Cliche

CLICHÉ 4

IN THE BEST INTEREST OF THE CHILDREN

Written by Vandemonium1

Edited by CreativityTakesCourage

Another story where most of the words and concepts are entirely well-used-to-the-point-of-being-tiresome, although I think it has a unique discovery method. Maybe the ending will break the mold; maybe it won't.

As one of my esteemed fellow authors says, this is a RAAC-free zone. There is no graphic sex.

My thanks to everyone that advised me on it, particularly Bill and Heffay. Heff is having a bad year and my thoughts go out to him.

------------------------------------

So much has happened in a few short months that it's now hard to remember how my doubts started. Let me think back to what happened on that extraordinary, ordinary day.

I remember it was a Wednesday, a Wednesday that started like every other ordinary work day. I left for work at seven-thirty after kissing my wife Julie and giving my two teen sons, Pete and Mick, a squeeze on the shoulder because, apparently, they weren't babies anymore and therefore were too old for a kiss - their words, not mine - goodbye.

Our routine was for Julie to get the lads off to school before going to work at nine. Her work was flexible enough that she could be home by four, when the boys were due back. Occasionally, she would have to work late and would ring me, and I would take off early. If not, I returned at five, my usual time. Sounds boring, doesn't it? Maybe so, but, for me, we might only be two boring middle-income lovers, but we had two great kids and happy lives.

My Wednesday may have started like any other Wednesday but it sure as hell didn't end like any other day. It ended with me having grave doubts about my wife's honesty.

I came home at my regular time and greeted Julie with my usual kiss. I called a greeting to the boys who were upstairs doing their homework. Julie ran a tight ship, and they were expected to complete their homework before any computer or TV fun. I was expected to not disturb them until they finished.

"Honey, do you think you could take a look at my car? It hesitates when you push on the accelerator. Maybe one of the spark plugs isn't working."

Now, that was unusual. Not that she wanted me to look at her car, nothing strange there. One of the reasons we still owned two older cars was so I could service them myself. Julie might work in the head office of a chain of car dealerships as chief accountant and receive cost price mechanical services, but I still insisted on servicing them myself. The second reason for the old cars was money. Julie wanted a big house, but I hated having a huge debt hanging over our heads so by being thrifty in other areas we could pay the mortgage off quicker and also put some money aside for the kids' further education.

No, what was unusual was Julie's sudden mechanical knowledge.

I knew from long experience that Julie wasn't the slightest bit mechanically minded. Shit, on two famous occasions she'd forgotten that a car even needed fuel in its tank. If she'd just said that the car hesitated, I would have thought nothing of it and, because I do know a thing or two about cars, the first thing I would have checked was the spark plugs.

Putting that thought aside, I walked into the garage and, using my spare key, unlocked her car and jumped in. As usual, I forgot to adjust the seat before hopping in. Julie being 5' 3" to my 6' 1", this normally resulted in me wearing my own testicles as earrings until I could lift the latch and push the seat all the way back. That day was different. The seat wasn't positioned all the way back, but it wasn't all the way forward as it usually was either. That set alarm bells ringing. It was a four-door car, with no reason to adjust the seat unless to get it in a more comfortable driving position.

Had I been a suspicious character, I would have concluded that the last person to drive the car was taller than 5' 3" but shorter than 6' 1". I might have let that pass if it wasn't for Julie's new-found mechanical knowledge,

I started the car and automatically began letting it warm up for a minute to be nice to the engine. Then, I thought, '

Stupid, it was used to drive Julie home a mere hour earlier. It should still be warm

.' I glanced at the temperature gauge. The needle was wrapped around the C. The engine was cold. The car hadn't been driven for several hours.

Putting that aside, I gunned the engine and felt the hesitation referred to. It was three minutes work to open the garage door for ventilation, grab my thick rubber gloves and remove the spark plug leads one by one. Sure enough, removing the lead from number three cylinder made no difference to the engine note. It took a further five minutes to remove the offending spark plug, clean the lead and replace with a new spark plug. The engine sounded good after that, and the unloaded hesitation was gone. Just to be certain, I took it for a test drive and declared the problem gone. My day job was mentally unstimulating, so small victories like this were very satisfying. I'd always been proud of my underutilised problem-solving skills.

