Lovers and Cheaters

By Grena Deestel

Marriages turn sour, and love becomes a memory when life becomes a routine of diehard habits that seem impossible to break free from. Two men, father and son, are successful real estate men. They cheat on their wives, and each has his reasons. Family drama is unavoidable when young and old marriages crumble in a web of deceit and emotional and physical domestic violence that snarls not just the spouses but family, friends, and enemies alike. When the going is tough, resignation and acceptance masquerading as dark humor becomes the only thing left to keep us going.

 

Multiple characters in this story tell us how they perceive the world through their eyes, and each perception differs from the others, even if everybody is experiencing the same reality. Reality is an illusion tinged by prejudices and opinions where everyone looks after their interests.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anvil Publishers
• Release date: Oct 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223552260

Book preview

1 ~ Emma

Dad once told me that much of our unhappiness is rooted in spending too much time with the wrong people.

I don't know if that remark was because he spent thirty years in the Navy, most of those years sailing the high seas in ships full of fools. He talks a lot about those Navy days. His first ship of Fools was a rusting tin can from World War II—I forgot the ship's name; I'm not good with names. Dad is a farm boy from the Florida panhandle and not too proud to be a cracker with little formal education, the son of crop sharers. One of his greatest accomplishments was escaping from the sandy lot prickled with pine trees he called home. Year after year, ship after ship, Dad earned stripes and became a sailor man: gruff, loud, with sea legs that took him from deck to deck without having to lean on walls or grab onto bulkheads no matter how rough the seas. The day he was made chief petty officer, he got his only tattoo, a golden anchor on his left vascular forearm. Daddy, you look like Popeye, I told him when he proudly showed it to me, and he laughed and told me, I yam what I yam and that's all what I yam! He retired with the rank of a master chief petty officer after twenty years of service and came home with his tattoo and memories of ships, oceans and faraway ports just in time to watch Mom die of pancreatic cancer.

He gets home to stay for good, no more deployments, and Mom dies. Unhappiness also comes from unexpected places. Dad and I came home from the cemetery without Mom and sat at the kitchen table across from each other, tired, our eyes still puffy and red from crying. I was fifteen. His years of work showed on his creased face weathered by the seas, his calloused hands rested on the table, fingers wrapped around each other. His tired hands looked gigantic and heavy.

So, said the Chief.

So, I said. I waited for his response. I never know what’s going to come out of his mouth.

Life goes on, sailor.

Aye, aye, Chief.

And that was it. In my family—what was left of it—we suck it up and move on once the crying is done, and we did, full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes.

2 ~ Emma

My husband James and I have been drinking at his parents' home since early afternoon. Their ostentatious house is perched on the side of a mountain in Evergreen, like one of those mountain monasteries in Tibet. The deck where we're partying looks east toward Denver and the plains, home to flatlanders like my husband and me. The sun is setting behind us, so we are in the mountain's shadow, and the temperature has already dropped about ten degrees. Thank God it's summer; it's turned into a refreshing evening. Nightfall will turn you into a popsicle on this deck. The sinking sun showers the little clump of Denver's downtown buildings in bright gold light. Long shadows stretch over sprawling suburbs, running amok in all directions over what used to be prairie and buffalo. Two gray mountains peppered with pines among the rocks frame the view. The city is poised as if I were looking through the sight of Dad's old rifle. He never sent me to a school dance or bought me stuffed animals, but he taught me how to shoot. Explaining to me how to adjust for windage and elevation was a piece of cake, but dealing with the troubles of his teenage daughter, not so much. He would have rather jumped overboard to wrestle with sharks. I had to figure many things out, but somehow, we managed to survive.

