folder to the judge.
He withdrew one of the prints, his eyebrows shot up and
wordlessly he turned the image around to the courtroom. It showed
Leona riding cow-girl on Rick. It was an excellent photograph
from a technical point of view; the wedding photo of Leona and me
was clearly visible on the dresser in the background.

Mayhem erupted. Marion Somersby was screaming objections. Leona
was simply screaming. Her parents, who were present, went ashen.

The judge was merciless. Leona was called back to the witness
stand. “Mrs. Henderson,” he said. “Not five minutes ago you
assured this court under oath that you had never committed
adultery with Mr. Larsson or anyone else anywhere. Your husband’s
counsel has now presented evidence that you on at least three
different occasions, according to the imprinted dates and times
on these photographs,” – he waved the highly pornographic stack
of prints around – “have had adulterous sexual relations with Mr.
Larsson in your marriage bed. Would you care to explain that?”

“I didn’t know the bastard had put a camera in the bedroom,”
Leona said sullenly.

“I bet she didn’t,” Bex said under her breath but with great
mirth. “Wait for it – Judgment Day!”

“I grant Mr. Henderson a divorce on the grounds of adultery,” the
judge started. “The pre-nuptial agreement clearly stipulates that
in case of infidelity, there will be no alimony and the wronged
party will get all communal assets. Mr. Henderson will get the
house, the cars and all monies in your savings accounts and…”

“You mean I walk away with nothing except my shares from auntie?”
Leona unwisely interrupted before her counsel could stop her.

“No Ms. Henderson,” the judge said icily. “You do not walk away
at all. For your blatant contempt of this court, I hereby
sentence you to 60 days in a county jail. While you serve that
the DA will prepare your trial for perjury. Officer – take the
prisoner away.” His gavel sounded doubly loud over the stunned
silence. The only sound to break the silence was the thud of Mrs.
Ingleby fainting and dropping to the floor.

Before mayhem again erupted I distinctly heard Bex mumble “one
down, two to go.” When I looked at her there was a strange calm
to her face.

______________________

I left the court essentially a free man. By the time Leona was
out of jail, the divorce would be final. Bex was bubbly. ”I told
you not to worry George,” she repeated. “You are rid of the slut,
your business interest is intact and you have a clear title to
the house.”

“And the mortgage,” I added gloomily. “And I doubt I can sell the
house, not in this economic climate. It was much too big for two
people in the first place. It will be absurdly so for one.”

“You don’t have to stay single George,” Bex said. “Once you’re
over Leona, I’m sure some nice – nice – woman will catch your
eye.”

She was looking at me with a different glint in her eyes. “You
know George; this is my first real case. Perhaps I should use the
fee to get a boob-job. So some eligible recently divorced
bachelor might notice me…”

“No Bex, NO!” I exclaimed in horror. “Please don’t do that. You
will ruin your breasts that way. A lot of women end up with no
sensitivity at all and they can’t feed their babies – and it will
always be obvious at closer inspection that the breasts are fakes
anyway.”

“Have you considered that I would rather have a dodgy
closer-inspection than never having any inspection at all?” Bex
said sadly.

“Real men don’t care about breast size,” I countered. “Only boys
do that. Real men do not distinguish between small and large
breasts.”

“Yeah right,” Bex scoffed. “What do these fictitious real men
then distinguish between?”

“Accessibility,” I replied without hesitation. “Breasts they can
have access to versus those they can’t. It is much more
interesting to play with a pair of real live breasts no matter
what size, than looking at a pair of melons that are out of
reach.”

Bex looked at me for the longest time with an inscrutable
expression, and then left without further comment.

I forgot about the conversation for the time being; I had a lot
on my plate. Getting home, I immediately called a moving firm and
had them pack up all Leona’s clothes and personal items,
including some furniture that she had brought into the marriage.
I kept everything else.

I went along to the Ingleby residence and helped unload the lot
on Leona’s parents’ veranda. Mr. and Mrs. Ingleby were both home
and came out – Mrs. Ingleby looking like a ghost, Mr. Ingleby
still with some fight in him. “Don’t you think you ought to give
her another chance after all that time you’ve been together?” he
asked.

