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.
*
The most difficult part of my road back was to speak to my wife. However, I wanted something from her, too.
I don't suppose I was surprised when I got home, to find Laurel sitting on the couch. I sat down beside my wife and took her hand in mine. She had been crying, probably ever since the children went to bed.
"You're going to have to help me, Laurel. I've lied to you. I've cheated, and I've broken the most important vows I made when we married."
"I'm sorry, Robert." It was difficult for her to talk and sob at the same time.
I looked at Laurel for a moment and said, "I think both of us have forgotten about our promise of forsaking all others."
She made a long low guttural sound that you'd expect from a mortally wounded animal. Then she took a deep breath and did it again. I cannot describe how much that hurt me. She finally stopped and shook her head, took a few deep breaths and admitted, "I don't know how I let this happen."
I hadn't begun to cry, but I felt the tears forming. "I don't think I can stand to hear the details, but I need to know if you love him and I need to know why."
"Love?" She asked, as if she didn't really understand what that was. "I always thought I loved you and that you loved me."
"I've always loved you, Laurel. I didn't always appreciate you, or what we had together, but I loved you. I don't think we can have this conversation without saying some names both of us would probably like to forget. I used Carol to make me feel like I was still some kind of young stud. She started it, but I didn't back away."
"Maybe that's what I did," Laurel was still shaking her head. "I was certain I'd forgiven you and then one Friday afternoon I was vacuuming the carpet in the sanctuary and I just collapsed. I was crying, sobbing, pounding the floor with my fists, and I couldn't stop. Doug found me. He held me for a long time while I told him about what you'd done."
"You didn't ... not there ... I mean, not in the church."
"Oh no, no," Laurel shuddered. "After that day, Doug would give me an extra hug after church or when I went to pick up the children. He got more physical every time I went over to his house."
"And he made you feel good, which was something I'd stopped doing."
Laurel looked at me and tried to smile. "Maybe so, but I wasn't aware that's what he was doing. He listened when I described how badly I was hurt when you were seeing Carol. He always told me it wasn't my fault."
"It wasn't your fault. It was my stupidity."
"Almost every week, Doug would ask me how things were at home. He wanted to know if you and I were having sex more frequently. Each time his questions were a little easier to answer. It was like he took little tiny bites out of my resistance to talk about something so private."
I shook my head at my own stupidity. "I watched it happening. I can't believe I trusted that man. I thought he was helping me gain my wife's forgiveness."
"Carol's older than me and she was attracting men. I was just a plain housewife. I didn't have anything to show a man to make him want me. You sort of stopped, I mean, you didn't kiss me much anymore. You didn't want to make love to me as often. We lived in that little house and were always trying to be quiet so the children wouldn't hear us."
"He took both of us in, we were his victims. I hate him. I want to hurt him so bad, it makes me shake with the need to do something violent."
"Robert, he may be a bad person, but don't forget he has three children. They don't deserve to suffer for what their father did."
That night was the first time Laurel and I were brutally honest with each other. We were soon holding each other, crying about how badly we'd hurt each other. She tried to get me to go to bed, but I couldn't. I told her I still had the vision inside my head, of Doug Hebert's bare ass and his cock pounding into her.
When I built the house, we added a study, which was really my company office. I moved a couple of things in the study and pulled down the Murphy bed. Laurel helped me put sheets on the bed because we agreed we needed some time apart, but neither of us wanted to be very far from the other. We knew we had some healing to do. We also knew the kids would quickly learn something was wrong. We both wanted to be there to let them know things would get better.
* * * *
The next morning, when we had both had a chance to calm down. We waited until the kids were involved in doing other things, and Laurel and I went out to sit on the back patio. I told her I wanted to talk, but I wanted it to be a real discussion. I didn't want either one of us to get so upset that we started arguing or placing blame for anything either of us had done.
"Laurel. I love you. I don't think I've ever thought about how much I love you. I'm not even sure I even understood what love is."
"I love you, too, Robert." She looked down at her fingers that were twisting around each other on her lap. "When Mother heard about what ... about Carol, she asked me if I married you because I had to, or if I really did love you. I told her that of course I loved you, but I just said it to get her to quit talking about it."
