This is a BTB story. If you don't care for that genre I certainly don't blame you. I don't condone any of the despicable behavior in this story. I just write what the voices in my head tell me to write. The story takes place on five days. In order they are:
Today - 56 days ago - 47 days ago - 45 days ago - Yesterday.
The female of the species is more deadly than the male...
-Rudyard Kipling
Steve's Blue Truck - 3705 pounds of wrath
Today
I grew up a happy tomboy in southern Illinois farm country, working on wagons, tractors, motorcycles and such with my father and my uncles. We built a couple of dirt track race cars and a couple of bracket racers over the years. I helped my big brother Jake build a Cougar and a few years later my little brother John helped me build a Mustang. Then we both helped John build a Bronco. I truly love both of my brothers but I have always looked up to and idolized my big brother. Five years older than I, he was my teacher growing up, my protector on playgrounds, my confidant and my friend.
He was my sponsor in a girls-only elementary school running club and he ran with me at the all-schools meet at Lewis and Clark College. Once Jake got a driver's license he occasionally drove me and my friends to the Alton Square Mall on weekends, the junior high school mixer and the Sadie Hawkins dance. After he graduated from each I put his high school and basic training photographs in nice wood frames and sat them on my dresser; those were happy pictures. I also put his wedding photograph in a frame and put it next to them; I felt that I had to. It humored me knowing that it was in a lower quality colored aluminum frame.
I wish that I could say that I saw it coming, that I saw something that nobody else saw in Barbra, but I didn't. She concealed her true nature well. I understood that my well concealed but intense dislike of her was based in my own jealousy. Jake was perfect, he was my dream dude and she got him. I knew that it was a totally irrational thought, because he was not available to me. I know... Well, I don't actually "know," but I've heard stories of siblings that crossed that particular line; I never would. Not because of Jake, he would totally be worth it. Because it would kill my parents, and I could never, ever hurt my family. Well, I could not hurt a blood relative.
In my eyes Jake was the perfect husband just as he had been the perfect soldier and the perfect brother. He still is the perfect brother. If I need some help or even just a pick-me-up word after a difficult day or a tough class at Southern Illinois University, I still call Jake, and he is always there for me. Barbra's dad was sick when they met, and he passed about a year after their wedding. That is when Jake got completely sucked into her family's insipid melodrama. He was suddenly unavailable to do anything he or we wanted to do because a brand new crisis would always appear, sometimes mere minutes before whatever we were going to do.
Then two months ago I finally saw through Barbra the way that we all should have before they got married as Jake explained the latest inane crisis to me.
The job that I had in front of me tonight was not a crisis by any means. It was just a lot of work to get completed in the cold and poor light of my friend Melinda's barn so I could get back home before my housemates woke up in the morning. It was a good thing Steve had morning classes and was a really sound sleeper, but I didn't want him to think I was out all night. As Yogi Berra once said, It felt like it was deja-vu all over again. Last month it had taken me considerably longer than I had expected to paint the rear of my boyfriend's truck, and prime and paint a dismounted hood and two fenders in matching robin's egg blue.
Tonight it took most of the night to unbolt the damaged front bumper, grille, hood, and front left fender. I also unbolted the undamaged right fender. I had already painted all of the replacement parts, and they all matched perfectly. The new paint had set up for over a month and the whole truck could be buffed out tomorrow or anytime really. Jake had taught me well, and that education was unknowingly returning to benefit him, I thought. I had been paying rapt attention eight years ago when he painted his Cougar.
They say that it is always the darkest right before the dawn. I had a really crappy Tuesday. But I was heartened by the fact that it was now very early Wednesday morning. I could cut class and get some sleep. I put the license plates back on Steve's truck, pulled it out of the barn and parked it where it belonged in front of the house that we shared. Once inside, I went straight to the bathroom. I had to pee rather badly, but not as badly as I had yesterday after sitting for an hour and a half watching that stupid mailbox like a hawk and drinking two big service station coffees in the process. I had done what I thought was required and didn't pee my pants in the process. Not that I'm complaining, some people had a far worse Tuesday than I did.
I turned on the oven and pre-heated the stove. I put a dollop of bacon grease in the frying pan. I got the carton of eggs, a carton of milk and a tin of biscuit dough out of the icebox. Then I set myself to work making breakfast. People embrace familiarity, it is comforting. I have a pattern, I make Steve and myself a good hearty breakfast on school days. Patterns can be good for us or they can be bad for us. I hoped that they would protect me from any incongruent speculation. I already knew that they make a person vulnerable to retribution from those who take that role upon themselves.
***
Two months ago, 56 days to be precise.
I did not have a specific reason to be suspicious when I went with Steve to the advertised "open house" at Barbra's mother's house, just a feeling that something was amiss. Barb had moved her mother into what I thought of as "Jake's house" with her after her father passed. She was ostensibly trying to sell the old place. I say ostensibly because it was priced considerably over market. Jake said that was because it had a second and third mortgage that had to be paid off and they wanted to break even. At first I thought their asking price was wistful thinking, but decided to look at the place, maybe it had "something" not apparent in the listing agent's photographs.
It did have "something" different. What I saw when I looked at the place made the short hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Someone was living there. Some guy was living there.
