The curtain calls I occasionally use in my stories are my way of showing appreciation to others for various courtesies, which sometimes include an astute critique that I use for improvement.
William Shakespeare once wrote, "The pen is mightier than the sword."
As someone who once faced a sword-bearing warrior while a member of the Special Forces, I can tell you I greatly disagreed with Mr. Shakespeare at that moment. Fortunately for me at the time, I also held a sword in my hand, or else I wouldn't be here today writing this.
So I was one up on The Bard when life jumped in and handed Mr. Shakespeare a cheap win.
The fountain pen was invented in 1827, in France. The first ballpoint pen patent came 61 years later, in 1888.
Throughout the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st century, pens have been used to great success as simple marketing tools. Even in this day and age where cellphones rule, many companies still put their names on pens to get their message out.
And those pens travel. A salesman hands a customer a pen. He later gives it to one of his kids. That kid takes it to school and loses it, where it's found by a teacher who puts in his pocket. Three weeks later that same pen is three states away, tucked behind the ear of a delivery man.
As I relate this, I have four pens with company names on them in my pen cup. You get the idea.
So it wasn't exactly a surprise that when I asked my wife for a pen at a dinner the other night, after discovering mine was out of ink, that she handed me a pen with a company name on it. As one of my responsibilities at the bank I work at is marketing, I always look at the names on pens, letterheads, etc., so I noticed the pen was from The Waltham, a hotel on the other side of town from where we lived in a large Midwestern city. I quickly made a note on the back of one of my business cards, put the note in my pocket and handed the pen back to my wife. Unlike a lot of people, I always return pens when they are loaned to me. Just one of my quirks.
We were sitting with two other couples at one of the nicer restaurants in town when I just had to write down a "note to self." Yeah, I know most people leave themselves an email on their phone, but another one of my quirks is that I prefer the old-fashioned method of writing a note. It seems to stick better with me.
Drink was flowing, the food was great, the conversation was light and jovial, but then I got a brain itch. While I'm fully aware that pens travel, it just struck me as funny that my wife would have a pen from The Waltham. The Waltham was a mid-level hotel clear across town, and I couldn't for the life of me imagine Traci running into anyone who stayed at The Waltham recently.
I make very good money and Traci only worked part time in a corporate law office. I know she was active with several groups in town, so it was improbable, but not impossible, that she could have gotten it at work or from one of the people in the historical society or the English Literature Society. I always thought those people were a little stuffy, though, and would probably consider The Waltham well below their standards.
The next morning when I was getting ready for work, as I stuck the card with my note to self on it in my shirt pocket, I remembered the pen. Just out of curiosity, I grabbed Traci's phone off her bureau and went to look at her calendar. It's highly unusual for me to touch her phone at all, but I figured a peek at her calendar wouldn't hurt anything and would clear up this pen thing in my mind. She was still asleep and would be for another hour, so there was no sense waking her to ask what I thought was a simple question.
To my complete surprise, Traci's phone was locked. I didn't believe it at first, so I actually tried it three times before it hit me. While I don't touch her phone very often, I have used it on occasion, and it's never been locked before. This was a new wrinkle.
Now that the challenge was thrown down, I accepted it. I thought for a few seconds of all the passwords she would probably use, and punched several in unsuccessfully. Then I punched in several more unsuccessfully. It wasn't until I entered in our younger daughter's Social Security number that I was able to unlock the phone, and by that point I was mad and losing my cool. So instead of going to her calendar, I went to her messages and started to scroll down. At this point, it was "fuck her privacy." I was going to open anything that didn't look familiar to me. The sixth contact down wasn't listed by name, just by initials: RJ. Bingo!
There were about a dozen exchanges discussing what only an idiot wouldn't assume was an affair. The last discussed a meeting this Thursday afternoon, again at The Waltham. Ah shit! Fucking Shakespeare just tied the game at one.
With trembling hands, I put Traci's phone back where I found it, and headed off to my job in a daze. Hard to believe that 27 years of marriage could be gone just like that.
At 50, the same age as me, Traci is still a beautiful woman. She has long blond hair and sparkling blue eyes, and at 5-7, 130 is only about 10 pounds heavier than when I first married her at 23. Her 38DDs are still a thing of beauty, even after breastfeeding all three of our children.
And thinking of the children, how was I going to tell them if my suspicions were confirmed? The girls at least are both out of the house at 25 and 23, and the youngest child, our son, 21, still lives with us when he's not at Michigan State. Traci's been a great mother, I have to admit, and this will probably be an ever bigger shock to them than it is to me.
I worked like a zombie the whole day. At 4:30, I went in to the bank president's office and asked for Thursday off for a personal day. I'd worked with and for H. Dave Knight for 17 years, since I got out of the service, and he could tell by my face that something big was wrong. He walked around from his desk and closed the door before returning to his seat behind his desk.
"What's wrong, Allie?" he asked, calling me by the nickname that my close friends and relatives used for me.
I debated for a second how much I was going to tell him, before I got choked up and started to cry in his office. Nobody -- and I mean nobody -- had seen me cry since I was about 6 years old and I broke my arm falling out of a tree. I tore up a knee playing football in high school, I took a couple of bullets and a knife on assignments in the Special Forces. Never cried. And there I sat blubbering like an idiot.
I told him what I found and all of my suspicions. As I talked, I started getting angry, and animated. H-Dave, as I called him in good humor, knew of my background, and started getting a worried look on his face.
"Allie, you need to calm down and think this through," he said. "Don't go doing something stupid and maybe wind up in jail. If this turns out to be what you think it is, don't ruin your life over this. You've faced much tougher situations before in your life than this."
"That's true, H-Dave, but I always had a clear objective. She's ripping my heart out. And it wouldn't be that difficult to make both of them disappear."
"Jesus, Allie! You can't be talking like that to anyone else! If either one of them gets a hangnail, guess who winds up in prison?"
"I know you're right, H-Dave, but I still need to take Thursday off to confirm my suspicions."
"First promise me on the lives of your three children that you won't do anything to harm either one of them."
