2. ABRAHAM
AbrAHAM
Two Months Prior
At twenty five stories high, the beginnings of rush hour traffic scored the late afternoon as everyone from hill staffers to waitresses pulled out of parking garages and filed into lanes like a game of Tetris.
At this time of year, the sun was already beginning to set and I mourned that I was day drinking at sixteen hundred hours instead of fishing.
With the weather clear, the strait that fed into the lake behind my property would be unnervingly quiet and swarming with mosquitos, but there was something to be said for a tech dead zone and kilometers worth of distance between myself and the closest neighbor. What that was, I had no idea.
“Yes, I need an appraisal for a small watercraft,” I said, finally.
“Year and model?”
Expensive as fuck. That was all I knew.
I’d seen the custom cruiser in question exactly once, sixteen months ago when my wife had insisted on driving us home from FXRG headquarters where we both worked, and had taken a detour to the marina.
With nearly a week until our second anniversary, she’d handed me an envelope including a bill of sale in my name, and the keys to what looked like a miniature yacht.
Speechless, confused, I hadn’t had a chance to react because she’d leapt onto the stern and begun removing articles of clothing.
It was depressing how many of those seemingly innocuous moments of playfulness I still kept stored away like an emergency fund for a particularly shit fucking day. Even now. Especially now.
Just a couple of years prior, I’d been planning a future. Today, I was dissecting the minutia of the recent past through the ugly scope of bitterness, all so I could translate the cliff notes version to a lawyer I was fairly certain barely fucked with me.
“I’m not actually sure,” I admitted. “It’s a custom commission, about fifty feet in length. Two cabins. One and a half baths. Built over the last few years or so. It was intended as a gift.”
Now it was an asset.
One I had to appraise and submit to an attorney who was going to pick through the frayed ends of my life until my identity was summed in numbers and property, all due to circumstances out of my control.
The most I could expect to recoup for the last three years of everything I’d given was a fair distribution of marital acquisitions.
Cold. Avoidant. Impersonal.
Just like me.
The jokes truly wrote themselves.
“May I place you on a brief hold please?”
“I’ll hold, yes.”
It’d been nearly a year and a half since the universe decided my life needed a complete remodel, but only two months since I’d made the rookie mistake of returning home and handing it the proverbial sledgehammer.
I’d been staying at an FX property in between an endless schedule of assignments and meetings with divorce attorneys, but it’d been an uncharacteristically hot day and I’d needed a swim in something better than some leech infested lake.
Catching my breath, dripping chlorinated water onto the tile, I hadn’t even had time to towel off before some kid with a bored expression asked for my name and put a manila envelope in my hand.
For three weeks, I’d oscillated between the words in block print at the top and the loopy signature on the final page.
Signed. Sealed. Served.
It was official.
My wife had fucking served me.
Coming back on the line, the woman’s distantly polite tone crackled through the receiver. “The next available marine surveyor can see you a week out from tomorrow. Otherwise, you’re looking at the following—”
“Next Friday works fine, thank you.”
A choking sound pulled my attention from the call and I glanced down at the dark curly head that’d been bobbing between my legs. Taking deep gulps of air, a woman who was the wrong height, wrong eye color, wrong breast size dug her nails into my thighs as she gave a dramatic cough.
“Fuck, you’re huge.”
Considering she’d spent the last ten minutes scraping my shit with her teeth while her tongue played it safe around the tip, I didn’t accept that as a compliment.
I rattled off my name to the receptionist with a promise to call back with the rest of my information when I was alone, then cut the call and tapped the woman’s cheek. Then I made my first smart decision since the moment she sat down next to me at a bar and zoned in on my ring finger. “Get up.”
Stiffening, the woman stayed put.
Irritated, exercising far more patience than I had, I waited but the woman was either determined or unable to read the room.
I counted five heartbeats before I reached for my fly, zipped my pants, and rose to my feet. Still kneeling on the floor, her fake innocence bleeding into annoyance, the woman wiped her face on the back of her hand and I hated that I noticed how unladylike it was.
Even more so, I hated how my first thought was that my princess soon-to-be-ex-wife would’ve waited for me to wet a towel and wipe her clean like I was some peasant servant.
Then again, she also would’ve taken me deep and wouldn’t have come up for air until she was done because work ethic like that couldn’t be taught.
“Stay the night if you want. Order dinner,” I offered. Before the woman could protest, I set my drink on the balcony and re-entered the suite. Palming three bills from my wallet, I tossed them on the hotel dresser for her cab and grabbed my keys.
She clutched the dress that’d fallen to her waist when she’d undone the tie, stepping inside after me. “You’re seriously leaving?”
Christ.
“Work.”
I checked to make sure the woman didn’t follow me into the hall, then shut the door behind me at the same time my cell began to ring. Glancing at the restricted number on the caller ID, I answered on the third. “Lawton.”
A familiar inhale on the other line preceded the voice and I knew then I’d made a mistake. “You want to tell me why I shouldn’t drive the ten hours up to that compound you call a house and snatch your behind like I didn’t raise you with some sense?”
I hit the elevator button with my fist and a car door slid opened. Shifting the phone to one shoulder, I stepped inside and pressed the button for the lobby.
“Mom.”
“Where the hell have you been? And why am I fielding calls from some attorney like your personal secretary?”
The air thinned at the mention of the squat, balding man who currently spent more time with my wife than I had in months and with another woman’s saliva on my dick, my rage and jealousy sliced a fresh wound.
Still, I’d never disrespected my mother and I wasn’t about to start. “He shouldn’t have called you.”
“I know I said I didn’t want to get involved, but you can’t just avoid everything you don’t want to deal with, Abraham.”
If I was in any mood to laugh, I might’ve.
Fifteen months, two weeks, and three days I’d held the line.
I’d shut up, shoved my shit to the side, and complied. If my mother thought this was avoidance, I could do better.
“Respectfully, this is between my wife and I.”
“That’s interesting. Because I’ve seen your wife. Have you?”
An unexpected spark of hostility slid under my skin.
“She came to see you.”
“She comes to see me,” she corrected. “Present habitual tense. And that’s more than I can say for my son. Call the damn lawyer.”
Before I could respond, my mother stole my move and the line went dead.
I pocketed the phone. Tenser now than when I’d rented a room and followed the woman upstairs whose name I’d never bothered to ask for, I stupidly dialed the last number I should’ve been calling and was greeted by a soft, hesitant voice.
“Hello?”
I paused.
Months of distance hadn’t begun to take the weight out of the air when she spoke and with nowhere to place blame, I did the stupid thing—I misdirected my anger and fired.
“Stop visiting my mother.”
Cutting the call, I switched off the cell.