I told him I had given Leona a chance after the drug-raid episode
and that things had been going quite well until she decided to
cheat on our marriage.

“Did you really have to send her to jail?” he pleaded and now he
just looked like a hurt and bewildered parent. I almost felt
sorry for him, but only a little – I could remember how I had
been treated over the years.

“I had nothing to do with that,” I said. “She brought that down
on herself.”

“That’s not how Marion looks at it,” Mr. Ingleby countered.
Marion Somersby was an old friend of theirs and they would have
been in close contact. “She said it is unheard of to spring
additional evidence like that on your opponent in court. The
decent thing would have been to show your hand in the pre-court
meetings. Then there probably wouldn’t have been the need for
court at all. It could have been handled quietly.”

I knew he had a point. I had wanted to show those pictures, but
Bex hadn’t let me. I had in essence let Bex set a trap and it had
worked beautifully: Leona got 60 days in jail and Marion
Somersby’s reputation was in the toilet: One thing is to lose a
case when your client is clearly guilty. Another is to have your
client going to jail in a divorce case because you haven’t
instructed her adequately.

Of course there was also the humiliation of the Inglebys. Their
daughter was now indelibly stamped as a cheating lying adulterous
whore with a criminal record. Their standing in the community
must have taken a nose-dive. “Take that you pompous assholes,” I
thought. Instead I merely shrugged.

“I wasn’t feeling very charitable,” I said neutrally. “Neither
was my counsel.”

______________________

It was the last time I ever saw Leona’s parents. The humiliation
was too much for them and they moved away. I never saw Leona
again either. I presume that she went to live with her parents
when she got out of jail. I know she didn’t serve the full 60
days. There wasn't even a trial for perjury - that practically
never happens in divorce cases - but it made no difference: The
bank summarily dismissed her – you can’t hold an office of trust
in a bank if you have been convicted of contempt of court.

The complete humiliation of Leona and her counsel was of course
general knowledge in town – in fact little else was talked about
and the local paper had reported extensively from the court.
Marion Somersby’s business took a hammering, and while the
alienation of affection suit against Rick, as expected, came to
nothing, Rick didn’t get off scot free by any means. Heidi filed
for divorce and skinned him. To make matters worse for him, two
major customers of Rick’s protested to his employers at the
insurance company that on that fateful Wednesday morning it was
Rick who had cancelled the appointments so he could screw Leona
at the motel, not the other way around. He got dismissed at once.

I didn’t date anyone for a while – at first because technically I
was still married , then when the 60 days were up simply because
I felt I’d had enough of women. Dad and the guys at work were
great; they helped me remove all signs of Leona from the house –
changing the décor and color schemes to something of my liking.
We practically nuked the master bedroom, giving away the bed and
Leona’s dresser to Goodwill. It still didn’t feel like home so
without expecting much, I put the house on the market. To my
surprise it sold quickly at close to the asking-price. Sure, I
had set the price low and so I didn’t have all that much equity,
but I didn't lose my shirt either. I moved back to the little
bachelor pad at work – five years older, and – hopefully – wiser.

Over those next couple of months I didn’t see Bex all that often,
but when I did she looked, well, restless, for lack of a better
word. After her stunning and devastating success representing me,
she was naturally suddenly very sought after for divorce cases,
but her heart wasn’t in it and before she had been a practicing
lawyer for a year, she changed career completely and became an
assistant DA.

Fred Buchanan, the ambitious DA who had busted a lot of Leona’s
friends a while back, was now up for reelection and boosted his
tough-on-drugs credentials by presenting Bex as his new star
recruit – a top Yale graduate, a local girl, a scion of a
respected legal firm, and someone known for her ruthlessness. It
looked good, and Bex, dressed sharply in a severe business suit,
said all the right things at the press conference. She was
ecstatic about getting the chance to work with a DA who really
cared about eradicating the curse of recreational drugs. She had
personally seen promising scholars and athletes throwing it all
away. There should be zero tolerance. There should be no
misguided permissiveness. There should be no cozy plea bargains.

