A Saint and A Sinner Ch 08
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“Randal,” Beth’s father said when I picked up the phone.
If I’d looked at the Caller ID, I’d probably have let it ring.
“Colonel,” I said coolly. “To what do I owe the unexpected honor?”
“I wanted to clear the air about what’s going on with you and Beth,” he said gruffly.
“There’s nothing going on between Beth and me,” I told him. “Everything between the two of us is done. Surely, she told you that when she arrived there yesterday?”
“She did,” he confirmed.
“Are you calling me to confirm what she said?” I asked.
“I’m calling to tell you that you’re being a jackass to go through with this,” he growled.
“Oh, really?” I said hotly. “So, did you miss the part where she told me that she didn’t love me and hadn’t for a long time? Did she skip that part? Are you glossing over the six-month affair she had with her boss? Or maybe she hasn’t gotten around to letting you know that she’s treated me like shit since December because her lover liked to bite her, and she had to come up with a way for me not to see the marks he put on her. Maybe you stepped out of the room when she admitted that the only time she’s had sex with me since she started with her lover, was on my birthday and she gave me the fucking Clap! I guess it didn’t register to you that she’s thought of me as a roommate she has to put up with, rather than a partner to face life together with, huh?”
“A man doesn’t abandon his family,” he sneered.
“You remember what you said to me on my wedding day?” I asked him, seething. “Let me remind you. You told me that I wasn’t good enough for Beth, that she deserved better, and that if I was any kind of man, I’d call it off and set her free, so she could find someone she could be proud of. Congratulations, Glen. You’ve got your wish. I’ve set her free, so she can find someone she could be proud of. Or maybe you meant that you could be proud of. Tell you what, why don’t we call this your Christmas gift. Don’t feel like you need to go overboard with gratitude. Just get me the same thing you got me last year. I’ll put it under the tree and take a picture of it for you.”
“You and me, we’re not friends. You’ve never liked me, never approved of me and you’ve always been really frank that you didn’t think a chemist was good enough for your little girl. At this point, we’re not even in-laws, so who the fuck do you think you are, calling me to bitch about my divorce. Fuck you! You want to talk about being a man? When I found out that Beth was stepping out on me, I didn’t treat her like a whore. I didn’t raise my hand to her, and I didn’t resort to posturing. I’ve seen you treat Beth’s mother like shit for years, so don’t you ever tell me you know what a real man does. As an officer, it’s been 40 years since you even admired a real man in the shower ... SIR!”
I snarled and hung up the phone on him. It was the first time that I’d gotten well and truly angry, and it felt good. It overwhelmed the ache I’d had in my chest since I’d found out about Stan. It was an hour later that I got a call from another Atlanta number.
“Hello?”
My temper was ready to go if it should happen to be Glen. It was Beth, though.
“Hi, Rand,” she said. “I promised I’d call when I got my new number. How are you doing?” she asked tentatively.
“Fantastic,” I said sarcastically. “I had a very pleasant call from your father today. I don’t know what brain injury he’s suffered that made him think he had any right to lecture me about how we did things, but he’s probably still boiling over from what I said to him. Fair warning.”
I could hear her hiss to herself about that.
“That bad?” she asked.
“If he shows up at the house, I’m going to assume he’s armed and shoot him through the door,” I told her. “I’m not going to go into it, but he got reminded that he’s done everything to point out to me that I’m not good enough for you. I told him he finally got what he wanted, and then I got nasty with him. He’s probably still throwing fits.”
“Sorry. I told him this wasn’t your fault, but he’s never liked you,” she admitted.
“I’m not his problem anymore,” I told her. “For that matter, I’m not yours either. It’s good of you to give me your new number, but you know I’m not going to use it, right?”
“You should, Rand,” she urged. “I don’t hate you. We just drifted apart and then with the affair ... Who knows? Maybe we’ll reconnect to the way we felt when we first met and get back together.”
“You don’t really believe that,” I said. “If you believed that, you would have stayed in Charlotte. Moving back to Atlanta was your fresh start, your clean break.”