So, four days later when Jake was at work, I went back alone to what I thought of as "Barb's house." Sure enough Barbra was there, not at Jake's taking care of "mother." So was someone with a black Honda Del Sol. I did some scouting from a distance and waited for more than an hour outside, but neither of them came out. Then I had to leave to get to a class to get to. When I came back that night, only the Del Sol was there. So, the next time that I saw him, I lifted one of Jake's keys. I had the key copied over at the Ace Hardware and returned it without him ever knowing that it was gone. All those 'Harriet the Spy' novels I had read in my childhood were paying dividends now.
With a bit of finesse, I could free up my Tuesdays and Thursdays while Jake was at work. That way I could park a couple of blocks away and observe them together. I had taken the outside basement key so that I could sneak in and observe them. Although as it turned out the best I could do was listen to them without being observed. I had to be certain of my facts before I presented my case to Jake. A sweet trait that did not serve him in this situation was that he always thought the best of people. He would neither want to think that he was being two-timed or that she was doing it.
Although I couldn't see them, I could hear them upstairs. She was giddy and anxious like a high school girl on a date. I could imagine that her belly had been aching this morning at breakfast in anticipation of the deceitful day she had planned. Pleased that her husband either hadn't noticed her demeanor this morning or that he had misattributed it. Fighting her emotions so as not to let it show that she was glad when her husband left to go to work. Someone she thought was a schmuck working to earn money to support her cheating ass and pay the cost of housing Mister Black Del Sol. Laughing at his working while she was playing around behind his back.
Barbra fully understood how Jake earned their money, the amount of work that it involved. She wanted nice things, better things. It was insane, she had the aspirations and she had put the additional strain on their finances when she quit her job to "take care of mother." But her mother was probably back at Jake's otherwise empty house watching some daytime drama while she was here creating one. The only silver lining that I could see was that "all the work taking care of mother," precluded starting a family with Jake. With luck, I thought, that delay might prove to be a permanent one.
It probably had not been the most difficult task for the quite attractive but not classically beautiful Barbra, with her long slender legs, flowing blonde hair and trim lines to make Jake fall in love with her. For obvious reasons, being a member in good standing of the "itty bitty tittie comittee" myself, I attributed his falling for a woman of modest bust measurement to his well developed and sophisticated intellect. Jake has a strong desire to fix things, and she presented as having a lot of potential. If only a few "temporary setbacks," mostly pertaining to her elderly parents who were in poor health, could be overcome. I thought that he had been putty in her hands since that first crisis she had allowed him to solve. When his delivered reward had been the comfort of her affectionate twenty-year-old body.
Barbra was a child of her parent's old age. She had always seen herself as being really special because her parents had treated her that way. She saw herself as a "lady" of the upper class, not the working class as those saps had been. She drove cars and lived a lifestyle that her parents couldn't afford to buy but for their outstanding credit. She grew up running up outrageous bills without them ever asking her to contribute a single dollar, or - shudder to think of that "four-letter-word" - work. Her father's job provided her parents with income and health insurance yet somehow on the day that she married they were destitute and debt-ridden. Jake had been her connecting interline transfer ticket to the lifestyle she felt she deserved.
I wondered if she had taken her first lover after she married Jake. Then I considered that she had possibly kept one on hand from before. Right after the wedding it appeared from the outside, as with most newlyweds, that Jake and Barbra spent all of their time either together, or helping out with her parents. I wondered how much of that drama Barbra had actually tried to solve on her own. Maybe none of it? Had it had all just been dumped in Jake's lap because he "would fix it," while she did something else that she found more entertaining.
***
Nine days later, or 47 days ago.
I had just set up the cameras and the recorder I bought at Gateway Electronics when Barbra arrived home. I thought that this would be a perfect test of my surveillance set-up. I retreated to the basement stairs and concealed myself so I could open my laptop and pull up the audio and video feed from my wireless cameras.
After making herself a drink she sat down on the armchair and made a call on her cellphone.
"Hey Susan..." Barbra said.
"I'm happy for you." The tone of her voice said the opposite.
"No, damn it, it's not..."
"That little bitch... His sister..."
Her statement made me rather mad. I am five-foot-ten. That is well above average. I am a rather big bitch. One to be reckoned with...
"She told Mr. Clueless that I was seeing Joey here on the sly and implied that I'm intrangent on the dump's sale price so as to keep it for illicit meetings with him or others."
"So what if it's true. That is irrelevant; she has no business in my affairs..."
She snorted at the word "affairs," as if it were funny.
"Something... He's a Schmoe, all that matters to me is that he keeps a consistently high bank balance that my checks don't bounce."
"Psssh, two full years. That is nothing..."
"Kris balked. I ask him for one little favor. 'Waahaa where am I going to stay,' fucking loser. I sent him packing."
"But there is this new guy at the tennis club. Joey, I think..."
"Oh, it's a great meet-market, that's where I met Dave..."
"Really, I never told you?"
"Weeks of hot, steamy, sweaty sex..."
"Because he was such a fucking slob he was going to get me caught..."
"That was before I got the bright idea to move mom in with us. I was afraid Jake would notice something that Dave had upset at our house."
"Like the stupid shampoo, Jake always closes the lid and puts it on the wire thingy. I'd have to go back and put stuff he touched away."
"No, he wasn't married..."
"I did, but three got to be one too many."
"Jose, Mr. Muscles, he was one of the guys who moved mom's furniture."
"I sold it all to some antique guy, got three thousand cash for it. Then I told my husband it was all faux wood particle board rent-to-own and we returned it."
"I fucked him, so he found some crap they had behind the thrift store and brought it here."
"You know, he always knew it was a temporary thing."
"My, but the energy he had..."