That done, I mentally framed some uncomfortable questions for Julie. She couldn't know they were uncomfortable, though. I loved her way too much to accuse her of anything outright until I was absolutely certain. I washed up before returning to Julie in the kitchen.

"All fixed, lover."

"Great, thanks for that, sweetie."

"How was your day? Did you manage to sneak away early?"

This wasn't an unusual question. I knew Julie didn't love her job and occasionally found some excuse to escape. It certainly didn't warrant the sudden searching look she gave me.

"No. I left at the usual time."

My heart sank into my belly at the lie, but I let it alone and forced both my face and tone to remain neutral.

"You were right; it was a dead spark plug. I'm a little surprised you picked it."

This time, I didn't get a searching look. This time she turned with unnatural haste back to facing the kitchen bench where she was peeling potatoes.

"I...I must have heard it somewhere."

To a man made suddenly more observant, those two clues were enough to start the spiral into distrust. The car seat adjustment, sadly, gave me a sinking feeling about the reason for the two lies I knew I'd just heard my wife utter.

As an aside, I am not an Australian by birth. I'm an import. When I first arrived in my new home country, some of the cultural differences really stood out. One of the most amusing for me was the Australian male behaviour when sharing a car with a female. For some strange reason it was socially uncomfortable for a man to be seen being driven around by a woman. That meant that it didn't matter whose car it was, the man usually drove. It was fading in the younger generation, but with older people it was still prevalent. So much so, that if you saw a forty-year-plus man being driven by a woman, he might as well be holding a huge neon sign saying,

'I've lost my licence.'

So, if I was a suspicious man, I might think that a guy had driven Julie's car, at least two hours prior and was mechanically minded. The problem was that I now really was a suspicious man. Luckily, the kids chose that moment to come screaming into the kitchen for their post school snacks. Not for the first time, it amazed me that teens could put away so much food at five and still handle a full meal at six-thirty. No need to admonish them with,

'you'll spoil your dinner'

for my thirteen and fourteen-year-olds. I focused on their excitement as a distraction from the feeling that I'd suddenly swallowed a baseball made of lead.

The rest of the evening passed in routine stuff, and we went to bed at our usual ten-thirtyish. I was suspicious enough that I worried what I would do if Julie tried to initiate sex. One of the advantages of the big house Julie wanted was that the kids' rooms were far enough from ours that it didn't put a crimp on our sex life.

I remember lying there, waiting for Julie to finish whatever she did for fifteen-minutes in the bathroom every night. I remember my internal dilemma. Should I feign sleep? No, bad move. Julie knew that I absolutely loved being roused from sleep with one of her fantastic blowjobs.

I recalled the thoughts that swirled and strained, as I tried to remember the last time Julie had done that. And I remember being jolted back to wide awake. It had been a while. A long, long while. Actually, our sex life had been sliding for some time. I realised that over a period of six or seven months we'd gradually gone from two or three times a week to maybe one. She'd gone from initiating sex approximately half the time to, gods, when was the last time she'd suggested it?

The realisation caused me to sit bolt upright. Things that had meant nothing the previous day now took on a new, evil significance. The reason our love life had dropped was that she'd stopped initiating it. Not only that, but she'd rejected my approaches with more regularity. After a while, the subtle slights of the rejections caused me to ask less often.

What else had changed that I hadn't noticed? By the time Julie came to bed, I realised that our full on make-out sessions and even hand holding were rapidly becoming things of the past as well. Was there any other reason for such behavioural changes apart from the classic one? I couldn't think of any. In the end, my worries were for nothing. Julie just came out of the bathroom, pecked me on the cheek, and said goodnight.

I won't say the two weeks following my realisation weren't difficult. I pretended normality. It wasn't easy. Not by a long shot. Just as an experiment, the following night I didn't give Julie a kiss as soon as I walked into the house. I'd done that every night for sixteen years and the lack should have set her alarm bells screaming. She gave no indication that she even noticed. That hurt.