You won’t find cheap booze in this house—nothing from a can or a plastic bottle. Their fancy booze is yet another chance to brag and impress. I buy expensive wines from Patagonia to California by way of Italy and France, even though I know nothing about wines. I took a wine-tasting class once with James, got drunk and learned nothing. All I know is that when I buy wine, I make sure I don’t buy anything cheaper than fifty bucks a bottle; I pay more if his parents are coming for dinner. The expensive bottles impress my in-laws. They go gaga about the labels, and I nod and smile at their comments like a seasoned sommelier who doesn’t need to respond to their amateur praises. Keeping my mouth shut makes me look smart—another of the gems of wisdom I learned from Dad.

The sunset's blinding horizontal rays cast large shadows from otherwise unnoticeable objects. James and my father-in-law, Henry, prepare mixed drinks inside the bar, just behind the deck's wide sliding glass doors. They fancy themselves to be expert mixologists. They laugh loud, and then their voices diminish to the whisper of conspirators. Their laugh becomes loud again as they look at me and Harriet, my mother-in-law. Fools, both.

Harriet sits on the deck chair next to me. She is gaunt and wrinkled from too much time in the sun and smoking. Her big, bleached hair and fake eyelashes give her a rhinestone-clad country singer appearance. Her jewelry is genuine and expensive, but her taste is still that of the Kansas City waitress she used to be until Henry pulled her out of the greasy spoon where she worked and whisked her off to Denver. Money has not cured her gaudy tastes; they are now expensive, garish tastes. Her hoarse voice and sallow color are byproducts of long and mentholated Virginia Slims. She's smoking one right now, exhaling through pouting lips. She doesn't know she looks shriveled, sitting on that lounge chair, feeling so sophisticated with her cancer stick between her long, bony fingers. Harriet and I don't have much in common. I'm sure I wasn't on her top ten list as a wife for her only son. I had hoped for a motherlike mother-in-law, but as fate would have it, now we're family. They are a perfect family.

She smiles at me and lifts her empty glass, insinuating we could toast if I were kind enough to give her a refill. I smile back and go inside to retrieve a bottle of Louis L’atour Chassagne-Montrachet white wine. I can pronounce the name like I can afford to waste ninety bucks on one bottle. I have a couple of these bottles at home. James and Henry smirk at me as I go through the patio door. Those two can’t handle their liquor; I’ll be driving home. I would rather drive on the dark and winding roads than spend the night in this remote fortress, and I would rather stay at a medieval castle with a dungeon than here.

I bring the wine to the deck and sit beside Harriet on the lounge chair. I easily open it—that much I remember how to do from my wine class. She extends her skinny arm with her empty glass, and a collection of noisy bracelets slides back to her bony elbow. I fill it out for her.

Thank you, dear, she says with a smile.

"De rien ma belle," I respond with a smile. Speaking French is a delightful way to show that I went to college, the first in my undistinguished family. I took French in school and spent six months in Paris.

Sometimes I think you’re telling me to go to hell in Frog, says Harriet. She blows smoke in my direction.

"That would be Va te faire foutre!"

I wish I knew how to tell people to go to hell in other languages.

You can always use international sign language. Watch! I turn around and look at James and Henry and give them the middle finger while smiling. They look at each other and shrug. See? I tell Harriet.

She laughs and starts coughing.

3 ~ Harriet

My husband, Henry, is a jackass. I know it, and the rest of the world knows it, too. Nobody says it out loud. Henry has no friends, only business acquaintances who get some benefit out of putting up with him. Me and the kids deal with it in our ways. Lilly is married with a family in Atlanta, and I don't blame her for going that far. I don't have many friends and can't go anywhere, so I'm in the same boat.

