Waiting in the Rain

Waiting in the Rain

Synopsis: Sometimes your eyes deceive you and you don't see what you think you saw. But then again sometimes you just might be an idiot as well.

Genre: Romantic

Codes: MF, Romantic

Originally Published on SOL: 10-01-2009

**********

This story was supposed to be a short Flash story, but this tale emerged instead... probably for the better.

*******

To say that Lynn and I hadn't been getting along lately would be a vast understatement. In fact, for at least the last six months we had been fighting at the drop of a hat with each other, and sometimes over not particularly much. Usually, it's our work schedules that mostly mess up our home life. We made most of the usual mistakes that doom marriages, but it was our inability to really sit down and talk with each other that really screwed things up royally.

Lynn is a junior attorney for the largest immigration law firm in the city and she recently brought in a new client that flooded her with over six hundred H1B Visa requests that all had to be completed in a mathematically impossible amount of time. Accordingly, she's been putting in sixteen hour days, including weekends lately trying to get all of this paperwork done. She's worse than bad about calling home to tell me when she'll be home most nights, so I fix dinner for us for about eight. Usually, it then sits on the stove or in the refrigerator until at least ten, and sometimes after midnight.

The concept of calling me to let me know when she'll be home is apparently alien to her. She's always 'too busy' just to pick up the phone for two minutes to let me know what her schedule is. She has a cell phone as well, but since she spends most of her day in meetings she keeps it turned off and rarely remembers to turn it back on again afterwards. This, more than anything else, is what drives me nuts and pushes my anger buttons with her.

She's still relatively new to the firm and thinks that this big deal, if completed successfully, will put her on the path for making Junior Partner early. I'd rather she pay just a little bit of attention, once in awhile to me. Our money situation is fine and we don't really need that big promotion to make ends meet.

On the other hand, she hates my blue collar job because it is so uncertain. Most weeks I don't get forty hours of work because management will run out of billable things for us to do and they'll send the shift home a few hours early a couple of days a week. Other times things will get busy at the plant and I'll put in sixty hour weeks myself with all of the work (and overtime) I could want. I used to call to say when I'd be home late but I stopped doing it awhile back. It always seemed to start another fight with her.

The joke is that I was sort of inline for a promotion into the bottom rung of management myself. The owner had bugging me about moving to a supervisory slot at one of our other local subsidiaries but I didn't really want the extra half-hour of commute time each way... and I knew that the job change would trigger another bad fight. I told him 'no' and sort of meant it, so he gave the job to my main rival James Harper just to spite me. I just shrugged and kept doing my job. James is big and loud, all bluster and no backbone... and even less brain, and he's already way over his head and starting to sink. Suited me fine.

In short, that promotion was still going to be mine anytime I wanted it and no amount of extra brown-nosing was going to improve that. If I thought that working no overtime at all would improve my marriage I'd just cut my hours and resign myself to remaining a Shift Leader indefinitely. It wasn't like we really needed the extra money anyway. There really are more important things in life than money, like having fun with my wife.

We had two good stable incomes, no kids and neither of us was quite thirty years old yet. We ought to have been living it up and enjoying ourselves, but it just wasn't happening for some reason.

*******

One early September Friday at work, we finished up a big order we'd been struggling with for over a week and got it all completed and out the door and into the shipping warehouse before two o'clock. The big boss was a happy man and sent all of us home, signing our timecards as 'out' at 4:30 p.m., giving us a full days pay with two and half hours of free time.

Most of the guys drove off to get an early start on some serious weekend drinking and frankly I just should have done the same thing. It's good politics to stop off at the local ice house to hoist a few beers with my co-workers and maybe even a few of the bosses at least once a week, but I had a moment of inspiration instead. Since our wedding anniversary was this coming Sunday, I thought I'd make an early start to a romantic weekend by buying some nice t-bone steaks, some jumbo shrimp (isn't that an oxymoron?) and a nice pair of lobster tails, then make us a nice proper home-cooked surf-n-turf for an early anniversary dinner, with lots of candles and flowers for good measure.