I didn't try to initiate a make-out session, hold her hand, or propose sex. Not once. She obviously hadn't read the

'how to avoid being caught cheating

' handbook as she was making just about every mistake imaginable.

This prompted me to look for other clues. Because we shared clear financial goals, I'd years ago started a spreadsheet to account for every dollar we spent. Every time a bank or credit card statement arrived, I allocated the amounts to different categories in the spreadsheet. The logic was, if you don't know where you're spending the money, you don't know where to cut costs. I updated my spreadsheet and looked in detail at the last twelve-months. There were no unexplained costs, no sudden change in cash withdrawals and both our pays were input like clockwork. In short, there were no financial clues at all. Not surprising for an accountant, I suppose.

What I did do, however, was check Julie's engine temperature and seat adjustment every night when I came home and tried to account for her movements. I took to ringing her work randomly to tell her I loved her. Sometimes the receptionist said she wasn't at her desk, and I'd ring her cell. Thus, it was that I discovered something Julie hadn't told me. I rang her desk phone, a fortnight after the day my suspicions started and was diverted to reception. The receptionist scolded me for forgetting it was Julie's rostered day off. I found out later that as part of the blue-collar union negotiations, the company gave them a day off every two weeks. That perk was passed on to the white-collar staff as well. As of seven months prior, Julie had enjoyed a day off every two weeks, on a Wednesday and I knew nothing about it.

That was when my feeling of suspicion turned to one of dread.

Unsurprisingly, Julie's engine was cold that Wednesday night and, once again, the car seat wasn't adjusted for midget. I know I was extremely distracted during dinner and was very surprised Julie didn't pick up on anything. Before dinner I'd checked out our bed sheets and those in the spare bedroom. I was confused to see that the sheets were the same as that morning. If the man driving her car adjusted the seat, then the journey must terminate at our house. Otherwise, Julie would adjust the seat to drive home. Any feelings of relief were quashed, however, when I noticed that the throw rug on the couch was missing. I found it on the washing line.

So, I knew the 'when'. And also the 'where'. I suspected the 'what' but couldn't for the life of me figure out the 'why'. And I didn't know the 'who'. Until two weeks prior I thought I was in a loving relationship with a woman totally devoid of the ability to deceive. My distraction at dinner was me thinking of what to do. I didn't have nearly enough evidence to confront her.

My musings were interrupted by Julie.

"Karen rang before. She lost an earring down the bathroom plughole and wants to know if you can get it back."

Karen was the divorcee next door. She and her husband had been regular members of our social circle until their divorce the previous year. She'd caught him cheating. There followed a very bitter divorce. Following bad advice, they'd both engaged lawyers to keep as many assets as possible. At the end of the process, of course, the lawyers owned most of the assets. The process had turned all the love they ever felt for each other into acrimony and hate.

Since then, Karen had withdrawn from our social circle; it really being suited to couples. As a good neighbour I went over there about once every two weeks, on request, to do boys stuff. You know, maintenance etc. During the process, I'd become firm friends with Karen, much more so than Julie was.

Glad of the distraction, I grabbed my tools and headed over after dinner. The U-bend under the bathroom sink was in a bitch of a spot and took some effort and swearing to remove. Karen sat on the edge of the bath, and we chatted. With the bend finally off, I retrieved the ear stud and used the opportunity to clear the pipe of years of built-up slime. Unusually, Karen ran out of things to say so I filled the void.

"Karen, can I ask you a personal question?"

"Sure, Dave."

"What made you initially suspect that your husband was cheating on you?"

Karen answered openly and without hesitation that she'd noticed abrupt behavioural changes in her ex. She'd bought a GPS tracker, phone taps, a self-contained camera and recording system. Within a month, she'd caught him on camera, in their bedroom, while she was out of town. By the time she'd finished her obviously painful speech, I'd replaced the pipes and was cleaning up.

"What made you ask that, Dave?"

I just looked at her while deciding what to say. She saw my hesitation.