The DA looked delighted and his poll numbers shot up. And Bex set
to work with devastating efficiency. Before a month had passed,
several raids had busted not only another couple of dozen users
whose lives turned to hell; the raids had also landed a few
dealers. Not exactly big fish, but they were promenaded in front
of rolling TV cameras and set up for a big fall. During
interrogation they squealed like pigs, as such low-lives are
known to do, ratting on all and sundry to try to get off cheaply.
No-one more so than Mike Dupres who would have sold his late
mother if it could have helped him. It didn’t – Bex and her
colleagues patiently listened to all he had to say, and then used
it against him in court. His inexperienced public defender didn’t
manage to suppress the evidence or have the doors closed and thus
it became public knowledge that Mike Dupres had ratted on his
suppliers from a notorious biker gang. He was sentenced to a
couple of years, but he hadn’t even served two weeks before he
was found dead in the workshop at the prison. The autopsy report,
also made public, indicated that his death had been slow and very
painful bordering on the sadistic. There were no actual biker
gang inmates at the time but plenty of criminals willing to buy
themselves favors. The murder was never solved.

The DA deftly deflected the criticism away from his office in
general and away from Bex in particular so the incompetent public
defender ended up taking most of the heat. The DA and Bex both
expressed conventional regret over the death but managed to make
it very clear that they considered the likes of Mike Dupres
utterly expendable, an excellent example of what they were
fighting and his death a good riddance.

The election came and the DA was reelected in a landslide. Bex
soldiered on and had another round of raids on clubs, catching
small fry – recreational users who still believed they could get
away with using coke. I don’t think many people knew that our
year at high school was overrepresented in the group who weren’t
offered a plea bargain and a warning, but I certainly noticed
that Bex showed no mercy to anyone who’d been at school with us.

Her next target was the illicit drug market in connection with
sports. Once more the media was tipped off about the raids and
footage of embarrassed gym users having their bags searched and
dubious “supplements” confiscated for closer scrutiny filled the
news bulletins for days.

The DA was on vacation when a major raid on the high school gym
facilities took place. They didn’t find all that much, but there
were some steroids in addition to hypodermic needles and other
“drug taking paraphernalia” as Bex called them during the press
conference. “DA Buchanan has fought a lonely war against the
curse of drugs in our community for years,” Bex intoned. “At long
last our enlightened politicians have increased his budget to
help him with his struggles. While he and Maureen take a
well-deserved second honeymoon we continue Fred’s good work.
Nothing is closer to Fred’s heart than the safety of our youth.
Keeping drugs out of our community is his life’s calling. This
one’s for you Fred!”

The media loved her. The politicians loved her. The public loved
her. She could do no wrong. Whatever she asked for she was given.
So she went for the kill. The football player who’d had the
steroids and his coach were both arrested. Next Bex decided to
“follow the money”. She singled out a local building supplies
company – O’Leary’s Building Supplies who had been in the town
for over a century and who was but one of the sponsors. Not a lot
of money – they couldn’t afford it, but they wanted to be seen
supporting local sports. Because the owner was too busy trying to
keep his business afloat against the cut-throat competition from
large national chains and after an expensive generational change
involving his ailing dad and a grasping step-mother, he realized
too late what a rotten egg that sponsorship had turned into. All
other sponsors had publically cancelled their sponsorships,
devastating the sports programs at our old school, but young
O’Leary hadn’t. He hadn’t had the time or the focus.

Not “distancing himself from the illegal drugs” made him
“suspicious” in Bex’ eyes. Or so she said. The media fought over
who could agree the most and ran stories questioning the
legitimacy of the entire business. The customers stayed away in
droves and not surprisingly the banks baulked over the bad
publicity, and pulled the plug on the credit. Within weeks the
business went under. The young owner, after having had to lay off
all his staff – some of whom had served his father longer than he
himself had lived – blew out his brains. He was twenty eight
years old. His two year younger widow was called Stacey O’Leary –
neé Stevens. She had one child aged two and one on the way when
she became a destitute widow.

This time the tough-on-drugs strategy backfired. The public was
not impressed and the image of the highly pregnant Stacey
standing with a toddler next to the open grave in the pouring
rain was hard to shake off. The DA called Bex in for a “strategy
realignment discussion” and Bex cheerfully resigned, taking up an
open offer to rejoin her brothers’ law firm where she quickly
decided to specialize on company law, having lost all interest in
criminal or family law.