I keep a fridge down in the basement with Coors beer. I drink alone, with a smoke, sitting on the deck looking east towards Denver and past Denver to Kansas, where the land and the sky meet. Once, a lifetime ago, I was a pretty waitress at The Golden Muffin in Kansas City. What a stupid name for a restaurant. Hey, hun, why don’t you show me your golden muffin? When my dad lost the farm, we were all old enough to fend for ourselves, and I ended up in the big city. The main benefit of working there was a meal or two a day—tips on ninety-nine cents breakfasts barely covered the shared room cost. Then, one day, a handsome blue-eyed stranger walked into the diner. I served him breakfast, and we talked, then he returned for lunch. He asked me for my number, but I didn’t have a phone, so I said no. The following day, he returned for breakfast in an electric blue Eldorado and asked me if I wanted to go to Denver with him. Nobody knew if I was alive or dead on a day-to-day basis, so I figured I didn’t have much to lose. I finished my shift and went up the block to grab the suitcase that held everything I had managed to stuff inside when the sheriff came to kick us off the farm, came back to the restaurant and got into the Eldorado. The rest is history.

He hasn't killed me yet, although he's knocked me unconscious a few times. But since I'm not going anywhere, why complain? It makes me look as stupid as Henry. He doesn't like my few friends, so nobody visits except James and his wife, Emma. She’s simple-looking and rather stuck up. James could have done better. Maybe he still will; divorce isn’t a big deal these days. I caught her snooping around in my basement last time she was here, refrigerator door open, staring at my Coors. At a loss for words, she asked if they were Henry’s. When I told her they were mine, she made a face like I drank old piss. Not expensive enough for ill-acquired tastes, I suppose.

When it’s too cold to drink on the deck, I move inside the sliding glass doors like a bird in a gilded cage. I told Henry once I felt like a caged bird, and he said more like an old hen that craps a lot but doesn’t lay eggs. Screw him. I survive because the house is big enough that he can be on one floor and I can be on another, and we don’t have to see each other all day. Even if I wanted to see him, he closes the door to his corner office to be alone with his online Russian prostitutes, watching porn and masturbating.

Every once in a while, I still think about leaving. Then I call my friends in Kansas and remember why I stay here. Asinine as Henry is, I'm not dealing with being evicted or not going to the doctor because I can't afford it. I like the house and the view and don't care if my Social Security check shows up. My car is new and doesn't leave me stranded. I don't know how much commercial real estate Henry still does, but he must do some because we always have more than enough money, enough for my smokes and Coors and bird food for the bluejays on the deck.

4 ~ Emma

Igot my associate degree at Arapahoe Community College in Littleton. The school building looks like a big, angular and gray bunker made of concrete and some glass. Every time I see it, I think I’m back at the Navy yards in Norfolk. It was in this bunker where I met James Seaman. We took the same class, English Composition II. We flirted, he copied my assignments, and that was it. I never expected to see him again after our class ended. Most people you meet are just passing acquaintances who come and go like a sign on the side of the highway, a passing blurb. But James and I met again at the University of Colorado Auraria Campus. I was in the Department of Modern Languages learning French—or Frog, as Harriet calls it—and he was pursuing a history major. There was no doubt that with our liberal arts degrees, the world was going to be our oyster. We were young, beautiful and invincible.

You’re full of it, the Chief used to tell me. Leave it to the Chief to be blunt. He wasn’t mean, just flat-out blunt. He was teaching himself to play the guitar then, but his clumsy fingers, used to wrenching on steam catapults and loading bombs underneath jets, were not quite ready for making music. I felt sorry for the treatment that his poor guitar got from his untalented sausage fingers, languishing on the fretboard like a fish out of water.

Dad, you're making my ears bleed. I can be blunt, too.

But I’m so full of raw musical talent, darling. He played louder, but it didn’t sound any better.

I met this cool guy, James, I said. He stopped and looked at me but said nothing. I like him. We know each other from Arapahoe College but never did anything together. He asked me out, so I said yes. My dad just stared at me. His name is Seaman.

What? he asked with a frown. After my mom died, my relationship with the Chief changed. We both knew that dating would lead to other things, including me leaving our little family unit, but there was something about James that gave me the guts to breach the subject of dating with the Chief. I tried to break the news with a joke.

Seaman. He’s a Seaman. He wants to date the Chief’s daughter.

