Grace

grace (gr-As), n ., 1. elegance or beauty of form, matter, motion or action. 2. the freely given, unmerited favor and love of God.

^ ^ ^

I'm sitting on the sofa, looking into the soft glow of the fireplace, a glass of eggnog in my hand.

It's Christmas Eve, and in the background I can hear my wife humming a carol in harmony with the soft tunes coming from the stereo as she sets out the Santa Claus gifts.

Even though our children are all but grown now, we still have Santa on Christmas morning, only instead of dolls and toys, the gifts are sweaters and dresses, movies and CDs. But they are still given with the love that they have come to expect from us.

I look over at her, and as it happens so often, she looks back at the same moment, our eyes lock and we smile at each other, with the look of love everlasting.

I think back then to an earlier Christmas Eve many years ago, and to one two years before that, when a series of circumstances -- fortunate and unfortunate -- led Grace to become my lover, and soon thereafter, my wife.

They say you sometimes have to go through hell to get to heaven, and that was true in my case. I went through a hell that I wouldn't wish on any man, but if I hadn't, I wouldn't have Grace and I wouldn't be half the man I am today.

Let me tell you my story, because there are some lessons to be learned from it.

^ ^ ^

To the best of my knowledge, in the history of the world, there has only been one perfect man, and even he was quite a bit more than just a man.

So it stands to reason then that every one of us at some point in our lives has done something bad, something that hurt someone else.

We've all done something that should have earned us condemnation, at least from the higher powers, and it is because of grace that we don't pay the penalty for our often-stupid decisions.

In my case, I took someone who was straight -- or at least drug-free -- and started her on the path to addiction. I introduced Elise Tucker to marijuana when we were just out of high school, and from that one corrupting moment, she slowly descended into the world of junkies and prostitution.

It might not have been so bad, except that not long after that, I got her pregnant, we got married and she eventually gave me three children in the space of four years, two daughters and a son.

It wasn't until we'd been married almost eight years that I realized what she'd become, behind my back and under my nose, and it took most of my money and all of my self-respect before I was finally free of her. And even then, she left me with scars -- physical and emotional -- that I still have to this day.

My name is Steve Moreland, and I'm 42, far wiser than I was when I was 15. I was born and raised in a suburban area near a mid-sized Southern city. My folks were fairly well off, and I did my damnedest to be cool.

Although I was on the football team all through high school, I didn't play much, mostly on special teams and the junior varsity. That never stopped me from smoking cigarettes or drinking beer or smoking pot. That's just the way it was in those days.

You'd have thought that when a good friend of mine was killed during my senior year of high school that it would set some of us straight, and in my case it did for awhile. I was on the rebound from that incident when I began dating Elise.

We had a class together and she sort of latched onto me as someone who was in need. Never mind that she already had a boyfriend, a fellow that was a year older and going to the nearby junior college. We started dating, and soon she threw him over for me.

That should have been a warning, but I was so sloppy in love that I failed to notice.

At that time, Elise was kind of a band nerd, but she was a band nerd who put out, as they say. She was a little taller than average, and fairly nice looking with a body that had all the parts in the right places and in the right proportions.

She was always a little self-conscious about her nose, which did have a bit of a crook to it, although it in no way hurt her looks, and she had soft brown hair that was utterly unremarkable.

She was, for the most part, a nice girl, the youngest child of a truck driver and a schoolteacher. But there were a few folks here and there who didn't like her much, one of whom was my father.

Even before she got mixed up in drugs, Elise was very moody at times, and when she was in a bad mood, she could be a bitch. But that was OK, because when I was in a bad mood, I could be pretty foul too. Even my mom, who liked her and empathized with her, recognized the pitfalls of two people like us hooking up.

I also think my dad sensed that there were demons lurking in her soul that could devour me if they were unleashed, plus he thought I could do a lot better.

But, I was in love, and, besides, he'd supposedly married beneath his station as well, and my mother turned out to be a true princess of a person.