______________________

Bex’ revenge mission was complete: The gang of three had been
viciously punished with Mike dead, Stacey widowed and Leona
crushed. In addition to them, a number of the lesser tormentors
had been punished directly or indirectly. Again I doubt that very
many people besides Bert, Gene and me could see the pattern. To
most people the cases of Mike and Stacey just looked like an
over-zealous assistant DA, and few would make a connection to
Leona’s case – after all, my ex-wife had blatantly lied in court
over adultery. And all those people busted for coke, well, they
chose to snort the stuff, didn’t they?

So, yeah, mission accomplished. But I personally wondered if Bex
was any happier. I saw her rarely. I wasn’t deliberately staying
away from her, but we hadn’t really been close at all since she
came back and besides Dad was starting to slow down a bit,
leaving more and more responsibility to me. Although just into
his fifties, his knees were causing him trouble which is not
unusual in our profession so he came in less, choosing instead to
spend time with Mom doing the garden and starting to plan their
retirement. Florida was mentioned and I agreed that the climate
was pleasant there, even if my only trip to Florida had been a
disaster.

But as I said, I wondered about Bex and my concern proved
well-founded when I finally did run into her one day at, of all
places, my parents’ house.

I was taking Dad home around lunch time. He had been in for some
crucial negotiations with the importers of one of the foreign
brands we also sold and since he had just undergone a, by the way
completely successful, knee replacement operation, he wasn’t
driving himself. We parked the car and I went in with Dad to get
some papers when I heard voices from the kitchen. It was Mom and
Bex.

Bex was crying. “I can’t get those images out of my head Millie,”
she sobbed. “Pregnant Stacey in the rain with her little
fatherless boy and the despairing vista of Mr. Dupres who looks
ancient now – wife gone and Mike tortured to death in prison. And
even Leona’s fate haunts me. Sure she lied and cheated on George,
but she is unemployable after having been to jail and her poor
proud parents had to leave town.”

Mom was trying to comfort her. “Hush sweetheart, don’t be so hard
on yourself. Mike and Stacey and Leona tormented you for no
reason. They went out of their way to be mean to you and never
offered any apologies. Why, Leona continued using derogatory
epithets about you after she married George.”

“But Timothy O’Leary did me no harm, and neither did his little
boy or the baby girl he never got so see,” Bex was sobbing, “and
I know for a fact that Mr. Dupres gave Mike a serious scolding
after Mike had lost any chance of an traineeship with Todd over
the Prom incident.”

“I think that was mostly because Mr. Dupres himself had been
humiliated,” Mom said drily. “But yes, I can see your point.
Revenge rarely satisfies in the long term. The best vengeance is
to live well.”

“But how?” Bex said – the despair clear in her voice. “I’ve
wasted my life hating; plotting revenge on my enemies. School
enemies. Isn’t that pathetic? Who would want me now? The only
person I ever loved married one of those enemies and I turned his
painful and deeply private divorce into a public spectacle to
extract my revenge. He must hate me now.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t,” Mom said, “he…”

I heard no more – I signaled to Dad that I wanted to leave
without Bex knowing I had been there. I didn’t want to embarrass
her. Besides, I had some serious thinking to do.

______________________

“The only person I ever loved – the only person I ever loved –
the only person I ever loved”: The words, in the anguished voice
of Bex, kept going through my head on the way back to work. It
had hit me like a sledgehammer. She loves me. She has always
loved me. How could I have been so blind, so stupid, so
insensitive? Going out with half her tormentors, fucking them and
telling her about it, knocking up and marrying one of the
ringleaders? Who was really the worst tormentor of Bex? A bunch
of stupid school kids, or her friend from infancy whom she had
loved totally and unconditionally and who in return let her down
so completely? I could see that now, and I didn’t like myself.
Not one bit.

I wasn’t much good for anything at work, so I left the workshop
and showrooms in the hands of our capable deputies and drove back
to talk to Mom. I demonstratively slammed the door of my car, and
even rang the doorbell just in case Bex was still there, but she
had left and my bemused mother asked me what had gotten into me.

