Seeds of Fear

'Me too,' he heard Karen whisper. The two words ice-picked him in the heart. He fucking knew it all in that instant.

The next few weeks played themselves out in slow motion. He owed Karen something, and he was a man who paid his debts, always. With interest. He owed her nineteen and a half good years; she'd done a million things for him, held his head while he puked — back in his heavy-boozing days — loved his family as if they'd been hers, a zillion things he owed her for. He would pay her back with loyalty and friendship, he decided. Kill her with kindness, so to speak. It was the only decent thing to do.

He said nothing, never let on, just made his plans. Each day was one day closer to divorce — there was never a question in his mind. He knew Karen well, and he knew he was watching someone in love. Jesus, it was really pretty funny. The thing he wanted most finally happens, but it's so good, it destroys him. Very fucking funny. If he'd written it, no one would have believed him. Life was a certifiable bitch. And in this case, he'd brought the bitch home. He couldn't complain.

Karen? In love with another bitching woman? Nah. Yeah. Might as well face it, stud, he told himself, it would be bad enough to lose her to another man, but you lost your wife to a fucking cunt, you no-dick loser piece of shit. Then he was able to look at his twisted goofiness, immaturity, sexist pigitude, and the whole nine yards of torn cloth that let him fuck his own nice marriage into the ground, and he stepped back, laughed at himself, and took a vow of reasonableness. George would be a mensch and let this play itself out.

It did soon enough. Karen was just back from the grocery store, and he'd helped her put groceries away, and had asked her to help him wash and wax the Regal. She had on short shorts and a halter top and looked so suddenly sexy to him, he was irritated with his weirdness. Here he was rubbing the same spot with a chamois cloth, trying to look down his old lady's top at those nice, hard nipples he'd become so bored with. What was sex, and in fact marriage, but a nutty head game? The car shiny, chrome agleam, they emptied their buckets, wrung out their sponges, and went inside to cool off with some drinks.

She brought him a special treat, Hires in a frosty mug that had been icing down in the freezer. He took a sip of root beer and she told him, matter-of-factly, that she was leaving.

'You know this is over. I still care about you, but I can't go on like this anymore. I've found someone else. I'm moving in the morning.' She began an itemized list of what she was taking and what she was leaving. He tried to keep an even keel, but it was difficult.

'I've withdrawn half the money — exactly to the dime,' she said, with almost a hint of pride in her voice, 'and I'll take the car. You can always buy another set of wheels, but I like the Buick and feel safe in it. You can keep the house,' she said. That was big of her.

'You and Gayle setting up housekeeping?' he asked, keeping his face and tone neutral. She looked at him sharply.

'Yes.' No how did you know? No hint of surprise. Letting him know with her equally flat gaze and tone that she didn't care what he knew or for how long. 'Neither of us meant this to happen, you know.'

They discussed the affair at some length, but Karen was not willing to divulge much. He could tell she'd slammed a door on any intimacy between them. He played to that, saying that he hoped they'd be very happy together. She relaxed a bit.

'I guess I owe you,' she said, 'since we'd never have gotten together if you hadn't insisted I meet her.'

'That's true,' George said with a chuckle. 'Maybe I should become a matchmaker. You two are obviously in love. I could tell from watching you together how good it was for you.'

'We're pretty gushy, I guess,' his wife said, in that self-deprecatory way she had that drove him up the wall. They discussed the details of her move and he decided to follow through on his plan to be a real friend.

'I'm going to help you move,' he said.

'No, I don't want you to do that.'

'I insist,' he said, and began producing suitable boxes, helping her call an appropriate moving company, and busying himself with the details of her immediate exit.

They worked most of the night packing boxes, and when the moving men arrived he was still in a sleepy fog, but somehow he got through the day, and by evening she came to kiss him good-bye.

'I'm just a few miles away,' she said, gently, 'and we'll still see each other a lot. I always want to be your friend.'

'I'll always be here for you, Karen.' They kissed and she left for the apartment where her new wife was waiting. Or was it husband? It didn't matter to him at the moment. He was crushed. Demolished. The house was screamingly empty without her. Nearly twenty years had just been flushed down the tubes. It was like a death. Worse, because the loved one was still around. Terrible. Devastating. All the cliches rang true. He was alone. Fucked.

Many tears later, many curses and prayers later, but only a month on the calendar, things were beginning to sort themselves out. It was true, those hackneyed phrases, like 'one door closes but another opens.' It was the beginning of a new life. And George was prosperous and healthy — being alone wasn't such a sentence after all. He would be able to rationalize his way back to some semblance of what passed for normalcy inside his head, in time. He'd work at it. He was strong.

Oddly, for a man who — for decades — had thought of nothing but another woman balling his old lady, he never thought of Gayle and Karen making it together. He didn't try to picture them, and he never asked Karen how they were getting along. What he did was try to help her so that she could be free from the details of life, free from the daily pressures, as much as possible.

He helped her with her investment program, even added money to the half she'd taken in order to buy her a mutual fund he thought had great promise; he paid for the $204 extra each month on her car insurance, 'so you won't have to dig into your principle so much,' he'd said. He suggested courses where she might sign up to learn a possible career, if she found herself, at forty-one, immersed in the strange waters of the workplace again. Housewife work was tough, he was learning, but it didn't prepare a person for becoming an independent breadwinner. He deposited money in their joint money market account, and would pay her taxes at least for another year, he promised.

At every turn he acted as her friend, confidant, and adviser. He even took her car in for servicing, their car but hers now. He referred to it as 'my wife's Regal' when he left it at the shop. He kept up his insurance premiums so that if anything happened to him, Karen would still be beneficiary of a fairly tidy sum.

'I have to tell you,' she said on a visit, 'you've really surprised me. I never thought you'd be so good about everything. It's made something that would be difficult at best so much easier and more pleasant for all of us involved. Gayle is bowled over about the way you've behaved. She never thought you were such a good guy, even though I told her you were.'

He fought to hold his temper. 'Well, you've had nearly twenty years to know me. Gayle and I don't really know each other.' He kept his voice modulated and calm, but inside he was picturing the blond bimbo bitch with her boyish tits and shaved pussy; he could imagine her talking her baby-talk bullshit to his ex-wife.

The day after the papers came from the lawyer, announcing it was an uncontested divorce and that they were no longer man and wife, Karen began to

have problems. The first thing was the car. She was driving down Main and tapped the brakes at a stop light, went right through and smacked a produce truck hard on the bumper, crushing the Buick's front grille.

'I don't know what happened!' she told the investigating officer. 'I didn't have any brakes at all. My God, if a child or somebody had been crossing the street, I would have hit them!'

A couple of weeks later the insurance company informed a startled Karen that she hadn't been covered with comprehensive when the mishap had occurred.

'According to our records, you let your car insurance lapse two months ago.' Karen phoned her ex-husband, who was shocked and chagrined.

'Jesus, honey, I'm sorry. I don't know how it happened.' He checked their stubs and the master file under Auto Insurance. Sure enough — somehow — a few weeks ago he'd managed to make out the check and all, but