Tom waited in the car for his son to come out of the house. It was his weekend with the boy and, like most five-year-olds, it took the kid forever to get ready. Once upon a time, Tom would have helped to dress him, and find the socks that were tossed chaotically over the bedroom, plus the backpack that would have gotten hidden behind a chair or in the closet, but the house belonged to his ex-wife's new husband, so Tom waited outside. Tom's ex, Randi, was probably chasing after Liam as she tried at the same time to get herself ready to go out. That thought made Tom smile. She was always stressed under pressure. And when she was stressed, she lost her temper.
"Be on time, please!" Randi had commanded.
"This dinner is important to Hank. He has clients coming in from Asia. This meeting is critical to his business."
Tom had kept quiet during the telephone lecture. He did not, for example, say anything about how he was always on time or how it was Randi, Hank, and Liam who were always late. He also said nothing about how he did not give a shit whether the dinner was important to Hank or not. Hank had, after all, talked Randi into his bed while Randi was still married to Tom. Tom did not say how Hank only wanted Randi to be his arm-candy because her rack looked nice in a low-cut dress when he had client dinners.
Most importantly, Tom said nothing to Randi about how, if anyone had asked Tom what he wanted, the answer would have been just a couple of minutes to disembowel Hank with a rusty knife and then garrote him with his own intestines. Tom had even looked online and found a pair of waterproof work gloves with no-slip grip that would have kept the gory offal from escaping his grasp as he really pulled the guts around the fuck-head's throat.
He said none of that though and just kept quiet as he listened to the squawking on the other end of the phone.
He had something better in his pocket, awaiting deployment.
Neither Tom nor Randi had come from money. Neither one had lived in poverty either, but Randi dreamed of being rich. Tom, on the other hand, was happy with a comfortable wage and decent house. They had met at a work networking function, dated for a while, and gotten married.
When they had met, Randi was in one of her dieting phases. She had bad eating habits and, when stressed, she ate to excess. Then, after loading on the pounds, she dieted with every miracle cure drug she could find and exercised like a maniac, sacrificing sleep to do so. She'd be thin for a while, but then would balloon up again. Her family tended to be fat, which was an extra problem because they all had severe hypertension.
Randi went through the weight-loss/weight-gain cycle three time while she and Tom were together. Hank seduced her when she was in one of her thin phases, and she seemed to have kept the weight off for the past one and a half years. Tom realized that the weight loss should have been his clue to the affair. He missed it though.
He only learned about it when Randi told him she was trading up. Tom did everything he could to put the brakes on the divorce. He was not trying to preserved the marriage. He was trying to be a dick. It was the only weapon he had. He had a good attorney though, a guy who was a friend of a friend. He fought everything. He even demanded counseling. That offended Tom. He didn't want to talk to her. But the lawyer calmed him down, explaining that Randi wanted to talk to him even less than he wanted to talk to her and that they could always withdraw the request. After all, Randi wanted to get married to Hank, so she had an incentive for things to move fast.
Tom's lawyer filed motions challenging everything, got hearings scheduled, then re-scheduled, and then filed other motions. When it came time to argue the motion for counseling, Tom's attorney withdrew the motion in court, as promised, after Randi and Hank had gone through all the time and expense of preparing. Finally, after months of arguing over everything, Randi gave Tom a check to go away and signed all common property over to him. She even paid for Tom's lawyer. Since she had no money of her own, it was obviously coming from Hank. Tom called that a win.