We both laughed—stupid Navy jokes. So, James and I started dating. How silly, how wonderful and intoxicating it is to fall in love. The world was our oyster indeed. James stood half a foot taller than me and looked—and still does—like a Greek god. His square jaw sits above his muscular neck and broad shoulders like the lead in a beach movie. His perfect white teeth hide behind perfect lips, those lips which I adore, those lips that kiss me and run over my skin, my curves, my breasts, my nipples. Words escape through those lips, whispering tender sweet nothings into my ear. I bite those lips, chew on them, lick them with the tip of my tongue, press my lips against his, and the world's problems disappear because all I can do is taste James, smell him, feel him under my hands, inside me, around me, my legs around his waist, my fingers running through his thick wavy dark hair.

It's still good, unlike in those college days when the future didn't need to go beyond tomorrow. Those were the times when being together was all I needed to be complete, when we owed nothing and owned nothing. The future was an expectation of that eternal state of bliss. Sometimes, though, I feel that something is wrong. I wonder if it's James or me. He used to hold me close and kiss me with a spontaneity that is now gone. I know life's not a fairy tale, and the pressures of everyday living have already stolen some of our youth and energy, but something is different now. I have to put on a show to get his undivided attention most of the time now—it can be a sex show, a sob show or a drama show, but he doesn't seem to care about me like he used to. Is this just what happens in relationships after a while?

I wish I could ask the Chief, but he only knows about ships and bombs and taking misbehaving sailors belowdecks and knocking some sense into them. He knows nothing about love and marriage; if he does, his sailor mouth can’t speak about them.

I miss my mom. She knew a different side of life than my dad. I miss her gentle touch and her low-key but ever-present love. She followed Dad from port to port, all over the country and overseas to some unpleasant places, and never complained. Dad was gone for months; sometimes, he couldn't say where he was or where he was going. Dad comes home, at last, from the Navy, and he does it to watch Mom die. The Chief and I know that the world sucks, and it's not all love and kisses. I should be thankful that the two loves of my life, James and the Chief, are alive and well.

5 ~Emma

We have no weekends to ourselves. Saturday and Sunday are open house days. Today, James took the house in Cherry Creek, and I took the one in Highlands Ranch. He always takes the bigger one, and I get the runt. This house is not too shabby, though. Gated communities have tamed the old west, that hungry and harsh west where cowpunchers worked for beans, a bunk bed and a little cash. I'm glad it's history, and now I like how refined it is around here. It's 5,700 square feet of expensive carpeting, wood and heated tile floors, and tall beige walls poked with expansive windows, but it's a pain to stage a house this big. I can't use cheap cardboard props and shabby second-hand furniture in this price range, so I had to hire a professional outfit. I called Jim and his wife to get the job done. They are not cheap, but when this house sells above the asking price, that expense will feel like small change. I have learned that it takes money to make money. I have my selling face on, greeting the walk-ins, passing out literature, making small talk, offering cookies and refreshments, and showing this house’s fancy features. There is no doubt that I will have multiple offers by the end of the day. I love being in a seller’s market.

I think of the 2007 recession and shudder. Back then, you couldn't have given this house away for free. James and I were still at CU, but we felt the harsh impact of the real estate crash. Henry and Harriet almost went broke while waiting for the market to turn. At least Henry was in commercial real estate, which weathered the storm slightly better. Back then, James was already thinking about doing real estate after college. The market was still in the dumps when we graduated in 2009, so he worked as a bank teller, and I worked as a pet groomer. Four years of education so I could speak to French poodles. Every day our bosses reminded us how grateful we had to be for having a shitty job. I block those memories of want, need and worries, survival wages, and being broke all the time. Houses sell now above the asking price, but inventory is tight, and appraisers are hard to find. I grin, though, because those problems are good. People must think I'm on something, but I smile when we make real money.

My cell rings. It’s James. Hi, honey.

Hi, how’s it going over there? he asks.

I’m sure I’ll have it under contract by this evening, I say.