She sighed.
“I just didn’t see anything to stay for. My job was wrecked, my marriage was done. There’d be months of questions from friends and then years of people trying to put us back together or set us up with their friends and co-workers who’d be just perfect for us. I didn’t want the string of blind dates and bad attempts to get us back together.”
“Yeah,” I said in agreement. “I can understand that.”
“Has anyone tried to set you up yet?” she asked tentatively.
“I haven’t talked to anyone,” I told her. “My lawyer stopped by with your last letter. That’s it.”
“I would have given it to you myself, but you were too upset yesterday,” she said. “I wanted you to read it once you’d had a chance to calm down.”
“Thanks,” I said.
I wasn’t sure if I meant it, but at least I hadn’t injected a healthy dose of sarcasm into the word.
“Look, I don’t want us to lose contact with each other,” she said. “Promise me we’ll talk, okay?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t want to hold you back. I just ... Every couple of weeks, let’s make some time to talk and keep up with the news. Does that sound like something we can do?”
“Yeah, I suppose, that’s fine,” I said lightly. “It’s easier to handle that than the invitation to spend Christmas with your dad.”
She laughed a little at that.
“I suppose I should go home and deal with the Colonel, huh?”
“I’d appreciate it if he didn’t call here again, unless he was planning on being respectful,” I said carefully. “Tell your mother I said hello, though.”
“I will. Take care, Rand.” We hung up and I went about getting dinner together.
I decided to go back to work the next day. They were surprised to see me. Word had spread about the divorce and seeing me without my wedding ring was a big stir. I went on like that for a while. I focused on work and pulled extra time for the other two engineers to have a little extra time off. Before I knew it, it was Beth’s birthday.
I called the house. By unspoken agreement, her father never answered my calls. I’d sometimes call her cellphone and sometimes the house phone to talk to her mother.
“Hi, Rand,” her mother said pleasantly. “You’re calling for Beth?”
“Hi, May. Yeah. It’s her birthday. I just wanted to send my best wishes.”
“I’m afraid she’s not here,” she said. “She’s out on a date tonight.”
“Oh,” I said. “She never mentioned meeting someone the last time we talked.”
“Shall I have her call you when she gets in?” she asked, her tone understanding.
“No, that’s okay. Just let her know I called to say happy birthday,” I said pleasantly.
We chatted for a few more moments and then we ended the call. I sat there, with the phone in my hand, thinking about Beth out on a date. I wasn’t sure whether I felt jealous or hurt ... or anything at all. I guessed I was settling into the numb phase. Maybe this was where Beth’s heart had been when Stan had come along.
I didn’t hear back from Beth that week or the week after, so I assumed that she was tied up with life. When I didn’t hear from her the following week though, I started to wonder what was up. I called her cellphone on a Monday night, shortly after Halloween and was about to hang up when she answered. She was somewhere loud. There seemed to be a party going on.
“Rand!” she said pleasantly. “How are you?” she said loudly.
“Not bad,” I said, confused. “I haven’t heard from you in a while. I was starting to wonder how you were getting along.”
“Yeah, Mom said you called on my birthday. That was sweet. Listen, it’s kind of loud here. I’m out with the girls from work. Can I call you back later in the week?”
“Sure, Beth. I was just checking in, like usual.”
“That’s sweet of you. Thanks. I’ll talk to you later.”
I put the phone down and decided to go to bed early. I’d taken up an exercise program and did yoga in the mornings now, at the gym, before work. Ironically, I was in the best shape of my life. I’d put on about 40 pounds of muscle and lost about the same amount of fat. It made me a lot sleeker. I went upstairs, into what had been the guest-room. I laid down on the uncomfortable mattress and stretched out, staring at the ceiling, lost in thought.
Was I holding on to the past? Should I just let the phone calls die? Did she even care? I knew the answer to that last one. She really didn’t. Atlanta was far enough away to get away from me, but I know she’d been in town a couple of times for parties with a few of our friends in the neighborhood. I guess they were really her friends, truth be told.
