But that was just something us guys do. This felt… different. I realized that I wasn’t ready for this, and quickly we got back to other topics.
After we’d finished lunch, I drove her back to the shop and dropped her off. She said she’d see me at home, so I drove up to the bluffs and looked out over the Pacific. I looked down at my left hand, and removed my ring that had sat there for the last 8 years. I reached in my pocket and pulled out Maggie’s wedding band, too. I studied them both, and just the sight of them made me sick.
I then pulled out my grandma’s engagement ring, and held all three of them together. I put the engagement ring back into my pocket, then hauled back and chucked the wedding bands out into the ocean as hard as possible. They glistened in the sun as they went over the bluffs and into the white water crashing into the rocks below.
It was symbolic to me. My marriage was dead, and that was the post-mortem. Sure, the Divorce still had to play itself out, but this was what I had to do for my own sanity, and to be able to move on.
Now, just because I’d said the eulogy for my marriage, didn’t mean that I had given up on my plan to get revenge on Maggie and Reggie boy. I thought of the line from the song “Violence and Bloodshed” that went “Payback’s a bitch, and I’m payin’ all!” I smiled as I could hear Scott Columbus on The Drums of Death, and Eric Adams belting out the lyrics while Joey DeMaio laid down the Bassline, and Ross the Boss scorched the Lead Guitar.
Oh, yes. Reggie was going to pay for stealing my wife, and my wife was going to pay for being a gold digging slut.
Some would call me vindictive and a caveman. To those I would just say “To hell with you.” Do a twenty mile road march in my boots, THEN judge me.
*****
3 months later, it was all settled. Joint accounts were split 50/50. During that time, Kat and I coexisted as roomies, and got along great. Nobody cared at work that we were “living together”. The huge surprise was when we got home one night and found the wedding invitations in the mail.
Huh. Maggie hadn’t been kidding. They had the wedding scheduled a month from the formal Divorce decree. I grinned at Kat, and she grinned back.
“Ok, now it’s go time.” I said evilly as I drove us to Costco.
Finding out the caterer for the wedding was easy. He’d wanted to do business with us a few months back, but it had fallen through. I decided to… ahem… “give him another chance”, and do negotiate it all out myself, this time around.
What got me laughing a LOT was that Maggie was going to wear white, as was Reggie boy in his Navy Dress Whites. He’d been a Naval Aviator back during the early days of the war, while I’d been in Captain Drake’s Alpha Team. The dumptruck couldn’t even wear a normal black tux, it seemed.
I paid a visit to the caterer, a few nights before the wedding, and replaced the chocolate cake mix with my own special blend. I grinned like a Cheshire cat as I replaced the cake mix with a chocolate tasting something extra. No, it wasn’t poison. It was just something that would make Maggie and Reggie boy’s wedding pretty damned unforgettable… for everyone involved.