Whap! I wasn't expecting it, and the slap caused me to stagger back, my ears ringing. "What the hell was that for?" I shouted.
Wait, I need to go back a few weeks and explain a few things, or this won't make any sense.
I entered the house from the garage and walked into our kitchen shortly after 4:00 in the afternoon, when I usually get off from work. The company I work for has several clients in the UK, so I start work at 7:00 a.m. every day to have a little overlap time with them. It took me a while to adjust to the schedule, but now I like it.
When I walked into the kitchen I instinctively glanced up at our message board, but the only notation I saw was, "Working late."
Damn, I guess that means I'll be eating alone again tonight.
Back when Ann and I were first married and living in that little apartment, we'd hung a chalk board on the kitchen wall as a way to coordinate our schedules. And when we'd bought the house, we kept the tradition going.
At first we used to leave each other embarrassing little love notes. I remember the time I left her a message reading, "I can't wait to get home from work, Cookie. I'm already missing you!" When I got home that afternoon, she'd written, "I miss you more - and don't call me Cookie!" We first met at a little bakery and I started calling her "Cookie" back then. Now that she was established, she didn't want others to know my pet name for her, but it was hard for me to break the habit.
Yeah, I know, the notes and the nickname all sound a little syrupy, but they meant a lot to me - especially so now that the syrup in our relationship seemed to have lost some of its sweetness. These days I'm lucky to find a terse note telling me what she'd be doing and when she expected to be home. Or, like today, just "Working late."
I'm not naïve. I know that even the shiniest gems lose their luster over time, and that routine and familiarity can dull the sparkle of new love. But for the last year it felt like more than just familiarity was changing our relationship. It wasn't just that we weren't leaving love notes for each other; things had devolved to the point where we hardly ever spent any time together.
My work schedule, of course, was part of the problem. On week days I left for the office well before she was even out of bed. But her work compounded the problem. You see, Ann is a realtor, and while her office has regular hours, she's basically at the mercy of any seller or buyer. Want to make an offer on a house at 9:00 p.m.? Ann will drive over to your place to help you with the paperwork. Trying to sell your home? Ann will arrange an open house that will tie her up all afternoon on Saturday or Sunday. You get the picture.
But that's not the half of it. Two years ago, Ann got it into her head to run for the City Council seat in our district. I did my best to talk her out of it, but friends and associates kept encouraging her. I wasn't too worried at the time because our long-time councilman had gotten two-thirds of the vote in the last election. But half-way into this campaign, his wife suffered a stroke and he withdrew from the race to take care of her. Before I could comprehend what was happening, my wife was taking her seat on the City Council.
That, of course, resulted in a whole new load of responsibilities for her. It wasn't just the monthly Council meetings. Soon Ann was also meeting with constituents, serving on task forces and doing whatever the hell it is that elected officials do.
When I stood on the platform at the hotel with her on election night when she won re-election, I was proud for her and her success. When I saw how happy her new responsibilities made her, I was delighted for her. But as the weeks went by, the time we had together kept shrinking. When I tried to bring up the subject she got defensive, accusing me of jealousy and a lack of support.
All that would be bad enough, but over the past year I've seen a change in her attitude. It's not just that she seems cooler toward me; lately when we've had time together, I've sensed an attitude of condescension bordering on contempt. There hasn't been anything overt, mind you, just a feeling I've gotten.
With all the time I've had to myself, I've done a lot of brooding about the situation. You won't be surprised to hear that that's gotten me in a bad place. I've chafed at the loss of time together with her and resented the demands on her that have come between us. I still remember one evening when we were getting amorous with each other. We had just retired to the bedroom when the phone rang. You guessed it: it was one of her real estate clients with an "emergency" that she had to go fix. Even today, that one still rankles. But, to be fair, I also remember the time I had to cancel our plans for a weekend getaway when one of my company's biggest client had had a network outage.
Now I sat at the kitchen table and tried to sort everything out.
Maybe I'm not being fair to Ann. Maybe I'm just jealous because other people need so much of her time.
But as a network engineer, I've developed the ability to identify problems based on seemingly insignificant symptoms. And my instincts were telling me that there was more at work here than the factors I'd considered so far.
It wasn't just our crazy schedules that were causing me so much discomfort. It was, I realized, her attitude toward me. When she first became a councilwoman, she was so eager to tell me about everything going on with the Council and the Mayor's Office. But now she never brought them up anymore. Was it just that the "new" had rubbed off, or had she decided I was just not worth talking to? That possibility really stung.
Suddenly, a truly dark thought hit me: what if she was having an affair? I immediately rejected such a vile idea; my Cookie would never cheat on me. But I couldn't seem to get the notion out of my mind because it seemed to answer so many of the questions I'd had. What was she really doing all those nights she worked late? She could be seeing clients, but she could also, I realized, be seeing a lover. Why wouldn't she tell me where she was going anymore? Was it because she just couldn't be bothered, or was it because she didn't want me to know. Why was she so condescending to me whenever we were together? Has she grown contemptuous of me now that I'd become her unwitting cuckold?
The longer I sat there thinking, the more I could feel myself spiraling downward in angry suspicion.
I've got to do something to break this train of thought before I do something stupid and irreversible.
So I got up from the table and put on some old work clothes. Then I got out the mower and attacked our lawn until it was too dark to see anymore.
The physical exercise had helped a little. I still couldn't help thinking about the situation, but I calmed down enough to come up with a plan of action. When a network starts having problems, my first step is to perform a number of tests to track down the cause.
I need to do the same thing with my marriage: do the diagnostics and find out what's gone wrong.
Over a dinner of leftovers, I thought about what diagnostic tools I might use. I'm pretty familiar with many of the electronic wonders out there that make spying on someone easy. But the more I thought about it, the trickier the problem became. Sure, I could put microphones and cameras around the house, but with as little time as Ann spent at home, that seemed unlikely to turn up anything useful. It was the time she spent away from home that worried me.
I thought about putting a tracer on her car, but what good would that do? Between real estate showings and City Council meetings, my wife was on the move more often not. Parked at a hotel? She was always attending luncheons and holding meetings in hotel conference rooms. Miniature recording devices? Trying to tap all the phones she uses? Nothing seemed very promising.
I knew the answer, but I hadn't wanted to use it because I figured it was likely to be expensive. But hiring a professional was clearly the way to go, so I sat down at my computer and did a search on detective agencies. Well, that didn't help - there were dozens of them out there. Some had ratings, but I've grown pretty skeptical of online ratings and user recommendations. Too easy to fabricate those. Is there a section of Craig's List for detective agencies? Angie's List? Damn!
Then, further down my search, I noticed an entry for a Channel 9 News story. When I clicked on it, I found they'd done a feature on local detective agencies a year ago. Channel 9, hunh? I went to school with Amy Howard, the gal who's now the news director for the station. We'd even dated some back in college. It hadn't been serious but we'd parted as friends. I called her.
