It's a Dirty Job
I normally like to write stories that are at least close to credible about everyday people faced with difficult situations. This is not one of those times. I suspect that the protagonist is a high-functioning psychopath or is simply broken beyond repair by the circumstances of his life, but I didn't set out to write him that way.
This is a dark, dark tale with extreme violence. I had one thing in mind and the image called to me until I wrote it out. I think you'll know it when you get to it. Please forgive me the violence. There are times when it takes a pen to exorcise the demons. This is, after all, just a piece of fiction.
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I know it must say something about my personality. Maybe it's the guilt my parents used to keep me in line as a child. Maybe it was just my nature. All I know is that even as a kid there were some nights when I would wake up with the most horrible nightmare that I've committed some terrible crime and it's just a matter of time before they come for me. I knew my guilt, I knew the evidence was out there, and I knew I'd get caught. My heart would race and I'd sit bolt upright from a dead sleep and struggle to get back to sleep. The funny thing is I don't have those dreams anymore.
When I met my wife, she was sweet and loving, she giggled when I made a joke, and she won my mother over the first time they'd met. We were married twelve years and all was well those first few years until about six months after our first child, a daughter, was born. That was when she began to change. It was gradual at first and it took years. We had a second child, a son, born two years later. That seemed to cement her new personality, and with every passing year it got worse.
She grew ill-tempered with me and would take sniping shots at the kids. Let's just say that motherhood did not agree with my wife. I tried to talk with her about it more times than I can remember, but those attempts only led to arguments that she would manufacture. I eventually gave up any attempt to fix a marriage broken by forces unknown and we lived two parallel lives. If you asked me what I did to deserve it, I'd be at a loss to answer. She was just an unhappy woman, never satisfied with what she had, and always wanting more.
As the children grew, she found more reasons to be out of the house. These were her distractions, and they grew more numerous with the passing years. I would get home from work and pass my wife in the hall as she was headed out. "You need to fix dinner. I'm going out!" Big surprise. It got so that I viewed those words as a gift. The nights she went out were calm in the house. It was the nights she stayed in that I resented.
I fixed most dinners and I did the food shopping. I knew what was in the fridge and I planned the week's meals. As the children grew older, they gravitated toward me as I became both mother and father to them both. You know, that's just not right. A father hopes his children will be happy to greet him when he gets home, but he knows that their mother is the center of their little lives. My kids seemed to hide in their rooms until I got home and then would burst forth to play with their dad.
I felt I didn't know her anymore. Her mother had cheated on her father and turned her betrayal into a lifestyle. My wife saw what it did to him. His wife threatened to take the kids away, so he stayed, and he suffered until they went off to college, and then he left. My wife saw the pain that her mother's betrayal caused and swore she would never become her mother. That was another vow broken.
The beginning of the end arrived one night in late March. The kids were in bed and my wife came into the living room to utter those words that have made the blood of husbands turn cold for generations, "David, we need to talk." She didn't even call me "Honey". Like a school teacher instructing a wayward child, she explained to me that she would start spending her nights with her lover. It came as no news to me, and as with her nights out I accepted the news with relief. In my wife's case, less was definitely more. I had long ago taken to sleeping in the guest room and her absence would only make our lives less stressful.
At first, I thought she took my acceptance as a victory, but before she left the room I thought I detected a note of disappointment. Was she trying to inflict pain? Did she want me to beg her not to stray? To my thinking, she was just admitting what I had long known, and like her father I was staying for my children until they were raised and out of the house.
The next few months established the new normal and my children never even asked where there mother was. Had she told them? I doubt it. I think they were as relieved as me.
Spring came and I began the usual chores that come with warm weather. We spent a Saturday, my children and I, doing the spring cleaning, airing out the house, dusting and polishing. My wife had now begun to spend weekends away, which was a decision that I embraced. My two children worked hard that day, and I was as proud of them as a parent could be. We celebrated our hard work that night with cheeseburgers and root beer floats.
In the weeks after that I did the things that the children were too young to do. I rehung a shutter that a wind storm had torn from the house. With the windows now open in the warm spring air, I repainted the living and dining rooms along with the entryway. I replaced exterior trim boards that were losing their battle to rot and replaced some weather stripping that was past its prime. Together, we prepared the garden for summer. We had become a family of three.
I do try to maintain the house myself as best I can, but there are some tasks I do not do. I bring in professionals to clean the furnace every fall, and I have the septic truck drain the septic tank every spring. That has got to be the worst job on the planet! They dig up a bit of sod to uncover the lid and then they lower that big hose into the tank of filth until they suck it dry. Even on my worst day on the job, I have a better day that that! They do a fairly good job of restoring the patch of yard where they dig out the septic lid, but you can still see the dirt and mangled sod for a few weeks after.
It was the following Friday night. I knew the kids were with their grandparents for the weekend. I had long ago informed my parents of my wife's activities and they felt it their job to give the grandchildren the occasional weekend of fun as their way of making sure the kids felt loved. My children adored their grandparents.
I came home with carry out expecting an empty house and a quiet evening, but I was met with something very different. In the living room sat my wife and her latest distraction. She was flaunting her affair and he was drinking my good scotch. I didn't give a damn about the affair, but the scotch pissed me off! I stood before them as she giggled and he snickered, and then the lecture began. He was spending the weekend and they would be sleeping in what had once been our bed. She explained that I could watch if I wanted, and for some reason she found that to be terribly funny.
It finally occurred to me as she spoke that it seemed she had a need to systematically escalate her betrayal year after year as if she no longer got a thrill from any existing attempts to belittle me and needed to find new and more exciting ways to destroy me. I wondered where this would lead as if the question posed some abstract academic exercise. I felt nothing for her and little to no pain from her betrayal, but I wondered what I would need to do to protect my children?
I said nothing. I suppose she thought that I was speechless, rendered submissive and surprised by the depth of her depravity, but the truth is that I was trying to decide whether I gave a damn. I had long ago accepted that the woman I'd married was dead. She stood, dropped her dress in front of me to reveal her naked form, and then walked laughingly up the stairs to her bedroom. He walked alongside her and snatched my dinner from my hand. I suppose at that moment I was a wimp, but I had come to find both her and her toys to be so far beyond contempt that they were not worth the effort of confronting them.