She stopped for a moment, and then said, "Maybe that's when I started to question myself. That day ... in the church ... when Doug found me ... that's when I understood how much I had lost. Robert, I thought you were gone, that if you didn't follow Carol, you would find someone else and we would never be together again."
I watched her face when I said, "I had that same kind of feeling when I saw you with Doug Hebert. He's good looking, suave, and women seem to fall all over themselves to do things for him."
"Yeah," Laurel agreed. "I think part of that is because he has a position of power, which he uses to attract women."
"God damn!" I exclaimed, and then apologized to Laurel. "Sorry." I took a deep breath. "I can't blame all of it on him. It's my fault too. I can lie to myself and say what Carol and I had was just sex. I can even let myself believe that Doug seduced you, but I know both of those reasons won't hold water. What I did was wrong. What you did was wrong. Now, we need to do something that's right, for us, only for us."
"Can we ... I mean, can we fix it, repair the damage ... make us like we used to be."
"I want to repair the damage, but I'd like to make us better than we used to be."
Laurel smiled, but looked a little frightened when I said, "I'm going to sleep in the study for a few nights, and then I gotta go see my dad."
"Your dad?"
It was a little difficult for me to tell Laurel that my dad wasn't my father. She gasped when I admitted that I'd known for a long time. She asked why I hadn't told her about it, but I just couldn't do that to him. I explained that if he could live with my mother, and continue to love her for more than thirty years after his discovery that she had cheated, and live every day with the impact of that cheating, me, I needed his advice. He was a good man and I needed some of his goodness, not the artificial religious tripe of a man I felt was responsible for trying to separate Laurel from me.
* * * *
I called Dad and told him I needed to come see him. I know he was curious, but he just said, "Come on." The Easter weekend I'd spent with him wasn't the best shining example of the man he had raised me to be. He told me that weekend that he wouldn't tell Laurel, but he wouldn't lie to her if she asked.
Dad was always a fun drunk. The solemn, tough guy, would turn into a tender-hearted, affectionate man, full of laughter and story-telling. He could drink a beer or two then go to bed and sleep like a log. On rare occasions, he could drink enough beer to entertain a roomful of other boisterous drunks and continue to drink until most of them had passed out. However, there was also a point in his evening of drinking when he would usually turn philosophical. I'd heard more real truths from him and comments on his observations of his fellow man during those evenings, than I'd ever heard from the pulpit of a church.
In the six hours it took me to drive to see Dad, I did a lot of thinking. I've always had some pride in being a silver-tongued devil. I might not be a big guy, physically, but I could pretty easily talk my way out of, or into, trouble. The closer I got to my destination, the more I realized I had to be absolutely truthful with Dad. I had to let it all hang out and not hold anything back. He'd know if I did and he would gauge his responses to what I told him.
Dad's girlfriend didn't drink and he seldom had more than two or three beers. But I drove up to his house that afternoon with an ice chest in the back of my truck. It was filled with two cases of cold beer.
"Hey Dad, you want a beer?" I asked after I'd hugged him and greeted the woman who had finally made him into a happy man.
"Hell, yeah," he said.
I watched Betty grin and walk back in the house. She might appear with a snack or two over the next few hours, but otherwise, she left us in the back yard, under the shade of a tree, with the ice chest between us.
As we drank the first few beers, we talked about my new house and a few things he was doing around Betty's house. The next few beers lasted as long as it took me to tell him all the news from home, things my children were doing, and some of the small town gossip. It was probably about the time we got to beer number nine when I admitted I'd seen his service record and knew he wasn't my real father.
"I gotta know what you thought when you learned she was pregnant and you weren't the father."
"Well-l-l," He drawled. "Your mamma wrote me a letter and said she'd avoided telling me she was pregnant 'cause she didn't want me to worry."
I think I spit a mouthful of beer into the grass when he said, "Just like Laurel, she was a virgin, ya know."
Oh shit, I wasn't aware he knew that about Laurel and me.
"We only had about a week together before I had to go back to Nam. She'd been protected, didn't know nothing about men, and just let some guy tease her 'til it was too late."
"Did you ask her who it was?"
"Nope, didn't care. She was mine, and whatever she did, I'd accept. 'Course ya know, we was doing all this by letters, which took a while."
"You never found out?"
