I was bleeding like a stuck pig from the cut I had just ripped on my right hand working on my car engine, so I ran from the garage into the downstairs bathroom for a towel and then a washcloth. Then I reached into the medicine cabinet for a Band-Aid, finding the metal box right next to my wife's birth control pills.
After putting two Band-Aids on the cut, I reached back in to put the box away and just happened to glance at the prescription. It was dated over four months ago for 30 pills ... and it was empty. Ah, shit!
At 52 years old, it was unlikely my wife, Traci, needed to worry about taking birth control pills, but since she had been having sex with multiple men for the last 18 months, the last thing I wanted was for her to get pregnant. With our two kids 28 and 25 years old and long since out of the house, I would have thought that was the last thing she would have wanted as well, but apparently, what the fuck do I know?
When she started on this "adventure," first cheating on me without my knowledge and then doing so with my tacit but unhappy agreement, it was with a younger coworker. That gradually morphed into sex with a handful of partners on a regular basis, and some more on an irregular schedule. I never in my wildest dreams would have thought she would it have done it without birth control, but then again I never thought she'd ever step out on me, either. Wrong and wrong.
As it was late Saturday afternoon, I knew exactly where to find Traci. She was upstairs in our main bathroom, getting ready for her evening's fun with Tony, Jack and crew. Tony was the young guy with eight inches of meat who had become Traci's go-to lover, and he usually had several friends in on the action with him. He and Traci were a twice-weekly deal, and had been for about a year now. He was somewhat of a dominant, and he knew how to push Traci's buttons. He had tried to include me in on the deal as Traci's sub, and had her drug me once so he could humiliate me by coming down my throat, but I stopped that shit from happening again by threatening physical harm, and the kid knew I could kick the shit out of him.
I walked into the bathroom and put the pill bottle on the counter in front of Traci. She looked at it and said, "Ooh." Then she looked at it harder and realized what it was, and said "Ooooohhh!" Yeah.
"When were you planning on telling me, when you got knocked up?" I half-yelled at her. "Are you fucking nuts?"
I had seen that "Oh shit, I got caught look" too many times in the last 18 months. I thought we had come to some kind of understanding about her escapades, but apparently we hadn't -- in a big way.
"There's no fucking way on God's green earth I'm raising somebody else's kid! Not happening, now or ever! I'll be gone! Do you fucking understand me?" I screamed.
Even with all the bullshit that's gone on for the last year and a half, I don't think I've screamed -- not just yelled, but actually screamed -- at Traci more than three times in our 31 years of marriage. The terrified look on her face told me she understood what I was saying, and also told me I was too late to stop the sequence of events that was about to play out.
I turned, opened the stool, leaned over, and blew lunch. What else do you do when someone hits you in the stomach with a 300-pound lead pipe?
When I finally composed myself and swallowed some water to help get the taste of puke out of my mouth, I looked at my now crying wife and quietly asked, "How long have you known?"
"I've missed my last two periods," she answered.
Again, ah, shit.
I started to raise my voice and yell again, but thought better of it.
"How could you possibly do this to me, to us? What about our kids? Now what do we do?
"I won't ask you to abort it. Neither of us believes in abortion as the answer to this, and I would never make you choose between me and the baby. That's a choice I have to lose, and that I understand. But I can't raise another man's child. I guess you've made the choice for both of us."
I turned, walked out of the room, then the house, got into my car and drove to the nearest bar. I handed the bartender $50 and my car keys, wrote my address on a napkin, and told him to call me a cab when I hit my limit. I might not have been smart enough to leave my wife when I found out she was cheating on me, but I am smart enough not to drive drunk.
I sat quietly and planned my future with my good buddy Jack Daniels. I knew that I had to be the man I should have been in the first place, but I had to do it right.
I walked in the house at about midnight. Normally, Traci wouldn't be home yet, but apparently she cancelled her evening's fun, because she was sitting up in the kitchen in her robe with a cup of coffee in her hand when I walked in.
"We need to talk," she said, voicing the words no husband ever wants to hear, but at this point I just didn't care.
I reached into the liquor cabinet and pulled out a bottle of Jack Daniels Tennessee Honey. I poured myself a couple of shots and sat down.
"We can work through this," she started. "If we can work through the other stuff, I can't see why we can't do this."
"There's the little matter of me raising someone else's kid, babe. It's bad enough you turned me into a cuckold, and then I let you become a complete slut, but this kid will be a constant reminder to both of us that you truly don't respect me or love me, despite what you say.
"I'll stick around long enough to make sure you and the baby are okay, but then I'm gone. You can tell the kids what you'd like, I will tell them the truth about us and the baby. I'm not trying to be vengeful, but I'm not taking shit from anybody else for the situation you made and then I allowed. I'll accept my fault in this but no more."
I stepped over to her, gave her a kiss on the top of the head, and went upstairs to bed. She didn't follow right away, but when I woke up in the morning, I was curled around her just like normal. I rubbed her stomach a few times, knowing that it was still way too early to be feeling life.
There was little talk of her pregnancy for the next couple of weeks as life got back to normal -- such as it was for us. She had her first OB-GYN appointment at about what she figured was the three-month mark, and like I had done for the other pregnancies, I went with her to the appointment. This was a new doctor from the one we used the first two times because her old doctor had retired a few years ago. This was a 30-ish smallish Asian woman who seemed to be trying to outdo Mr. Rogers in the cheerful department, and her nurse also seemed to have had one too many happy pills.
While the doctor was examining Traci, she tried to make small talk with me, and twice called me "Dad," a not too uncommon practice in most cases. This wasn't, however, most cases, and after the second time she called me Dad, it was time to clear the air.
"Excuse me, Doc, but I am probably not the baby's father, so I'd appreciate it if you'd stop calling me Dad. Save that for the son of a bitch who is, when you find out."
The doctor, her nurse, and Traci all looked shocked, then Traci's face got beet red.
"It would have been nice of my wife to have been honest with you ahead of time, but apparently she wasn't. So anyway, when is the earliest we can do a fetal DNA to tell me what I already know?"
The doc stammered a bit before regaining her composure, then told me we could do DNA in about a month. She made the appointment for us right then.
The cutesy, fun appointment turned into a somber exercise after that. Traci stayed red-faced, but I think half of that was from anger, not embarrassment. When we finally got back in the car, she exploded.
"Don't you ever again embarrass me like that!" she screamed at me. "You don't want to be a part of this, fine, but you're not going to ruin it for me!"
"And there it is!" I shot back. "It's always about you. Your fun. Your pleasure. Well, fuck that. I need to know for sure, and if you don't want to tell people the truth, that's on you. But I'm not covering your ass. It's not my kid. You made the choice to become a slut, then you made the choice to get knocked up. Or was it somebody else's choice on becoming pregnant?"