We talked a little on the road home, but in between talks, and in the back of my mind I wondered what the hell I was doing. I had just had some of the greatest sex I’d had in years, with a wife who had been cheating on me even after I was in prison.
That she was desperate to save the house and survive, I understood; yes, that I understood. That the guy who had cuckolded me and, in my opinion, had been the cause of me going to prison, was still cuckolding me, had agreed to help her for sexual favors, I did not understand. He, Mr. Carlton had to know I was not going to be happy when I got out, and I wasn’t. And, I did not understand how my wife could not realize how badly I was going to take it when she saw me.
An outsider not going through it all might see my path to be simple and straight forward: dump the cheating woman and screw over the interloper. But they were not enduring the inner turmoil that I was going through. They did not know Meagan. Meagan was not a military genius. She simply reacted to the calamities that beset her, always took the shortest and easiest way out. Anything more complicated was simply beyond her. So, to reiterate, what the hell was I doing, and what the hell was I going to do.
We pulled into the driveway at around noon-thirty. The house looked the same except some of the bushes were pretty overgrown. The garage door needed painting, but it had that even before I left. I’d be getting to it as soon as I could—why was I thinking of garage doors?
Meagan watched me as I took in the scene. “You’re home, my husband, and those awful days in that place are behind you forever. I promise to protect you; I do,” she said.
I looked over at her. She was being sincere. The truth was that I needed her to protect me; or, maybe love me was the right way to say it, in spite of her failings and continued messin’ with Carlton. I needed her to care for my heart, and that was an absolute and totally unadorned fact.
Water under the bridge, as brackish as it was, was still water under the bridge, and this was the dawning of a new beginning for us. Still, in the back of my mind, I knew that sooner or later I was going to have to deal with mister asshole. I would be ready for him this time, and I was going to get my pound of flesh one way or another, one fucking ounce at a time; and, I was not going to go back to prison for the doing of it either. ****** Initially things were idyllic around the house. I took a few days to get reacquainted my—our—place before I went looking for work.
I landed a job in less than a week. It was at a Radio Shack. Pay was bad, but the work was actually interesting; in the joint, technology had become my passion. Now I had the resources to discover its many facets, and I was determined to do just that.
There was a definite side benefit to the job too. By the end of the first week on the job, I had some things that sooner or later I was going to need; it turned out to be sooner.
I had my home phone wired to a recorder in the garage before the end of day three on the job. I couldn’t afford a computer for our home yet, and the old one we had had broken down, who knew how; but the recorder would be enough for now. Plus, I had acquired a smaller—very small—micro-recorder that was going to be my main backup whenever I was out and about just in case. All, I needed now was a sixgun, but I was on parole and I wasn’t going there.
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