I managed to get through the next four or five days without coming unglued and then one night I got a phone call from my mother.
"How have you been sweetie? I haven't heard from you all week."
"Not good momma. Gail walked out on me."
"When did she do that?"
"Last Tuesday."
"What in the world happened?"
"I don't want to go into it momma. It is kind of personal."
"You didn't go messing around behind her back did you?"
"Damn it momma, you know me better than that!"
"Well it had to be something bad like that to make that girl leave you."
"Sorry momma, but it is just too personal to talk about."
"Are you going to be all right?"
"I'll manage momma."
"Well you keep in better touch now, you hear?"
"Yes momma."
Forty minutes after I hung up the phone the door bell rang and when I went to the door I found my mother standing there. She pushed past me and went straight to the kitchen and sat down.
"Now" she said, "I want to know exactly what happened."
When I finished my story she sat back, looked at me and said, "I guess I didn't do as good a job of raising you as I thought I did. Where did you get all of them fool notions you got in your head?"
"A lot of it came from you momma, from overhearing what you told Alice."
"Girls are different from boys Rob and they get different words than boys do. For one thing, I never expected you to keep your promise to me to stay a virgin until you got married. All I was trying to do was get you out of high school without you getting some poor girl pregnant and ruining both of your lives. And where did you get your ideas on making love? No wonder the poor girl gave up on you."
"Only whores and sluts would do what she wanted to do."
"Am I a whore? Am I a slut? Your daddy and I did every bit of what Gail Sue said she wanted and then some. Nothing at all wrong with any of it. Making love is all about two people giving each other pleasure and whatever gives two people pleasure is a good thing. I just can't believe that you let that girl get away over something so dumb. You need to do whatever you have to do to get her back."
"No momma, I don't think so. She chose to leave. I'm not happy about it, but she wanted out so bad that she didn't even waste a second sitting down and talking about it and at least giving me a chance to make a choice. It was "I'm not getting what I want so I'm out of here." What would it be next time? You won't let me paint the bedroom walls purple so I'm leaving?"
"Honey, you are letting your pride do the talking instead of your head and your heart."
"That might be momma, but she chose to walk so she's gone."
++++++++++++++++++++++
Gail Sue called four days after she walked out and left a message on the answering machine giving me her new address and phone number. I wrote them down, dropped them in the drawer and forgot about them. I was in a funk for a couple of days, but I gradually came out of it.
Being a reasonably healthy young man who was used to making love I got to missing it and I began to look around. In fact, there were several good looking women right in the same office where I worked and four of them were single, but strangely enough it was the two married women who interested me the most.
But married or single there was one thing that I needed to take care of first. I saw an attorney who specialized in divorce actions and he drew up the papers for the divorce using irreconcilable differences as grounds. I gave him the address that Gail had given me and he said he would take care of things and three days later I was told that she had been served. That night as I was fixing my super I got a call from Gail.
"I got the papers today."
I didn't say anything and she said, "I didn't think you would do it."
"That's a strange thing to say. It is what you said you wanted and not just once, but three times as I recall it. First you told me to divorce you on whatever grounds I felt like and then, after spending ten minutes trashing me and telling me how worthless I was, you told me you would let me know where I could send the papers and three days later you called and left a message on the answering machine and as I remember it your exact words were:
"You can send the divorce papers to me here. You were pretty clear in what you wanted Gail Sue."
"I guess I was, wasn't I. Goodbye Rob."
++++++++++++++++
The day after I filed I went by the Human Resources office to find out what I needed to do as far as things like insurance and withholding were concerned and they advised me not to change anything until after the divorce was final.
I wasn't sure of the legalities, but I wasn't worried about them either. I was still legally married and would be until the divorce was granted so technically anything I did with another woman would be adultery, but as far as I was concerned so what? Gail Sue had relinquished all claim to me when she walked out and I had done the same to her when I served her with divorce papers. And, given her big speech about her being such a sexual person and what her sexual needs were (and remembering what she had told me about her past) I'd no doubt she was already getting them taken care of. I figured that released me to go out and do the same.
I'd already noticed the girls I worked with, but they all knew that I was married and I didn't know how to go about getting around it. Somehow I didn't think that going up to one and saying, "Hi Mary, I'm getting divorced. Want to go out?" would work all that well so I sat down and started making out a list of places I could go to meet women. I had a list of about fourteen places, but before I could start investigating the possibilities something I never would have expected happened.
I was sitting in the break room having a cup of coffee when Katrina came over to the table I was sitting at and sat down across from me. After some small talk she said:
"A little birdie tells me that you are a free man again."
"A little birdie?"