“Mom, I heard most of what you and Bex were talking about this
afternoon,” I blurted out.

“So I gather from what your father told me,” Mom said neutrally.
She wasn’t going to let me off the hook easily. That much was
certain.

“I must be the biggest dork in Christendom,” I exclaimed.

“I will not argue that point, George,” Mom replied – still
neutrally, but there was now a hint of a sparkle in her eyes.

“I mean, regarding Bex,” I explained, completely unnecessarily.

“Indeed,” Mom agreed, still yielding no ground.

I suddenly had an inspiration. “If I recall rightly it was mainly
Dad who wanted to adopt her when her parents died, right?”

“And?” Mom prompted, not sounding so neutral anymore and with the
beginning of a smile on her lips.

“Could that be because you wanted her to be a different kind of
daughter?” I asked.

“Did it really take you almost ten years to work that out?” Mom
asked back, now smiling for real.

“Sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees,” I sighed.
“But it’s not too late, is it?” I added – sounding no doubt
hopeful and feeling that I had taken twenty years off my age and
submitted my doubts and fears and worries into the capable hands
of my mother.

“I should think not,” Mom replied. “But remember: Bex is
ultra-fragile now. She has used all of her incredible
resourcefulness to extract a terrible revenge, only to find out
how bitter it tastes. She will need a lot of loving and
understanding. Besides, she still has a very poor
self-body-image.”

“I told her real men don’t worry about that,” I said. Mom was
nodding, so I assume Bex must have told her about that exchange.
“I don’t know that I can help her with her breasts,” I mused.

Mom smiled broadly. “Actually, you can.”

“How so?” I asked puzzled.

Mom’s answer was indirect and somewhat convoluted. “Do you
remember Constance, Bex’ mother?” she asked.

“Of course I do,” I replied.

“I mean, really remember what she looked like?” Mom insisted.

I thought for a moment, calling up the image of Mrs. Anderson.
“Yeah, I think so.”

“How would you describe her?” Mom asked.

I sensed my answer was important and hesitated. “Well, she was
slender,” I eventually said. “Very good looking, actually, for
someone close to sixty.”

I was threading carefully here, knowing that Mom and Mrs.
Anderson had been very good friends. Mom smiled, pleased with my
answer. “How would you describe her build? And don’t claim you
didn’t notice. Teenaged boys check out every woman they see.” The
last was said in a jocular voice and we both laughed a little.

“Nice!” I replied without hesitation. “I mean, sure, she was very
slender so of course she wasn’t massive up front, but yeah, nice.
I remember her filling out a bikini nicely in the summers at the
pool.”

“I bet you remember,” Mom said with a grin. Suddenly her face was
serious. “Would it surprise you to know that back when she
married Archie, Constance looked exactly like what Bex does now?”


“Gee,” I said – totally surprised. “Did she have a boob-job or
something?”

Mom laughed. “Try ‘or something’. She got pregnant and before
anyone could tell from her belly, her breasts had grown from
nothing to those large B-cups you lusted over.”

“Wow!” I exclaimed, ignoring the barb. “I didn’t know that could
happen.”

“It does,” Mom said. “It’s not nearly as infrequent as you think.
And it runs in families. Constance said her mother was the same.”

I got the point. Completely. Also the unspoken message. Now to
win the girl.

______________________

In the end it was not nearly as difficult as I thought it was
going to be. I raced into town, leaving my car strewn rather than
parked outside the Anderson law firm. I made it up the stairs in
a few long strides, surging past the astonished secretaries in
the front office and entered Bex’ office unannounced.

She looked up startled from the papers she was working on.
“George, what are you doing…” she started, but I held up my hand
to stop her.

“I heard you talking to Mom today,” I said. “Almost all of it.
The bits I didn’t hear I guessed.”

Bex colored up beet red and started to speak again, but once more
I stopped her.

“I’ve been an idiot,” I declared. “An insensitive lout. I am so
sorry. So desperately sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. I
have always loved you; I only realized that now. I don’t want to
live without you. I can’t live without you. Please, will you
marry me?”

Bex had been gaping at me. She looked bewildered, no doubt
wondering if this was really happening.

“Please,” I repeated in a pleading voice. “Please Bex. I love
you. I want you. I need you. Marry me!”