"Oh no, not Julie."

With no one else to share my dread with, I opened up and told her the full story over a coffee she prepared. When I finished, she started to give possible explanations for Julie's behaviour. None of them sounded very convincing however much I wanted to be convinced. Our conversation was interrupted by Julie knocking on the door. She was invited in but didn't even try to explain why she'd come. If I had to guess, I would say she was suspicious of what I was up to, innocent though it was. I couldn't help remembering that people up to sly things are often paranoid about others being sly. I took that as a good sign. Whatever she was up to, she was worried about losing me. I left to go home with her fifteen minutes later.

Karen rang me at work the next day. She assured me that she thought I was wrong about Julie and came up with an idea of how to prove it. She still had all the surveillance gear from her monitoring of her ex. She'd decided not to sell it on eBay but to use it to check on her next partner. That saddened me but I understood that's the mindset that being cheated on gives you. It not only destroyed your trust in them but affected your ability to trust in anyone else.

Two days later I took three hours off work in the middle of the day to meet Karen. She showed me all the gear and how it worked. By the end of the session, I'd three cameras set up in my house. One facing the front door, one facing the couch and one in the master bedroom. By the next morning I had the tracker in Julie's car, a recorder in the ceiling space and the software on my laptop.

In the twelve days until her next RDO, I merely observed and learned how to effectively monitor my wife. It amazed me what an open mind sees when the blinkers are off. Nearly a month after my eyes were opened, Julie was oblivious that we hadn't done anything but cheek pecks to say goodnight and I'd practically stopped talking to her. We'd never gone a month without sex before. I longed to know what sort of obsession would make her ignore that.

I also noticed something else. Julie was much more withdrawn from the children as well. She paid them far less attention than normal and rarely joined us on our increased weekend activities. The increase was due to my just wanting to get away from her. Pretending everything was hunky dory was exhausting.

The final observation that my new attitude revealed occurred on the Wednesday of her next secret day off. I'd never noticed before, but she wasn't dressed in her work clothes when she emerged for breakfast. My initial reaction was one of self-recrimination. How unobservant was I to not have noticed that? Then, with a flash of anger, I recognised it as the actions of a completely trusting man.

I was so sure now that today was the day, that after driving around the block, I pulled over and fired up my laptop. Through the cameras, I saw Julie getting the kids to the bus stop then cleaning up the kitchen. When I saw that her usual departure time had come and gone, I knew I was in for a major trauma that day. She then stunned me by sitting on the couch with a coffee and watching daytime television. It looked like a regular mother having a day off.

She remained in front of the television until I saw her get up to answer the phone at about eleven. The distance of the phone to where the camera was located meant I couldn't quite make out what she said but I did see the smile on her face. It didn't bother me that her conversation was muffled because I knew I could listen to the phone tap recording later. After hanging up, I watched her go upstairs and change into a smart dress. I felt a little like a voyeur watching her get changed.

I was so distracted that I nearly missed the man walking toward me on the footpath. I recognised him as one of her colleagues. He ran the service arm of their dealership company. I ducked down and gave him enough time to pass. By the time I rose, he was standing opposite my house. He looked around casually, before crossing the street and walking straight into my house via the clearly unlocked front door.

I struggled to change screens back to the one showing the inside view of the front door. I was just in time for the bottom to fall out of my world. He and Julie were standing in the middle of my lounge kissing passionately. It took every last molecule of my self-control to not run over and commit murder.

I watched them walk off camera but not back out the door or toward the bedroom. Because of the unfamiliar view of the lounge the camera showed, I was a little confused. Then the movement of my garage door gave me the answer. Again, I ducked down as my wife's lover drove her car past me.

I hadn't played around with the GPS tracking part of my surveillance that much. I had no idea how accurate it was. Therefore, I thought it critical to keep them in sight. That worked pretty well until they left the town boundary by a quiet road. I dropped right back to avoid being spotted. Five minutes later, they turned into a building that advertised itself as the Farmhouse Restaurant. I drove past the entrance and parked well up the road.