When She Stops Saying She Loves You

I spent a lot of my life in self-induced isolation.
Completely voluntary, as I was afraid of the vast expanse outside my bedroom door. I’d wear my suit of in-difference armor, activate my deflector and set sarcasm to high yield to keep anyone from meeting the real “me”. No, they would get an uncanny valley avatar to interact with; one that wouldn’t care about the slings and arrows and would carry on even with half of its soul hacked to death.
So it was surprising that I actually had a girlfriend in high school and got married one year after graduation. It was easy at first—you’ve shared so much time with someone that you feel they complete you and the ceremony and paperwork puts it all together in a nice little package.
At least until the mortgage, bills and kids come in.
We had a few mortgages, several bills and four kids in the span on of fifteen years. It took fifteen years before my resolve started to buckle and that marriage foundation that I had held onto for so long cracked,
It was all because of an alert from the cell phone provider.

Ding! This text is to inform you have been charged 2.00 for international texting.
International?

Did one of the kids reach out to someone in Japan or communicate with a Nigerian Prince?
I swiped through my phone and loaded the app..
Ding! This text is to inform you have been charged 3.00 for international texting. Please see our app to avoid international roaming and texting charges.

“You better believe it,” I said to myself.

I was at work at the time, sitting at a desk within an enclosed server room at Federal Express. My sold job was to monitor the company’s internal network for intrusions which gave me a little time to web surf and read a few books on my phone.
The cellular application greeted me with the log-in screen and the phone continued to ding about international roaming charges. One or all of my kids were about to have their cell service terminated.

I logged in and cycled though the their accounts:
My oldest, Lexi; her account was clean, she had domestic texts...there were over 9000 of them, but they were free.
Nick’s had very little texts; but a lot of data usage. I would have to look into what we was streaming
Marissa was in a race with her older sister with close to 8000; but they were local too.
Serena had no texts, as she was grounded from her phone due to mouthing off to her mother; never give a nine year old a smartphone.
Was it my own phone, perhaps some form of malware? No, my profile was clean.
I opened my wife’s account as the phone dinged again with yet another warning.
Her account showed several text to a foreign number.
I spun my chair back to my work PC and searched for the number online—the results were not helpful so I copied the phone number and then *67’ed the number—for all I knew it was some marketing agent but why would she respond back to it so much? Unless it was indeed malware sent by some person in a boiler room trying to gain backdoor access to our bank account.
I always hoped there was a especial place in Hell for those types.

The phone rang and a male voice picked up.
“Hello?”
“Oh, hello,” I replied in my best foreign-sounding account. “I’m calling from the National Lottery and I—“
The phone clicked off—I admit, I would’ve hung up on me too.
The phone dinged again, another three dollars.
I wanted to text my wife and ask what’s going on and why was she using text? I mean we had messenger!
Remembering that, I loaded her online account up on the PC and opened the email section that also contained the messenger application. We used to send each other sexts in the past—but we stopped after it started getting a bit too crazy. I mean, how many times can one say “I want to fuck you so bad” before it sounds like a bad promo movie?
She had a lot of e-mail, mostly junk, as she used to ask me to help keep her in-box clutter free but one day she said she got the hang of it and could do it on her own...the thirteen thousand items in three different folders told a different story.
The conversation folder had a lot of files in it all of them from an email address of 4oreverMe4U to my wife’s account. It had to be spam messages. A Russian “bride” who sent out missives hoping someone would take a bite.
I clicked on a random message and the text had not even loaded up before a dick pic popped into view...followed by a picture of my wife’s breasts...and then a picture taken lower and the word “fuck” conjugated in several tenses.
The other messages were about the same—like a film strip version of an xhamster video. The most recent message mentioned that he wouldn’t have access to data while he was in Europe and to use another number—the number that was continuing to make AT&T stock holders very happy, three dollars at a time.

