Молли Харпер - And One Last Thing...

Every women’s magazine I’ve ever read says there are five signs a man is cheating on you. All married women, hell, all women in a committed relationship, know them by heart.

Repeat them, if you will, ladies. Diminished sexual appetite. Finding reasons to work late. Cutting you off from his communications - leaving the room when his cell phone rings or changing an e-mail password without explanation. Unexplained charges on the credit cards. Finding fault with you because it makes him feel justified in cheating.

In my defense, the age-old standard didn’t exactly help me. I’d always felt so safe, so stupidly smug in the security of my marriage, I never even thought of them. Again, because I’m a moron. Mike’s sexual appetite had never been exactly ravenous. He regularly worked ten-hour days, twelve to fourteen hours during the January to April tax season. So many of his phone calls dealt with clients’ financial issues that it was normal for him to take business calls in another room. I never saw our credit card statements because Mike handled all of our bills. And he hadn’t found more fault in me than he had when we first got married, which wasn’t really a compliment to either of us.

As I was vomiting on the lawn, this list of cheating signs bounced through my head like a Buddhist chant. With more purpose than I could fathom, I cleaned up the car mess and ran into the home office. Mike and I had separate e-mail accounts, again for business reasons. When I logged on to the quickmail.com server, believe it or not, he was dumb enough to have left thestinger@quickmail.com in the user box and checked “Remember this address.”

Mike’s e-mail password had always been a combination of my phone number from college and my middle name: 64l0agnes. But it was not working. I tried it three times and made sure the capslock was off.

The son of a bitch had changed his password. Honestly, where was the trust? I tried combinations of his birthday, his middle name, my birthday, the street we lived on, our wedding anniversary. Nothing. Finally I tried “Bumblebee.”

“Please tell me this isn’t it,” I muttered.

“Welcome!” the monitor yelled, showing me a list of Mike’s new messages. I thunked my head on the desk and sobbed, “Damn it!”

Mike and Beebee must have had complete confidence that I was far too stupid to figure out Mike’s new password, because his in-box was a treasure trove of divorce court exhibits. First up, we had several digital photos of Beebee, who was apparently very proud of her recent purchase of lingerie and her new tattoo. Her poses were enthusiastic and … detailed. Then there were several messages outlining their plans to meet at the Royal Inn outside town on nights when Mike was supposedly meeting with clients or attending dinners with the Rotary Club. Other post-rendezvous mash notes described what they’d done, where they’d done it, and how good it felt. One charming missive detailed the night Mike returned late from a romp with Beebee and slipped into bed with me, reeking of her perfume. The phrase “She doesn’t suspect a thing” was repeated enough to prompt another vomiting run.

Well, at least he’d left a paper trail. I managed to keep it together enough to print out copies of everything and hide them in the bathroom drawer where I kept my feminine supplies. Mike was almost clinically phobic of Tampax. I also forwarded the entire contents of his in-box to my own e-mail address. Including the pictures. That done, I ran for the newly retiled comfort of our shower and huddled there, the spray burning needles into my numb skin until the hot water ran out. Waterlogged and shivering, I bundled into my ratty old blue robe and crawled under the covers. I just couldn’t seem to warm up.

It felt like life had thrown a pie right in my face. And that pie was full of bricks.

Across the room, there was a bank of matching silver picture frames on a table that had been Mike’s great-grandmother’s - a happy blond couple on vacation in the Bahamas, at a Fourth of July barbecue, sitting in front of a Christmas tree. In each of them, I’m smiling blithely into the camera, secure in my position in a life where nothing could possibly go awry.

How could he cheat on me? Was Beebee his first … was “girlfriend” the right word? Had there been others? Did he even think about how this might make me feel, or was I even a consideration before he unzipped his pants? Was she better in bed than me? Did she know special tricks?

How dense could one person be? I didn’t even bother asking about his Lions Club or Rotary meetings anymore. After hearing “Oh, nothing new” so many times, I just assumed he wouldn’t want to talk about them. I never questioned how many nights he was spending away from home. He came to our marriage bed with her stink on him. And I didn’t see (or smell) any of it.

I was the stupidest woman on the planet.

I slipped off my wedding ring set and stared at the tasteful solitaire. My hand felt so light without that empty circle, that hideously appropriate symbol. I laid it on the nightstand and wondered if Mike would notice that I wasn’t wearing it. Our wedding portrait had been sitting on the nightstand for so long, I’d almost forgotten it was there. For the first time in a long time, I looked, really looked, at the pretty blue-eyed girl in the white dress and the handsome man smiling down at her. She seemed so bright and full of promise. Capable, confident, just a smidge sassy. What the hell happened to her?

I was someone in my own right before I married the Tax King of Hanmet County. I had plans. I was going to be a newspaper reporter. As my Gammy Muldoon always said, everybody has a story, the trick was finding a way to tell it that didn’t bore the hell out of people. (Gammy was a colorful woman.) I loved finding the story. And I was good at it. I even won a couple of minor awards writing for my college newspaper. Right after graduation I was supposed to take over a general assignment position for the local newspaper, the Singletree Gazette. But I got so wrapped up in planning the wedding that I agreed when Mike and Mama suggested I should just wait until after we were married to start working at the paper. Daddy was an old golf buddy of Earl Montgomery, whose family had run the paper since 1890. Earl agreed to keep the reporting job open for me until after the honeymoon. And then we bought the house and Mike said we should finish moving before I started working. Moving became renovating, renovating became redecorating, and Earl finally told me that he’d had to fill the position while I was waiting for wallpaper samples to be shipped in from Tulsa. I was disappointed and embarrassed, but I understood. And soon it didn’t matter, because Mike’s business took off and he finally admitted that he didn’t want me to work because none of his friends’ wives worked and it would be “uncomfortable” for him.

So I stayed home. I never considered myself a homemaker because that always made me think of those scary ladies who organized the baking competitions for the county fair. I was Mike’s at-home support. I joined clubs, women’s organizations, charitable boards. I approached planning benefits and auctions like it was a career. My job was to live and breathe the image of a happy wife of a successful, capable accountant so that people would bring their finances and tax problems to said accountant. I worked full-time to make sure Mike’s accounting firm seemed as prosperous and thriving as possible, even before it was prosperous and thriving.

At work, Mike was the ultimate go-getter, motivated and energetic, meticulous to a fault. But when he came home, he shut off. He honestly believed that because he paid the bills, I should have to handle all of the messy details of our life together. He just wanted to show up and be there - like when he used to live with his mama. I took care of booking Mike’s dental appointments, vacation plans, shopping for gifts for his parents. Mike didn’t want to get a pool or a dog because it was too much maintenance. He had halfheartedly broached the subject of having a baby, but seemed relieved when I put him off for reasons even I couldn’t explain. This turned out to be a good thing as I would hate for our children to currently be witnessing Mommy’s snot-coated, terry-cloth-wrapped breakdown.