The relationship might have run its course if I hadn't gone to college and come back for Thanksgiving break with a renewed appreciation for the wonders of weed.

The first day I was back from college was on a Tuesday morning. Elise's parents were working, and she met me at the door still dressed in her thin nightgown. We hadn't been together in a couple of months, and we were hot and horny.

But I talked her into throwing on some clothes and taking a ride with me. We had a really good parking spot we'd used before and I drove us there.

We got parked, and I pulled out a fat doobie. She kind of looked at me in disapproval, but I guess she'd always been a little curious about it, based on the way I'd talked about it -- in roundabout terms -- so she agreed to try it.

She got real giggly, then she turned on me with a passion I hadn't seen in her before. I mean we had fucked before, but it always seemed like she was holding something back.

Not this time. She kissed me wildly, and in seconds we were frantically ripping at each other's clothes.

I pulled her T-shirt off, clamped my lips on her tits and her body responded by writhing in the heat of lust. Her hands were steadily kneading my cock through my jeans. I managed to get her shorts off, and her pussy was steaming hot.

Elise was naked as I eased the seat back to give us more room. There was an unholy fire in her eyes as she worked my pants down to my ankles, then pulled my shirt off, pinching my nipples as she climbed aboard.

She held my throbbing cock in one hand, aiming it for the wet opening to her sex, then with a loud mutual groan, she slid down my pole and began to work her hips up and down, enveloping my cock with her molten pussy.

I didn't think about protection, because she'd always been on the pill in the year since we'd first become intimate. I didn't think about anything except how good she felt.

Our mouths were working together feverishly and our stiff nipples were sending electric shocks of sensation radiating through our bodies, crackling from one to the other.

I was thrusting up hard while she was working her hips in a corkscrew motion around my turgid dick. We were hurtling toward a huge mutual climax like we'd never had before.

Elise was panting, moaning and squealing, and I was grunting and gasping as I fought for control, to try to prolong the delicious agony of our coupling.

Up and down, up and down, we worked faster and harder, until Elise gasped loudly, arched her back, raised her head to the heavens and exploded in a truly awesome climax. I'd never experienced anything like it before, and seconds later, I spewed a monstrous cumshot deep in her womb.

We were covered in sweat and laughing insanely as we slowly floated back to earth from such an incredible high.

I quickly learned that weed had the same effect on Elise that it had on me. It made her insatiably horny, and we fucked every chance we got that whole weekend, until I left that Sunday.

We spent the whole Christmas vacation doing pretty much the same thing, although finding the time and space to fuck could be tricky.

However, it wasn't all fun and games, and the longer the holiday break continued, the more friction there was. Elise was so horny and fell so quickly into the weed that I would subsequently wonder what she was doing when I was off at college.

When we weren't getting stoned and fucking, we were getting a little bitchy at each other, and I think we were probably headed for the inevitable breakup when fate intervened.

I'd been back at college for the spring semester about a month when Elise called me blubbering. Her period had been late, she'd gone quietly to a clinic and the doctor confirmed her worst fear. She was pregnant.

Even though neither of us was at the time very religious, we didn't believe in abortion, and after talking about it, we decided to get married.

Needless to say, both sets of parents were not happy, and my dad, in particular, begged me not to go through with it. But I felt like it was the manly thing, the honorable thing to do, so in May 1983 we were married.

Much later, after our daughter Mary was born, I worked out the time line, and Elise must have conceived on or about Christmas Day. I would end up doing the same thing with the other two as well.

With a wife and a family to support, college wasn't an option, and I got a job working for a drug store as stocker and sometime cashier.

I couldn't have gotten that job under the same circumstances today because I'd have never passed a drug screen. But that wasn't standard practice back then, and I soon showed an affinity for the job.

After two years, I was promoted to assistant store manager at another branch in town, and in 1985 Elise gave me a son, Robert. Just a year later, we had our other girl, Allison. With that, Elise had her tubes tied and we set about raising our family.

Throughout this period, we partied pretty good, but nothing too wild. We'd smoke pot on a fairly regular basis, and occasionally, we'd spring for some coke, hash or LSD.

