Confessions of an Octogenarian Wife

It was to be our last summer alone at the cabin. We were giving the place to our kids, who wanted it to stay in the family. It was getting too hard for us to come up in the summer, as we did when we were young. We had sold our house in Connecticut too, and were planning a move to San Diego. The contents from our home in Hartford had already been packed and shipped to a storage facility in he gated community of cluster homes where we would move in October. We weren't taking anything from the cabin except our clothing. Our car was already sold, and we were leaving the old Grand Cherokee here at the lake for our kids to use when they came up.

Our new home was built in a senior community. There was a small medical center, a satellite of the large medical center only a mile outside the gates. Shopping was convenient, and most of the time we wouldn't need more than a golf cart to get around. The weather there is beautiful year round, and storms like those that are common on the Eastern shore are rare. It seemed like a perfect spot for us to celebrate the later stages of life.

It had been a good life. Marie loved me, and I loved her. We had our disagreements along the way, but all and all we got along famously. She was a fantastic lover, though it was rare now that we both could physically meet the arousal requirements to have sex. We did still kiss, and hold each other. Cuddling never gets old, and once in a while magic still happens. Our kids were delights growing up, had married wonderful spouses, and were all happily making their ways being productive in society. Marie and I had five kids, and now were blessed with eleven grandchildren, and even four great grandchildren. Our kids were our joy.

It was a beautiful night, late in August. The sun was painting the sky in beautiful pinks and sand tones, and crickets had just started the evening symphony, when Marie said "I have to tell you something." I knew the day was coming, and I was truly ready for it. You don't have a family that is as close and loving as mine and expect to keep secrets. I had my own secrets, and I wouldn't be surprised if Marie knew them all. I knew hers, at least the big one.

"Ah yes," I said. "I knew we would have a chat. I suspected it would happen before we moved to San Diego, but rather thought you would wait a bit later, a bit closer to the move."

"You knew we would have this chat? How can you possibly know? I only decided today..."

"To confront me with the amount of vodka I have been consuming. Yes dear I know you have been worried, especially since the two of us have also taken to enjoying as much wine as we have. Well I sure you I am not becoming an old alcoholic, it merely numbs the ill effects of the arthritis in my knees."

"No, no, no, dear that's not it at all, I have to tell you..."

"Ohhhhhhh, you mean you found my stash of pot. Yes it has been a long time since I gave up the stoner life, but dear I always did enjoy a bowl or two in the evening, and at my age I am not very concerned with its supposed status as a gateway drug. Even if I do get hooked on the feeling and turn to cocaine or heroin, most of my life is behind me, so I wouldn't be throwing away much. Just a few short years."

"Charles! I won't have you talking with such despair! You will not throw away one precious moment of your beautiful life! Now as I was saying..."

"Ohhhhhh, then you must have discovered my penchant for fetish porn! I suppose I should have known you'd find me out, you are so clever. Tell me, how long did it take you to open the websites I like? I thought the password "2saggywr1nk3dtits!" was brilliant, didn't you? It gets "very strong" ratings on every site I use it. My alternate is "suck_m3_wr1nkly_p3ck3rw00d." Like it?"

"Charles that's disgusting, I had no idea..."

"You found my fleshlight masturbator?"

"No!"

"My Viagra?"

"NO!"

"My penis pump?"

"I should say not!"

"My butt plug?"

"Charles! Heavens!"

"The DNA report?"

She got very quiet.

"Darling you have no secrets left to tell me. I already know."

"You had DNA done?

"Yes I did, years ago. But I didn't need it. As soon as she was born, I could see his face in hers. She's not at all like me."

You see, as I told you Marie and I had five children. However we also raised a sixth child who was Marie's, but not mine.

"When you pushed so hard to name her Karla, with a 'k,' I put two and two together and realized I had been cuckolded by you and Karl Donaldson. You named her after him. When they checked out the baby after it was born, they typed her blood. It was impossible for her to be my daughter. As soon as DNA testing became possible, I managed to get a hair from Karl, and have the tests done. She is his daughter."

"And you lived with this all our life. Charlie, I am sorry. I really am. Why didn't you say something sooner?"

"We had a beautiful family, and you didn't seem to change anything as far as I was concerned. I loved you, and your affair didn't change a thing in our day to day life. I wanted the kids to grow up happy and secure that we would be there for them. So I kept my discoveries a secret."

"That is so unlike you. I would have expected you to seek revenge."

"I did! But since you two kept your dalliances quiet and they didn't affect me, Jeanie and I kept our revenge quiet."

It took her a while to process what I had said. Jeannie was Karl's wife until he died several years ago. She passed away the year before "the talk."

"We rather enjoyed our revenge times. You and Karl we sneaking out in the back of his car or on hikes in the woods, we were home making the children he thought were his."

"What??"

"Yes, you see Karl and Jeannie couldn't seem to conceive. They spent years trying, and spent thousands on fertility treatments for Karl. His little swim teams just were not up to their tasks. You apparently benefitted from his 'one in a million' lucky squirt. Yes their four children belong to me."

"Do they know?"

"Yes, she told them the whole story when she passed. As a matter of fact, they all have talked with me about it at length. Karl raised them, and they will always treasure him as their dad. But they all understand why Jeannie did what she did, and were kind of happy, or at least at peace with it, because they never would have been born otherwise."

"You won, didn't you?"

"Won what dear?"

