Friends. I have been really, really busy over the last few months and have written not a sausage. I haven't even had time to polish and submit one of the many I have near completion. This all changed yesterday. I looked at the recently published list and there was only one LW story with a good enough score to interest me. It was scoring 4.40 so I read it. At the risk of sounding like an arrogant wanker, it was awful. The guy lost his wife and kids in pages of unoriginality. That spurred myself and a friend to roughly polish a spare one and submit. Hopefully this one raises the quality of stories here and shows readers that there are still wild stories out there; plots waiting to be conquered, and that inspires them to write. I have gone back to my roots a little with this one. There is no sex and the husband is once again faced with a situation in which he appears to have very limited options.
My heartfelt thanks to Creativitytakescourage. Not only for the lightning fast edit but for reminding me that good things happen to good people.
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Until 5:30p.m., today was a typical day. Let me see now, how did it start? Up at 7:00a.m., showered, got the kids out of bed, then made their breakfast and school lunches. After that, I woke Tracey to make sure she got eleven-year-old James and eight-year-old Maddy on the school bus. She was tired from her late night tennis tournament. After kissing the kids goodbye, I left at eight for my job as foreman of the local authority's civil works gang. After a typical day, I headed home a little after five.
Today was pay day and I stopped at an ATM to get some cash for the weekend. The bloody machine swallowed my card. No message or warning; just refused to give me cash or my card back. In hindsight, it was maybe a little silly to put in my credit card to try to get a cash advance. It was Maddy's birthday on Sunday and I intended spending Saturday buying her something special. The bloody machine swallowed that one as well. The bank was closed so I just headed home.
At home, I noticed Tracey's car wasn't in the driveway. I rushed to the front door, hoping she hadn't made the kids come home to an empty house again. She knew I hated that. After the last time, I'd told her to ring me if she had something important on after school, so I could come home early.
As I was putting the key in the lock, I heard a voice behind me say, "Mr. David Brown?"
I automatically said, "Yes," as I turned round. A middle aged man held an A4, yellow envelope out to me with the name, 'Slugden and Pyke' in one corner.
He handed it to me. "You have been served, sir," and walked away.
Confused just doesn't come close to how I was feeling. I continued into the house. As soon as I got in, I felt it was unusually empty. Two minutes later, I'd discovered that, not only was it bereft of the three other members of my family, but all their clothes and possessions had disappeared as well. There was no note or message on the phone. Nothing at all. All I had to answer the swarming confusion I felt, was the damned yellow envelope.
Sitting at the kitchen table, I ripped it open. The first document, I soon discovered, was a divorce application. I'd never seen one before, but the title left no doubt. There were those little sticky labels saying, 'Sign Here', sticking out the side. I didn't bother reading it, just skipped to the next document. This one was a little harder to understand. Eventually, I figured it said I had two months to vacate my own house, so it could be sold. What the f...?
The third document was even harder to interpret. Eventually, the penny dropped—some guy called Michael Smith wanted to adopt my kids. At the risk of repeating myself, what the f...?
The last document had a title that brokered no confusion. The restraining order said I was forbidden from approaching within two hundred metres of my wife, my children, or Mr. Michael Smith and his residence of 12 Riverview Drive blah, blah, blah.
I felt completely bushwacked. The sheer enormity of the change to my life, threatened to completely collapse my soul. I think it may have, but for one thing which I didn't realise at the time. The problem was so enormous I couldn't grasp it in my mind in one bite. My automatic emotional defence mechanisms had cut in to save my sanity. My mind was blank to start with, then little certainties started to drip into my consciousness. My wife had left me to set up with some guy I'd never heard of. She'd taken the kids and wanted me to release them so he could adopt them. She'd closed all our joint bank accounts and wanted to sell our house to get that cash as well. Her partner in crime was called Michael Smith and he lived at 12 Riverview Drive.
What was making things worse, was my embarrassment about my naivety. If Tracey had taken this step, then whatever was happening had been building for a long time. I hadn't seen a single clue. I knew Tracey wasn't that smart, so the only conclusion possible was I'd been really dumb. I searched my memory for retrospective clues.
Sure, Tracey had become a little distant about six months ago, but when I pointed this out, she'd snapped out of whatever funk she was in. Our sex life, that had shrunk to a shadow of its' former glory, came back with a vengeance. In fact, it had come back bigger and much better than ever. Out was the sexually repressed wife I knew. In was an adventurous sex maniac I didn't recognise. I smiled as a recollected some of the things that had happened in our bedroom recently.
Could they be things she'd been road testing with Mr. Smith first? No. That just wasn't Tracey. The solution to that one filled my veins with ice. I now think she'd always wanted to do those things but her repressive upbringing wouldn't allow her to do them with someone she respected. The logical conclusion to this was both sad and amusing. She'd lost respect for me six months ago; that was the sad bit. The funny bit was I was getting kinky-sex-Tracey, while Mr. Smith was almost certainly getting repressed, missionary-only-Tracey.
Hold that thought, Dave. You'll need every opportunity to laugh to get through what's to come.
I was still numb with shock as I decided on my first course of action. It may have been a surprising move to anyone who hadn't read my last psychological appraisal. My boss had come up with the trendy idea of getting all his senior staff profiled. I was proud of the line in their report, 'Mr. Brown is not particularly rule bound.' A subtle way of saying I was a bit of a cowboy who was results focused and got the job done using accepted guidelines as a reference only. This report was followed by my receiving the highest professional compliment ever at that years' performance review. My boss, who was as straight-laced as they come, had sat me down and said, "Dave, every time I have a difficult job that needs doing; I give it to you. On that day, I write in my diary how I think you will do it and how long it will take you. I'm happy to say I've never once been right." He then gave me the highest score possible and we had a good laugh. Unfortunately, that meant nothing, as I was already at the top of the tree my qualifications allowed. The pressure of supporting a wife and children had precluded me completing my Engineering qualifications to allow me to jump to the next tree.