Good, same here. Hey, my parents want to meet us for dinner tonight at Cherry Creek, and they asked for your dad to come.

Oh boy, Dad and his sailor mouth in a fancy restaurant, telling nasty jokes and Navy screw-up stories that make people wonder how our ships stay afloat. I think Dad is working tonight, I lied.

My parents like listening to his stories. See if he can make it, he says. Have to go; I have a full house.

Bye, love you.

Love you too.

After the open house, I head to Home Depot, where Dad works. It would be easier to call him, but I like to meet him at work because he's always busy, which keeps our conversations short, and I have done my duty by seeing him. I'm proud and, at the same time, embarrassed by my dad, and the contradiction drives me crazy and gives me so much guilt. He has a Southern accent tamed by years among sailors from everywhere but hasn't fully surrendered it like he's waiting for the South to rise again. Dad, I asked him once, why do you talk like a hick? Bluntness is a virtue in my family.

What do you mean?

Like you came from a cotton plantation in the South. You’re from Florida.

I was born and raised closer to Mobile than to Tallahassee.

People from Florida don’t talk like you.

My dad smiled and shook his head. Girl, Florida is Dixie, the South end of the Deep South. Them so-called Floridians, you know, are nothing but carpetbagger Yankees, Disney World people and damned Cubans.

I know he watches his mouth, his cussing, his southern accent. He does well, but when he gets pissed or drinks, all bets are off, and here he comes, that swearing southern sailor that cusses like, well, a drunken sailor. That expression is no joke. My ears burn when I remember some of my dad’s tirades. He can make the devil blush.

Home Depot is busy. I stopped by the customer desk and asked for the Chief. He's at tool rentals today. He works everywhere; no job is beneath him, and no department intimidates him. If they need him in hardware, he goes to hardware. If they need somebody to copy keys, Dad will do it. Need to move a stack of two by sixes? Here comes Dad with a forklift. No wonder the Navy tolerated him for over a quarter of a century; the man never hides from work or makes excuses. Dad is wearing his orange vest and blue baseball Navy cap behind the tool rental desk. He’s checking something on a clipboard with his reading glasses hanging over the tip of his broken nose. That broken nose is another colorful story of his.

Hi, Dad.

He looks at me over his glasses. He looks older, much older; I don’t know why. His blue eyes are soft. Does the lady need an auger to dig fence post holes? he mocks me.

I don’t need power tools, Dad. Thank you for offering.

What brings you to this fine establishment, then?

The Seamans want you to come with James and me to a fancy restaurant for dinner tonight. Dad grunts. Just keep your mouth shut, be nice, and you will be fine, I say.

Yes, ma’am, I’ll keep my filthy mouth in check.

Thanks, Dad. I know I can always count on you. Of course, that’s not true after he has a few. He grins from ear to ear.

At what time will you and James come by?

I’ll call and let you know, but plan for around seven-ish.

Nineteen hundred hours then, plus or minus, he says. I’ll be ready to rumble.

We pick up Dad at his little house at 7:30. James is driving his new fancy German SUV. Dad sits behind us, wearing his black dress pants and shoes and a long-sleeved light blue shirt I bought him for these occasions.

How do you like that new car smell? I ask Dad.

He shrugs. My truck smells like wet socks, he says.

It won’t take long for this thing to smell like that, James says. I’m going to use it to show houses.

How’s the business going? Dad asks.

Closing on twelve deals this month, says James with a smile. Dad grunts. His grunts are noncommittal, his way of saying whatever, or maybe he’s saying, Who gives a damn? Perhaps he’s saying, That’s nice. I can’t tell.

We use valet parking. I can tell that Dad already feels out of his element. The restaurant is one of the most trendy and expensive eateries in Cherry Creek. I bet we can spot a couple of Denver Broncos eating here tonight. Dad would look at them and grunt. He's not into football; he's more of a hockey fan. We get into a semicircular booth under designer lights that put me under the spotlight like I'm being interrogated. Dad