"When we married, you wanted a huge family. I didn't want more than five. You got your eight!"

"Eleven actually."

Her eyes widened with the realization that I had not stopped with Jeannie Donaldson, then widened further when she realized...

"My nieces are yours!"

Give Aunt Marie a gold star. She always joked that her nieces looked as much like my sister as they did hers.

"Yes dear. Your sister actually saw you and Roger slip away that night in Cancun when we took that vacation together. She followed you to the beach, and hid behind a tree as you fucked him on the lounge chair. She heard you two talking about how hot it had been seeing each other naked on the sand earlier that day when we were all sunbathing au naturale. You also talked about getting together Thursday nights when you returned. So you joined that dance class and he started bowling, and once a month you skipped your activities to play at the Starlight Motor Inn out on route 12. The drapes on the windows were poor, so we have lots of photos. I have them scanned on my laptop, and could actually show them to you before we go to bed if you'd like to take a stroll down a memory lane of passion. I have shots of your other affairs too."

She sure looked pretty when shocked.

"Relax, I didn't need to get revenge on any of the others, they all met with tragedy beyond my control. It seems you are bad Karma! There was Danny Dawson, the UPS guy. He was arrested for drugs, wasn't he? The police stopped him on a hot tip that he was carrying cocaine in the cargo area, and would pedal to regular clients, even delivering to their homes. He's probably still in jail. When you were schtooping your boss, his wife got a phone call that she should follow him Wednesday afternoons at lunch. He got caught with his pants down and his pecker in his secretary's mouth and she took him to the cleaners. You were lucky though, you were his Tuesday girl and she never got wind of you. It's ok, your secret is safe from me. Remember how the exterminator died in his van that day? It was the day aft he treated our home, and you fucked him as his tip. Somehow a leak developed in a couple of his chemical tanks, and when the combined filled his vehicle with toxic fumes. Oh well, it was painless at least. Then there was Charlie Jr.'s first grade teacher, Jack Ryles. He was found in bed burning when the firemen got to his house. Remember? He supposedly fell asleep smoking and nearly burned to death?"

"You knew? About all of them? And you didn't stop me?"

"Why? To get divorced? So I could live alone in a shitty little apartment while you enjoyed e comforts of my home and salary? So I could see my kids for a weekend or two a month? So I could take bother job to support two households, not have time to date, and never get laid again? No way! Marie, you were a sexual dream! You took good care of me and the kids, you were an amazing housekeeper, and you made as much money working part time than most people make working overtime. You were, and still are a jewel, and I will never let you go."

"But I betrayed you! I cheated!"

"More than that you were a serial betraying insatiable nymphomaniac slut! But because you did those things, you changed the rules for me too. I slept with so many women it was amazing. Fat, skinny, curvy, flat, blonde, brunette, red headed, buff, soft, tall, short, smart, dumb, bimbos, broads, dames, girly girls, Tom boys, nerds, jocks, celebrities, rough, smooth, hot, cool, I had them all. It was an amazing love life. So don't feel you have to confess everything."

"I haven't confessed anything. You know it all! And apparently I know nothing!"

We sat awhile longer, sipping a beautiful red, watching the sun complete its artwork, and set into darkness. The frogs and other night singers had joined the crickets, and I felt incredibly at peace. After a whole she got up and went to bed. I fell asleep on the chair, smirking a little that she knew.

@@@@@@@@@@

Marie found him the next morning, still on the porch, in the rocker. He still clutched the stem of the half full wineglass in his hand. There was a peace about him. His smile was cute. She had cried a bit the night before after hearing his revelations. But when she woke in the morning, she was ok with it.

Years before she had gone for something more than her Charlie could give her. He was the best lover she had ever known, but she needed more than one man could give. There were always other men at hand took up the slack. She was actually happy that Charlie had children that weren't hers, it made things seem fair. She suspected that those times in their lives when he had mysteriously lost track of something financial and they had to tighten belts for a while were probably times that he was giving a little extra to her sister or to Jeannie Donaldson to provide for his other kids, and he always took care of their youngest like she was his.

It dawned on Marie that the accidents her lovers had met were probably not accidents, but were due to Charlie getting revenge. There was something right in her mind about that too. Charlie was a man's man, and stealing his woman was not something he could accept easily.

It was remarkable that he could compartmentalize both his and her affairs, and let home be home. What happened away from home never came back, until last night. He loved her. All of his life he loved her. This beautiful wonderful man, loved her enough to accept her faults, and to find a way to be strong doing it. He played by the rules she re-wrote. So like him. All the guilt she had felt over the years about her inability to control her unstoppable lust left her now, as she held his cold, hard hand this one last time.

She looked at the wineglass she had taken from that hand. She sniffed it, and knew. It didn't smell as it had before. He had left this world on his terms. Charlie never planned to go to San Diego. He wanted to stay here at the lake forever. She called her oldest, and asked him to come up to the lake right away. She told him her father had died. She did the same with her eldest niece, and Ellen Donaldson, Charlie's and Jeannie's eldest.

Then she took her place in the rocker beside Charlie, and kissed him good by. "Thank you love." She whispered. To his eternal smile, and drank the last of the wine in the glass. It's bitter flavor faded quickly, and she noted the complexities in the wine as Charlie had taught her. The sweetness, the overtones of plum and current, the late flavor of cherry back on the tongue. Perfect. The lake before her warmed with the sun. Perfect. Her eyes closed and everything went quiet.