I sat back in my chair and ran several scenarios flashed through my mind:
I imagined it.
It was an elaborate prank. A sadistic and horribly evil prank; but it was elaborate in how they pieced it all together and made these videos— the ones recorded with a very good camera-probably a GoPro.
It was all truth, all real—but how to deal with it?
Murder suicide would be out of the question—I had four kids.
Murder—of the guy—was something I could kind of live with but i had no legal way to buy a handgun due to my past mental history.
Mental history!
That had to be it, this was just a psychotic episode and if I closed my eyes I could bring myself out of it
Ding!
Damn.

I left work two hours later as if nothing was wrong. My wife asked me—by text— to run by Kroger and pick up coffee and soy milk and I obliged as asking things like “how many times this guy been at our house and whose room are you going at it in” gets lost in context. However, as I stood in the ever-so slow moving self-check-out lane queue I could not help but think about how this was all going to go.

Pretend nothing’s wrong?
Come home with a scowl so she asks “what’s wrong?”
Assuming that she was even at home, as my wife was a realtor who sometimes worked...strange...hours.

Of course, now I wasn’t sure what business she was actually in.
Was she helping people move in or was she welcoming them to an open house?
Those were the kind of thoughts that could cause someone to slam their late model Ford F-150 truck in the living room of their house...but the truck was still being paid for and the house was under a mortgage and an HOA.
I turned my phone on silent but it would vibrate every once in while, no doubt adding to my carrier’s coffers.

The drive back home took longer than it normally did as I drove on autopilot—not exactly paying attention but I was sure I didn’t hit anyone—at least I didn’t recall hearing screams, scrapes or sirens and maybe if I had the officer would have gone easy on me if I showed him the messages my wife sent the other guy. Maybe I would have gotten a warning.

The street lights were already on as I turned onto the street that entered my neighborhood, “Mallard Park”—even though I never saw any ducks in the rather large lake that was at the center of the housing development. Our house sat on the lakeside allowing for some decent swimming in the summer but at that day the high was only in mid-twenties, as it was January.

Our house was a two-story brick house with an attached garage: the perfect Norman Rockwell of the 21st century home. It looked less inviting as I drove up to it, as if it was ready to implode and disappear into another dimension and for a moment I wanted it to so I would not have to face the inevitable and it would make a hell of a good story to sell to Hollywood.

My wife’s car was not in the driveway so it would be left up to me to start dinner or to call “China Panda-Dragoon” for take-out, the kids loved fried rice. Not that I couldn’t cook, I just didn’t feel like doing it that night for fear that I would turn a burner on high and slam the over loving crap out of my hand onto it.

The warm air of the HVAC swirled around me as I walked inside as the sounds of two televisions, a video game system, and someone talking on the phone filled my ears.

“Marissa, Serena, turn off the TV’s; Nick, save the game; Lexi, call them back! The house is a mess.”

The combination of groans, grunts and defiance rang out from all over the house.

The kids were given one chore to do each day and it was always on a rotating schedule that would pop up on their phones as a reminder until they turned it off so everyone knew what they had to do, even Serena, as the chores never changed beyond the normal weekly cycle. Not like I’d require her to mulch the lawn.
No, that’s a summer job.

I put the soy milk away, the coffee into it’s designated container and then took the death walk up to the master bedroom.

Master.

I had to wonder how many of those pictures were taken in there. If I bothered to look through all of the pictures I may have seen the baby-blue paint on the wall, the flowery border trim or even the large mural painting that we received as a wedding present.

The kids bickered downstairs about who didn’t do said chore from the night before so I trekked back down and stood in the middle of the argument: no had dine the dishes for the past two days so Nick was refusing to do them too.

“Pick your battles, young man,” I said as he seethed about having to wash (well, rinse and then let a dishwasher do the brunt of the work) three extra plates and a spatula, “And sometimes the war isn’t worth the casualties!” I said as he slammed silverware into dishwasher, but at least he wasn’t smashing cups and saucers.

The door clicked open and my wife walked in.
“How was everyone’s day?” She said with the brightest eyes.
“It was. Interesting,” I replied as I held up my phone.