Notes: "February Sucks" by George Anderson has now become a Literotica classic. Certainly well-written, it is, however, an unpleasant tale to read, with a disgusting wife cheating on her husband in the worst way, with false friends complicit in a man's destruction, with the betrayed husband in the guise of a weak submissive who agrees to continue living, for the supposed sake of his children, next to a vile person, devoid of any feelings toward him, a despicable and miserable being who had publicly humiliated him, trampling on his dignity without batting an eyelid.
Such a tale, though, as I repeat, well written, in addition to a bitter taste in the mouth and sense of emptiness, leaves the reader with a sad and reprehensible message. Agreed, it is a story, and in reality perhaps (one hopes) none of the characters would behave this way, neither the husband (wanting to keep the children in the bamboozlement of not wanting to tell them the truth about the slutty mother, cannot be preeminent over justice and dignity of the person), nor such a lousy, vile and disgusting wife, a bitch who creates irreversible damage, heedless of all the harm she does to the person she has sworn to love and respect for her whole life.
I do not consider myself a writer although I would like to be one, I have written several things that I have kept to myself for now, and this is the first thing I publish. I felt that this short story needed to be rewritten in its final part, and so I did, also trying as much as possible to respect the original line. The story is divided into two parts: the first is a copy and paste from the original story for the benefit of those who have never read it, while others can go directly to the second part, which begins after Jim has read the letter in which Linda describes her betrayal.
I am not a native English speaker, and I apologize in advance for my mistakes, which may be many because I do not have an editor.
And now the story.
Part 1
It always does, unless you live in one of those places that doesn't have winter. Every February sucks, but that particular February out-sucked all the others put together, and the March that followed was worse.
The Worst February Ever started with two weeks when we literally didn't see the sun. Grey overcast, high temperatures in the 20s and an occasional inch or two of snow. Everyone was looking forward to Valentine's Day as if it was their hope of salvation. It fell on Thursday that year, and so many people were taking the next day off that the editorial writers were saying we might as well shut the whole city down on February 15
th
.
Linda and I had big plans for Valentine's Day, just like everyone else. Like everyone else, we awoke to two inches of new snow, with more falling rapidly. By mid-afternoon we were both sent home from work while we could still get somewhere: the whole city was shutting down. By the time we should have been getting dressed for our night on the town, all the roads were closed to non-essential traffic so we changed into our cozy sweats instead. The great Valentine's Day date, the dinner-movie-dancing one that was supposed to make up for the previous two weeks of unrelieved beastliness, was frozen pizza and "Frozen" with the kids. The only dancing we did was dancing Emma (age six) and Tommy (age four) up to their bedrooms amid protests of "You know there won't be any school tomorrow."
After the kids were asleep, I sighed as I handed Linda her glass of wine. "I'm sorry, Linda," I said. "This isn't how it was supposed to turn out."
"It's okay, Jim. It isn't your fault, and it was fun looking forward to what you had planned for us. Besides, if nothing else, I got a new party dress out of it."
"Which I haven't seen yet."
"You know the rule: you don't see it until you take me out in it." I looked at her, trying to imagine what she had bought, and how she would look in it. Linda isn't classically beautiful, but she has an innate sense of style: everything she wears not only looks great on her, it reflects who she is. She started making her own clothes in middle school, and still does from time to time when she can't find "just the right thing" in the stores. She makes many of Emma's dress-up clothes, too. Anyone lucky enough to see her when she's dressed up would think she's the most attractive woman in the room, but would trouble figuring out why, because there would be hotter women there. They would be thinking, "There's just something about her, I'd like to get to know her," not so much "Boy, I'd give a month's salary to get a piece of that." I saw that when I first met her, and I've had no reason to change my mind. I looked at the diamond I'd placed on her finger almost ten years before, as it flashed in the firelight.
"Thank you for saying yes, Linda. I love you." I raised my glass. "To us."
"I love you, too. To us," she responded with a smile. We sat for a moment, comfortably silent.
"Linda, I'm sorry I've been so touchy these last few days. It's nothing you or the kids have done, and you deserve better from me. It's just this damn February, and this..."
"I know, Jim. I'm sorry, too; I've been just as bad. I think the hibernating bears have the right idea. We really should be sleeping until spring. We've all been on edge, even the kids. The people at my work are a lot worse than you, though. What about your work?"
"The same."
"Well, look at it this way, Jim. We have each other, we have the kids, we have our home, we know where our next meal is coming from..."
"Yeah, Wendy's."
She laughed. Our first date was a running joke between us. I had met Linda in college. My parents had had to cut off my support to pay my dad's health bills, and I refused to take out loans, so after tuition and books I literally had no money. Linda was a little better off, and had offered to treat me or go Dutch, but I wasn't having any of that, so I was saving up to take her someplace nice. She had told me I was silly and said the object was to spend time together and get to know each other, and we could do that just as easily at Wendy's. So that's where we had gone, and the rest was history. We've moved up in class since then, but we still get Wendy's now and then for old times' sake.
"Seriously, though," I said. "How do people get through times like this if they don't have love?"
"Sometimes they don't." Linda shuddered. A high school boyfriend of hers had killed himself with booze and pills on Valentine's Day night a couple of years before.
"Well, we do, and we will." I put down my glass and took both of her hands in mine. "Happy Valentine's Day, my love."
"Happy Valentine's Day, my beloved husband." We gazed into each other's eyes for a moment, then decided we really should move this to the bedroom.