Elise liked the way some of the drugs made her feel, and she was enthusiastic about it whenever we got high, especially since we'd fuck like rabbits when we did.

But as the kids got older, the harder drugs fell away for me, and eventually, as I started getting more and more responsibility, I let it start to fade away from my life. And I thought Elise had, as well.

Let me emphasize that I loved her throughout all of this, even if at times things got a little bitchy around the house.

It was in the fall of 1989, when Allison was 3 and Robert was 4, that Elise decided to go back to work, and she found a job as a secretary for a modest-sized electric contractor.

At first, I didn't mind, because it meant added income that we needed to support a growing family. But then I started to meet some of the people she was working with, and I began to get real bad vibes, especially from the men that worked there.

To be blunt about it, a lot of them were lecherous lowlifes, and a couple of them I knew to be serious druggies.

And then there was Elise's friend Glenda, who worked there and who had steered Elise into the job. She was married to Mitch, who was a low-level dealer, and the main person we turned to when we wanted to get fixed up.

They fought constantly, and ran around on each other all the time. Hell, I even think they did some swinging, although I never got involved in that.

Mitch was OK for the most part, unless he got deep into the whiskey, then he could be a real terror, so I didn't get too close to him. But Elise and Glenda became fast friends, so we spent a lot of time at their house.

The first time I really thought something might be going on with Elise was that New Year's Eve. We went to a big party at Mitch and Glenda's, and it was the usual year-end bash -- a lot of beer and a lot of smoke. I had been away from the weed for about six weeks, so it hit me pretty hard.

Still, I was all right until just after midnight, when the champagne started flowing. I sucked down the better part of a bottle -- on top of a dozen or so beers -- and I got sick as a dog. I remember sitting on the driveway in a drunken stupor, and it was cold out that night.

Elise finally found me after I'd been out there heaving my guts out, and brought me in and laid me on a bed, where I passed out.

I must have been down for a couple of hours, when one of their teenage daughters rustled me out of her room. I kind of staggered into the den, looking for my wife, but she was nowhere in sight.

I thought I heard muffled sounds of sex from one of the back bedrooms, but I was too gorked to do anything about it. The next thing I knew it was morning, I was on the floor in their den and Elise was asleep on the sofa.

After that night, I made a vow that I was never going to do anything like that again. I had a good career going, and I could sense that things in society were trending away from an acceptance of recreational drug use. It was the "just say no" era, as the stories about the pitfalls of illegal drug use began to circulate.

I cut down my drinking considerably, and all but gave up smoking pot. I quit keeping it around, and over the next year weaned myself away from it altogether.

I really thought Elise was in it with me, but it began to become clear to me that she'd simply quit using at home.

The first real sign that things were changing came in the spring. Elise went to get her hair cut one day and came back as a blonde. I also noticed that she was losing some of the weight she'd put on having the children, although I didn't see her on any diet or workout program that would cause weight loss.

And with her weight loss and her new hair color -- which I didn't care for -- she began to sport a new, more revealing wardrobe. When I finally complained about it, she just shrugged and said something about wanting to look good. But at work? It didn't add up.

As spring turned to summer, she began going out "with the girls" a couple of nights a week after work, and she started coming in later and later.

After many of her nights out, she'd try to slip in quietly, lock herself in the bathroom and shower. And as she was going out and staying out, our sex life simply ceased to exist. At the time it concerned me; later, I'd be glad it had.

It was in mid-July when she came home around 2 in the morning and I watched her while pretending to be asleep. I watched her pull her dress off, and I was shocked to realize that she'd been naked under her dress.

That was the first concrete sign that really made me suspect that she was fucking around on me. I confronted her about it the next morning, and she looked me straight in the eye and denied it.

"Of course, I'm not having an affair," she said indignantly. "Are you?"

"Not even close," I answered back.