After the second time I saw pictures that had her in them, attending a party at a house I could see from my front porch, I got the message that I’d gotten the money and she’d gotten the friends in the divorce. There’d been a few halfhearted attempts to talk to me right after Beth left town, but I’d been too raw to talk to the curious friends and neighbors. The attempts had trailed off around the time I saw Beth in the pictures from one of the parties down the street.
Why was I still here in Charlotte? That was more difficult to answer. My parents were gone. My dad had been a cop, killed in the line of duty when I was in high school. My mother had worked herself into an early grave by the time I’d finished college. I had a much older brother who was a lawyer in Oklahoma, but we hadn’t spoken in years. He’d kept in touch for a few years after Mom died, but like Beth, the calls had trailed off to nothing. I sighed and closed my eyes. Maybe it was time to see what was down the road waiting for me.
Instead, I got out of bed the next morning and went to my yoga class. I found it relaxing and rewarding. I knew I felt better on days I attended the class. I got to work and tried to pay attention to more than the work. I wanted to start living my life, but Beth had been with me so long, I had no idea how to reclaim my own identity outside of her.
I was a little more friendly about saying hello to people that day and for the rest of the week. I talked to a couple of the girls in my yoga class for the first time and got a sense of how far down my social life had fallen.
“I actually thought you were deaf!” one of the women said. “I tried to talk to you once, just after class started, and you acted like you didn’t hear me at all.”
I grimaced at that. “I’m sorry about that. My divorce left me kind of in a daze,” I told her. “My name’s Rand.”
“I’m Mary,” she said, taking my hand. “You’re divorced, huh? A couple of the girls here are, too. They were a little wary of having a man in the class, but you haven’t been hitting on anyone, so they’ve relaxed a little bit. They’re a little bitter. Cheating husbands, you know? What happened with your divorce, if you don’t mind me asking?”
I shrugged. “Cheating wife. I had no idea until I went to the doctor and was told I had a case of the Clap.”
“That’s a shitty way to find out,” said someone from behind me.
It was Belinda, the instructor.
“My creep just came home and told me he’d found someone else,” she explained. He went on for about an hour about how much kinkier than me she was and all the things she’d do in bed and how she had bigger tits and blah, blah, blah!”
I nodded. “Mine had a lover with a biting fetish. So, she started fights with me every night for six months, so I wouldn’t see her naked and get a look at the marks. She started two weeks before Christmas.”
“Ouch!” she said sharply. “And she started the affair just before Christmas?”
“With her boss,” I told her. “The scumbag made a big production of introducing himself to me at their staff Christmas party while she was standing there, like he was taking her from me directly.”
“She introduced you to the guy that was fucking her on the side?” Belinda said, revolted. “Even my ex didn’t do that. He just went on about every perverted little thing she’d do with him.”
I nodded. “I heard all about it during the divorce,” I said. “When I caught her, he was trying to get her to go off her birth control, so he could breed her and send her home to me. Give me a couple of weeks of pity pussy and then she’d suddenly be pregnant, and the baby would be born premature.”
“Fuck! Did you bury the bitch along the side of the road?” Mary asked.
I shook my head. “I’m only starting to get past the stunned stage. She moved out of town, but she sneaks back to visit some of our old friends, once in a while. I guess they’re really her friends at this point though. I don’t seem to get invited to a lot of those parties anymore.”
“I go to a support group on Thursday nights,” Belinda told me. “It’s for victims of cheating spouses. It’s almost all women, but I think you’d fit in. Come, tell your story. Listen to the others and meet some people that understand what you’re going through.”
I nodded. “I think I’d like that. I’ve been kind of short on people to talk to about it.”
I had to run to work, but I promised I’d be there for class tomorrow, like usual. I was a little more relaxed at work and before I knew it, I was done for the day. I decided to go back to the gym and hit some of the machines. I did that three or four times a week, spending an hour or two lost in the simple pleasure of exertion. Belinda was gone for the day, by that point, but I’d see her a couple of times before Thursday night.
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