“Then who did you have the affair with.”
“Well… I began to travel with my job. Not much, just a couple of times a year. It was at a conference in Dallas that I met this guy from our Boston office.”
She paused for a moment, “I’m sorry Lynn. This is very difficult for me to talk about, especially to my daughter.”
To Lynn’s credit, she gave her mother the time she needed to pull herself together.
She regained her composure and continued, “His name was Charles Conklin. But Dr. Royce said it could have been most anybody at that point. She believes I was already looking to have an affair and she was absolutely right.”
“Any way, he invited me down to the bar one night and a few drinks later we were up in his room dancing to a song he was humming.”
Lynn rolled her eyes, “Sure didn’t take much to sweep you off your feet, did it?”
“Oh Lynn…I still can’t believe I did it and the next thing I knew I was waking up the next morning in his hotel room with a hangover and the worst case of guilt I ever thought possible. I tell you, if your father had seen me the next day he would have known immediately what I had done and divorced me then. Would have deserved it too.”
“The next day at the conference Charles was the perfect gentleman, or so I thought. Can you believe that it was Dr. Royce who convinced me that this guy never had any real feelings for me? Damn it Lynn, a grown woman like me couldn’t see it until almost two decades later.”
Pausing for a moment she went on, “So the next day he sweet talked me enough to go to dinner with him and I don’t have to tell you what happened then.”
“You wound up in his room.”
“Yep. I wound up in his room. Only this time it felt a bit different. When I woke up in the morning the guilt was still there, only not nearly as strong. The guilt was being replaced by excitement. Excitement from sleeping with a man other than your father.”
“Are you trying to say you didn’t know it was wrong?”
“Of course I knew it was wrong, but it was the excitement of having an affair and that your father would never know about it. We spent a couple of more nights together before heading home. Then the guilt returned.”
“How do you explain meeting with him again at other conferences?”
“I can’t Lynn, that’s just it. In between those conference I’d be fine and somehow managed to block out the cheating. But a couple of weeks before each conference he would call or email me at work and remind me of the fun we had in Dallas or another conference. Of course I would casually forget about the guilt and potential for ruining my marriage.”
“I shouldn’t be telling you this, but…well…it wasn’t about the sex. Your father is a kind and gentle man in every way and what I did had nothing to do with him. It was all about the thrill of doing something I shouldn’t be doing?”
“Did dad ever meet him, you know, at a company party or something?”
“No. Never.”
“Why did you stop seeing him? You did stop seeing him didn’t you, mother?”
“He was fired for certain indiscretions with female employees in the home office. One was with CEO’s wife.”