But her attitude spoke volumes. She was taking the offended approach, and turning my suspicions into her suspicions. I knew I'd stayed faithful, even though I had periodically been offered by some of the girls who worked under me. I knew that was a bad practice to get into, and I avoided those encounters.

It wasn't that I was so virtuous that I wouldn't fuck another woman outside of my marriage if I got the chance. It had more to do with my personality. I've never been blessed with the gift of gab, and I never learned how to smooth-talk strange women.

I was in my comfort zone with Elise, and trying to step out with other women would have been hard for me to do.

At home, our attitudes toward each other blew hot and cold, but as time went on, there was more and more of a disconnect between us. Our sex life was a joke, and we weren't having the kind of playful banter we'd had earlier in the marriage.

I also began to harp on it when she'd come home just a little bit late, but with the telltale bloodshot eyes and sweet aroma of marijuana about her.

Again, she turned it back on me, telling me in no uncertain terms that she was old enough to do what she wanted, that I was the one who had started her down that road, and if I wasn't willing to party with her, she'd find someone who would.

Around the end of September, I made a desperate effort to salvage our relationship. I caught Elise on a day when she was off, had her sit down and we talked. I told her I knew she was smoking pot a lot heavier than she ever had before, and I told her I suspected she was using harder drugs as well.

I asked her if she still loved me and if she still wanted to be married to me, and looked at me tearfully and said she did.

"OK, then, I have a few conditions," I said. "I want you to quit that job and find something else, I'd like to see you get into a rehab program and we need to see a marriage counselor. I'm willing to wipe the slate clean, but only if you're willing to meet me halfway."

"I don't know, Steve," she said. "I make good money there, and I like working there. They treat me nice. And I'm definitely not going into any rehab. I understand if you don't want to do it any more, but I'm not ready to quit. I'm not a junkie or anything. I can handle it."

She did agree to meet with a counselor, and we went twice, then she decided that it was a waste of time and money we didn't have, and she quit going.

And the pattern of wayward behavior resumed. I started following her around, to the bars she'd go to after work. She'd drink with a mixed group of men and women, and some of the places she was going were pretty seedy.

I never stayed long enough to see if she went off to motels or anything, because I had to get home to see to the children.

But a couple of times I saw her walk to the back of the bar, toward the rest rooms and stay back there a lot longer than I thought was necessary for her to do whatever business it is that women do in the ladies room.

By December, I had enough circumstantial evidence that I was prepared to take the next step and get concrete proof. By then, our marriage was a joke. We were fighting constantly, and she was coming home late from work just about every other night looking like she'd been rode hard and put up wet.

I was fed up with Elise and what I could see was her pattern of lies and infidelities. More than that, she had really shirked the role of mother as she spent her time running around partying all the time. I was doing most of the parenting, because she didn't have time for the children, and don't think they didn't notice.

I needed to know what she was doing, so I could plan my next move, whether there was any hope of saving our marriage or whether it was time for a divorce.

I did three things to begin.

First, I went to my doctor, ostensibly for a checkup, and while I was there I asked for a blood test. I wanted to establish two things: One, that I didn't have any sexually transmitted diseases, and second, I wanted to show that I was now drug-free.

Next, I quietly got samples from all three of our children and sent them to a DNA lab in another state. I wanted rock-solid proof, one way or another, that I was or was not the father of my children.

DNA testing was not quite as sophisticated then as it is now, but it was advanced enough to tell me whether I was really the father of the children I'd been raising.

I didn't think it would make a difference in my feelings for them. I was their daddy, regardless of whether I was really their father, but from a legal standpoint, I had to know one way or the other. If we got divorced, I was going for custody, and my chances would be a lot better if I was their biological father.

Finally, I asked around and got the name of the best divorce attorney in town, then went to see him. I laid out my concerns, and he agreed to take me on as a client and referred me to his private investigator.

Lillie Spradling was a no-nonsense woman in her early 40s whom I would soon learn knew everybody in town, and everything about them. I told her what I wanted, and she took on my case. It was already starting to cost me an arm and a leg, and I still didn't know anything concrete.