“Yes!” she squealed and flew in my arms which is how her brothers
and their staff found us a few moments later.

“At long last,” Gene said and shooed everyone out.

As I had expected Bex’ self-doubt surfaced almost as soon as the
initial shock and delight over my proposal had subsided. “How can
you marry someone like me,” she said – indicating her flat chest.

“Who says I have to?” I replied flippantly

“But you said you didn’t want me to get implants,” Bex said
sounding hurt.

“You don’t need them. Use your mother’s and your grandmother’s
solution,” I countered.

“What do you mean?” Bex asked.

I explained it to her.

“You mean to say that your mother as good as told you to get me
pregnant before we’re married?” Bex asked incredulously when I
had told her what Mom had said.

“Yup,” I replied. “If you don’t want to get married looking flat,
that’s the solution.”

“Is she for real?” Bex mused.	

“Totally. Don’t forget she’s the one who urged me to masturbate
rather than just waking up with wet pajamas,” I said.

Bex shook her head slowly.

“Besides,” I added, “she wants grandchildren. The sooner the
better.”

“How soon can we start?” Bex asked – a beautiful flush having
returned to her cheeks.

“When do you get off work?” I asked back.

By way of answer she took me by the hand and dragged me upstairs
to the apartment. Only hours and hours later did I realize that
Bert and Gene had gone out to dine that evening.

______________________

EPILOGUE:

It took six weeks to get Bex pregnant during which we found out
what we liked and didn’t like sexually.  Our compatibility was
very very high. A further eight weeks, and Bex had a nice bosom
which filled the classical wedding gown well. Her breasts,
already very sensitive when they were essentially nipples-only,
got even more so while they grew and more and more of our
love-making involved her breasts. Bex ended up being able to have
multiple orgasms from oral nipple stimulation only.

The cut of that wedding dress, by the way, discreetly hid the
tiny bulge on her no longer completely flat belly. Everyone would
be able to work it out from the timing when the baby came, but it
mattered to Bex to hide it so it mattered to me. And on the
wedding day it was invisible. Gene gave her away and the wedding
was beautiful. Mom bawled her eyes out – I think her happiness
was only the tiniest smidgen less than ours. I am sure there are
plenty of brides who are truly loved by their mothers in law, but
I refuse to believe any bride has ever been more loved than Bex
is by Mom.

Of course the ghosts from Bex’ past, especially from her revenge
campaign, popped up from time to time. There was nothing we could
do about Mike – he was dead and his father died before we were
married. We also felt that Mike had brought it all on himself –
the original unprovoked deceit, the drug dealing, the willingness
to tell on his suppliers. Not much room for sympathy.

I felt the same way about Leona. To this day I don’t know why she
acted the way she did around me: why she cheated rather than
simply divorce me and why she so blatantly lied in court. OK, she
wasn’t the brightest light in the chandelier, but surely she must
have known that lying in court was a poor idea. Not much sympathy
for her either, and when we learnt that she had finally found a
secretarial job that would support her, we stopped worrying about
her completely.

But when it came to the collateral damage it was the fate of
Stacey that caused most heartache. Bex struggled for a long time
with what to do. She tried to contact Stacey but was angrily
rejected. In the end we found out that an education fund had been
set up for the O’Leary children. It was managed by another law
firm in town and while the original donations had been many, the
sum raised was small. Bex had loads of money and she donated
enough to the fund to ensure that both the little O’Learys would
be able to go to a top college, should they want to. The donation
was anonymous of course, but we got some measure of
acknowledgement one day when Bex and I were walking down the main
street. We passed Stacey coming in the other direction with her
children. The smallest smile of gratitude flashed over Stacey’s
face and then she had passed us and the moment was over. Shortly
after that we heard that she had remarried and moved away – we
never saw her again and we never talked about her either.

Bex’ wealth also meant that we could buy back her childhood home
when it came on the market and do it up for the now five of us.
Having us next door meant that Mom and Dad changed their
retirement plans. They only go to Florida during parts of winter,
spending the rest of the year with us. We keep the door in the
wall in very good repair.

And Bex agrees with Mom: The best revenge is to live well.

THE END.