Think of it as a sort of a peace offering. Yeah, we'd been fighting lately... a lot really, but this was as good of an olive branch as I could think of. The trick was going to be getting Lynn home at any sort of decent enough hour to enjoy it.

I called up Ramona, Lynn's admin and asked to speak to Lynn. I was pretty sure I could hear my wife's voice fairly clearly in the background but Ramona told me (after a slight but noticeable delay) that Lynn wasn't in her office at the moment. Upon further questioning, she did (grudgingly) suggest that she thought Lynn's project was about done and thought that she might be leaving 'on time' tonight.

Hah! That would be a first! Ramona ignored my follow-up questions and pretty much hung up on me right afterwards. For a plain vanilla legal assistant and girl-Friday, Ramona puts on quite a few airs and doesn't seem to like me very much. I guess she takes Lynn's side on all things and hears a lot of daily complaints about her scruffy laid back husband who still gets his hands dirty to make a living.

Still, I this was encouragement enough that I went ahead and went to the store and bought everything that I thought I'd need for a proper celebratory feast, including a bottle of her favorite wine, which I had to get from a specialty wine store near downtown. Since I was now about five minutes away from her office, I made the fateful decision that I was going to drive over to her building and wait for her right in front of her office. Lynn normally took the Metro train in and out of downtown and then transferred over to a park & ride bus to the lot where she parked her car, which was quite near our house. Picking her up would save her nearly an hour off of her normal commute, especially since it was now pouring rain outside.

It was a good idea anyway, but it didn't quite work out that way.

The thunderstorm was coming down quite hard now and it was nearly as dark as night, but in front of her office building I patiently sat, waiting in the rain for Lynn to leave work for the evening.

I had only been waiting for about ten minutes when I caught a glimpse of Lynn walking out the main doors of the building, nearly arm in arm with an older gentleman, whom I think was her boss, one of the two top Managing Partners.

She didn't see me at all, probably due to the heavy rain. Even after I rolled down the windows and waved while yelling at her frantically. A moment later they had crossed the street and she got into his dark BMW sedan that was parked in the executive reserved parking lot.

Maybe they were off to a meeting or dropping off Visa paperwork at the Federal building, I thought. Lacking any better ideas I decided to follow them. I nearly lost them when I got caught by a traffic light, but caught up to within eyesight of them a few blocks later. They stayed downtown, but turned away from the Federal building and headed towards the ballpark.

A few minutes later, the dark BMW pulled into valet parking at the hotel across the street from the ballpark and the pair quickly got out and went inside. At this point I was frantically hoping that I'd 'lost' her bosses car in the rush hour traffic and was following someone else's car now by accident, but not so. Even through the rain, I could clearly see my wife Lynn going inside the hotel along with her boss, looking far too happy and pleased with herself for any respectable married woman.

I waited in the rain some more, across the street for about forty-five minutes in the hope that this was just 'business', picking up or dropping off some paperwork from a client, but soon gave this up as unlikely. Then I decided to go inside myself and take a look around. Maybe this was a dinner meeting? I checked the casual cafe downstairs and the ritzy restaurant upstairs at the top of the hotel and despite a careful search saw no trace of them. There were some private offices on several of the lower floors of the hotel, including some of the management offices for the professional baseball team, but no other legal offices that they could likely be visiting.

Nearly frantic, I made something of a pest of myself asking (well, closer to demanding) what room my wife and her boss where shacked up in. They didn't quite have to call security on me to escort me out, but it was soon clear that I wasn't going to get any answers from the desk clerk and I left on my own.

*****

I went straight home... really I did. The phone had been ringing when I walked in the front door but the caller had hung-up right before I answered it. It couldn't have been important or they would have left a phone message.

