Special Thanks to my own private consultant. When an author has no experience with a particular emotion, it is best to seek out those who know of it first hand. Thanks again. Additionally, I thank my editor, Erik Thread, for his patience and skills, not only with the words, but for his tutelage.
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"I guess I couldn't expect any better. After all, I am a bastard," I mumbled to myself as I lifted my glass to the photo of my parents on the mantle in front of my chair.
Because of my Dad's birth date and the draft lottery number he had, he figured he would be drafted into the Army as soon as he graduated from high school, so he joined Navy. He didn't want to march in formation. There isn't room to do that on a ship. In the early years of the war, almost every soldier or seaman spent part of their military career, long or short, in Viet Nam. He even signed up to go back there for a second year. Spending most of the war offshore on a ship, he must have felt safe because he did it a third time.
After that third tour, during his annual leave around Christmas, Dad met and married a woman he would live with for the next thirty-plus years. Well, it wasn't really the first time he'd met her. He knew her and her family, sort of like you know everyone in a little town with a population of less than 3,000. Because he was married, he really wanted to leave the military, so he agreed to go back to Viet Nam for his fourth tour because it would earn him a discharge a few months early. He got home three months before I was born.
You do the math. Mom and Dad married around the end of the year and I was born a little over a year later, the first ten months of that year, he was several thousand miles away. They never said anything and I never asked, in fact I didn't learn about it until I was grown. Hey, you don't ask your mother, "Please tell me who my real father is." They never said anything to either of my two younger brothers either, both of whom look just like Dad, over six feet, long legs, two hundred plus pounds and even at the age of 63, he still had a full head of hair. I'm the oldest son, but I'm also half-bald, skinny, and short.
Funny, not humorous, but strange, Dad was always a strong-willed, tough guy. Mom was a red-headed termagant, a temperamental shrew who was so jealous she'd question him if he were five minutes late getting home from work. He would stand beside a ringing telephone and let it ring rather than have to go through her interrogating him about who was the woman that had called, and why had she called him. I guess I grew up thinking I should be jealous, too.
That jealousy is probably why Laurel and I had to get married. I think I was marking my territory so every other guy in school knew she belonged to me. I might have been a bold guy, something of a wheeler dealer, but I wasn't stupid. When I needed to go tell Laurel's father that she and I had to get married because she was pregnant, I took my parents with me. I figured the chief of police would be a little less likely to draw his gun and shoot me in front of his wife, daughter, and my mom and dad.
Laurel and I lived with my family for the last half of that year while we finished high school and then we just stayed there because we had the baby. About that time, Dad was pretty sick and only worked part time. My two younger brothers were still in school. Mom was helping with our baby boy, and Laurel was pregnant again. Yeah, we knew about birth control, but didn't do anything about it. Dad's half-income and my job just barely kept enough food on the table for our two families.
It was during Dad's illness that I drove him to the nearest VA hospital for some tests. I was sitting with his medical records in my lap while he was giving samples for some lab work. I was flipping through several pages and saw his service record, including leave dates and discharge date. All the blood drained from my head when I realized he wasn't home when my mother would have gotten pregnant with me. I didn't say anything to Dad, nor did I mention it to my mother. If they wanted to keep that secret, I'd let them. I'd never felt slighted or that I was treated as anything other than their son. In fact, I felt sort of special that my dad had accepted me knowing he wasn't really my father.
When Dad got well, Laurel and I found our own place to live. I worked for a homebuilder and Laurel stayed home with the children, which pretty soon included our third child, a second son. I discovered I liked telling people what to do -- better than I liked working -- so I started my own construction company. Most of the work my company did was home improvements. About the time the baby was two years old, Laurel gave birth to our fourth child, our second daughter. It only took one suggestion from Laurel to convince me that I should have a little medical procedure performed so we wouldn't have any more children.
It's amazing to me that some women just lose all sense of themselves when they become a mother. They gain weight, feel they don't have time to wear and maintain nice clothing, and forget to wear make-up. Laurel was never like that. She had a hot body and took care of herself. She wasn't a clean freak like her mother, but our home was always neat and she was a great cook. She made sure the family went to church regularly, and my Laurel could stretch a dollar until it seemed to buy twice as much as anyone else.
About the time my oldest son was in his first year of high school, my mother was suddenly ill. She went downhill so fast she was too far gone by the time we needed to say goodbye. After the funeral, Dad took a few months before he could do anything other than a day's work and then go home. He started chatting with a few women online. A little over a year after mother died, one of his online friends asked him to come visit her for a weekend. He never really came back home. He just made a trip to quit his job, pack his clothes, and then he went back to live with her.
After he moved on, it sort of became a habit for me to stop by one of the local bars one or two days a week on the way home from work. In a small town there wasn't a lot of choice, it was either the bar I liked or the one with music so loud it would damage your hearing. I was probably copying what I'd seen my mom and dad do, although I didn't go home and get my wife as my dad always did. I'd stop by during the afternoon, or go by there for a beer or two before I went home.
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I'm not a saint and if I'm absolutely truthful, I would probably say I'm not really a good man. Although I'd be pretty angry if my wife looked at another man, or flirted with him, I didn't think that rule applied to me. I flirted, I looked, hell -- I even touched. Dammit, I did a little more than touch.
One of the gals I'd gone to school with was the daytime bartender at my bar. She was three years older, which might mean something when you're in high school but it doesn't matter when you're in your early thirties. She started working there about a month after she divorced her second husband.
A couple of weeks after she started, she asked me to help her flush some of the liquid supply lines in the little closet behind the bar. I bent over to open a valve, but when I straightened up Carol was half naked. We had a mind-blowing stand-up fuck that lasted only a few minutes before we were both trembling from body-shaking climaxes. We continued our acquaintance in a hot and heavy affair that took us to her house two or three afternoons a week. As soon as her afternoon relief arrived, she would call me and I'd meet her at her back door, almost tearing my clothes off. Even though there was no emotional connection between Carol and me, we liked to fuck. She was aggressive, usually taking charge, leaving me panting. I never did kiss her the way I kissed Laurel, though. It was just sex.