Now if I had been a woman in a similar mental state of mind, finding that her husband was fooling around on their anniversary, I probably would have likely smashed most of the good china and maybe even the crystal saved for special occasions, but I decided to be contrary. I instead set the table and decorated it to the nines, complete with our best white linen tablecloth, her grandmother's best china and my mother's prized Bohemian crystal water and wine glasses. Then out came the flowers I had bought earlier and I arranged them as well.

The phone rang once again, but it was a telemarker, and after I yelled at him... ok screamed... I smashed the phone back down into its cradle. Alright, I mostly threw the phone and it didn't seem to too work too well afterwards, but so what.

As for the fancy surf & turf dinner complete with side dishes and desert? Well, I cooked it and ate my half, complete with everything left in the wine bottle after I poured my absent spouse a glass for her place setting. Her hotel meeting with her lover was apparently going to be a long one and not some little quickie and I decided not to stay up half the night to wait for her soiled ass to return home.

With all of the accoutrements of our anniversary feast laid out and half eaten, I soon sickened entirely of the sight and stomped out the door, but not before tossing the bundle of two dozen red roses onto the floor on my way out the door.

Upon later reflection, the damaged phone might have been making some vague quiet chirping noises instead of boldly ringing, but I didn't much care to talk to her by then. I grabbed my coat and bunged myself out the door. It was still raining like all holy heck but that suited my mood just fine.

Rain or not, I was done waiting for her.

*********

I don't know what time Lynn dragged her scanky whore ass home. I had intended originally just to get a beer or two down at the local watering hole but I fell in with a pair of co-workers who had been divorced relatively recently and the three of us began to hit the hard stuff and bitch about faithless wives. It was a pretty decent therapeutic drunk, I had to admit.

They threw us all out around closing time and since I was far too potted to drive I just curled up in my truck and slept it off until morning, when the sun... and an ungodly hangover both struck me in the face like a sledgehammer.

Frankly, I have no idea why I even bothered to go home, especially in a bad mood with a raging hangover. The discussion, if you could call it that, was completely predictable. I made my accusation, she made ones of her own, I called her a lying faithless whore and she screamed something incoherent and began to smash the china and crystal I'd left out last night. Ducking a wine glass, I shouted out a few more accusations and tried to keep my dignity while leaving the house as fast as possible.

Since she could never be bothered to call me the previous night, I didn't bother to call her either... all weekend long. I spent the our entire anniversary weekend hanging out with friends from work and drink far too much than was good for me. By Monday morning, I was in a right ornery state of mind and pretty much decided that if Lynn wanted to apologize to me then she knew where I worked and she could call or see me there.

She didn't.

*****

After the first week back at work without a word from Lynn, I pretty much gave up on the though of even trying to return home at all. My brother had a nice little fishing cabin near the lake and I knew where he kept his spare key. I had tons of unused vacation and sick time at work so I quickly developed a bad case of the fishing flu. In a right snit of a foul mood, I took the next two weeks off on vacation and took my mind off of my problems by doing my three favorite things, drinking, fishing, and drinking while fishing.

By the time I returned to work in a much better mood two weeks later, I found that Lynn had left several phone messages for me earlier, but her most recent one as of last Friday just basically said 'Fuck you and stay gone!'. So much for my good mood now!

The funny part was after a couple of weeks of soul searching (and much too much drinking), I had decided that I did still love her and if she would stop her affair and moderate her work hours I would be just barely willing to offer her a second chance. Enlightened by this truth I decided it was time for me to reopen the lines of communication. Unfortunately, now it was Lynn who was being stubborn and not willing to talk or listen.

I left phone messages for her at work with her assistant for three days in a row before finally giving up. It was quite clear that Lynn had given Ramona instructions not to take my calls.

That just left divorce.

I suppose that Lynn could have easily filed the paperwork from her law firm, but the really angry and annoyed part of me wanted to be a bug on the wall just to see her face when my paperwork, citing 'infidelity' was served on her at the office. The top Managing Partner of the firm, old Dylan Robertson, was an ultra-conservative bible-thumping good ole boy from the Great American Heartland, and I was pretty sure that even a rumor of office infidelity would put the hard breaks on Lynn's chances to make Junior Partner anytime this next decade.

******

The next few months just swept by way faster than I realized. Right after my attorney filed my divorce petition, I cleaned out the last of my personal stuff from the house and left my house keys and my wedding band lying on the dining room table for her to find. We already each had our own financial accounts and we made about the same amount of money so there was nothing to split there. With the recession, our house was probably worth less than our outstanding mortgage balance, so there was nothing complicated there either. She could sell it for a loss or even burn it down for all I cared.

Now that I was about to become a single man again, the idea of transferring to that small subsidiary parts manufacturing machine shop on the far end of town, was becoming a more appealing idea. The promotion would mean more money and it was much closer to the lake house I was still living at, and idiot Harper was still fucking things up bad there which would only make me look that much better when I fixed up his messes. Win-win-win.

My boss practically kissed my feet and didn't quibble when I asked for an additional 10% salary increase plus an annual bonus when (not if) I straightened things out. There was even talk of new (lucrative) projects that were projected to start in about six months with the promise of another fat bonus if that ship sailed out of my harbor, shipshape and in Bristol fashion.

Now the timing was perfect for everyone. I'd be away from casual contact with Lynn in the unlikely event she decided to make trouble, and I'd be busy at work and too busy otherwise fishing to piss and moan over my divorce.

My attorney was actually dead set against my making the claim of 'infidelity'. We were a no-fault & no alimony state and there was no pot of money or children to fight over. He finally allowed me, grudgingly, to make my deposition under oath concerning how I caught my wife going to an hotel room on our anniversary weekend with her boss, but he thought it would be fairly valueless in court and the judge would mostly likely automatically strike the infidelity motion and change the divorce to something vanilla like 'Irreconcilable Differences'.

Fine with me; I'd just done it this way out of sheer spite anyway.

*******

Finally, it was about an hour before the divorce case was to be finally ruled on by the judge. I was quietly sitting with my attorney on a bench outside the courtroom. I didn't have or need to be there... but I thought since I was present before a judge when I was married that it was proper symmetry to be also present when another judge divorced me.

Yeah, I'm weird, and sort of a stickler about following all of the rules, even the unwritten ones. I couldn't help but think that if I'd followed a few more rules on how to maintain a loving relationship that my ass wouldn't now be sitting on this rock hard bench. The part that hurt the worst was not knowing why Lynn had felt the need to have an affair with her boss in the first place. Promotion? Probably... but the nagging doubt was still there that somehow my wife had found me 'inadequate' in some way and had left me for the arm of another lover.

Looking up I saw Lynn and her own attorney now standing across from us talking softly in the hall. To kill time, our two attorneys then began to huddle together off in a corner making small talk and making sure all of our paperwork was in order. Undoubtedly so that each could pad another half-hour of consult time onto our fees. Damned shysters!

Lynn looked wan and probably about twenty pounds thinner. There was no note of happiness or victory on her sad face, and not even any hint of relief that the divorce ordeal would soon be over. She certainly didn't appear to be a woman eager to reclaim single status. In her lap was a small box, wrapped up in gift wrap, much like a wedding present. After a few minutes of indecision she stood up and walked over to me. It was the first time we had seen or spoken to each other since the early morning after that fateful rainy evening.

"Here is a very belated Happy Anniversary present." She muttered in a quiet near toneless sort of way, as if this was a speech she had rehearsed hundreds of times before a mirror.

Her eyes were focused on the floor and when I accepted her gift she lifted her eyes enough to almost but not quite meet mine. Then with a burst of tears she rushed off down the hall into the ladies room.

Unwrapping the box, the gift wrap was in a 'Happy Anniversary' theme, I found a shoe box that contained an envelope full of photographs, a few letters, an autographed baseball and a DVD in a professionally labeled jewelcase. It didn't take long to scan through the contents and discover what their meaning was.