Her Problem Ch. 04

I watched as she walked away from me and could tell from her walk how much she'd changed in such a short length of time. The slouch she was in as she left me was one hundred and eighty degrees away from the upright, confident, sexy walk she'd had as she walked through the airport terminal earlier in the week. She shuffled along instead of striding gracefully away like she had in the past. My plan to remove myself from her as much as possible until my pain was gone almost went to pieces when I saw the broken woman she'd become instead of the vibrant woman I'd fell in love with.

I followed her home and parked beside her in our garage before going to her car door and opening it for her. I allowed her to lean against me as we walked into our living room. I sat on the right hand side of our oversized couch with my arms resting on the arm and back of the couch while she clung to me with her head on my chest and I felt the wetness of new tears on my chest as she cried harder than I'd ever seen her cry. In a moment of weakness, I wrapped my left arm around her shoulders and hugged her to me as I fought not to cry myself.

The emotional stress we both had been in that day finally caught up with us and we both fell asleep there on the couch. I awoke sometime in the night and had to answer the call of nature so I eased Mare's head down onto the couch cushion, grabbed an afghan off the back of the couch to throw over her, and went to the downstairs bathroom. I went to my room and stripped off all my clothes before lying down and falling back to sleep.

I was awakened by the sound of someone pounding on the front door. I jerked on a pair of sweats and ran to see who was making so much noise at 6 AM on a Sunday morning. Mare must have slept the entire night on the couch because she managed to get to the door before I did.

When I saw my in-laws standing on the porch after Mare had opened the door, the situation that Mare had put our marriage in worsened by a factor of two at least. I hadn't had one thought about the my in-laws the day before and knew that their showing up at our house so soon didn't bode well for me if Mare wasn't totally on my side as she'd promised she would be. The thought of me disappearing without a trace flashed across my mind and for the second day in a row I felt the most fear that I'd ever felt in my life.

"What the hell is going on, Joe?" Mr. Ortiz bellowed at me before he'd taken two steps into my house.

"Don't you talk to my husband that way, Poppi." Mare yelled back at her father. "I'm the one to blame for everything that happened yesterday. I let Stephanie get me drunk and I reverted back to that filthy slut I was in college. Stephanie hates Joe so much that she videoed me doing it and sent it to Joe. That's why I couldn't reach him yesterday and called momma in a panic."

"He still shouldn't have made it impossible for anyone to get in touch with him. I left more messages on his voicemail than I can remember and not getting even the answering machine here at the house made it worse. We didn't know if something bad had happened to him or not. Surely whatever you did wasn't bad enough for him to do what he did yesterday." Mr. Ortiz exclaimed with the same angry tone to his voice.

"Yes, it was that bad and to make it worse he found the birth control pills that I forgot to take with me to Atlanta.

"Do you want to see the video, Poppi, and decide for yourself if what I did Friday night into Saturday morning wasn't bad enough for Joe to react the way he did? Or maybe you'd like a copy of the CD that Joe had the presence of mind to make of me having sex with three men at the same time? I thank God that Joe didn't have the stomach to watch the worst of what I did with those men or we wouldn't be standing here yelling at each other right now.

"I know Joe would have kicked me to the curb if he had seen the video in its entirety like I did. I forced myself to watch it and couldn't believe that Stephanie would say all the bad things she said about Joe at the end of the video. Joe was right about her all along and I refused to listen to him.

"Stephanie was so good to me when we first met, not like the other girls. You remember how miserable I was before I met her, Poppi. Being called all those ugly things the other girls were calling me, being ashamed of how different I was from them, and feeling helpless because I couldn't change the body I was developing back then. I truly thought Stephanie would be my best friend forever. I didn't realize how much she's changed over the years until I heard what she was saying at the end of the video.

"I'm probably pregnant with another man's child on top of everything else so I ask you Poppi; how should Joe have reacted when he found out about all of this while he was here alone without anyone to help him cope?" Mare ranted at her father before she ran out of steam.

"He could have called me, he could have talked to me, he knows I love him like he was my own son, and I would have listened. I can't say I would have been able to give him any advice about what to do about the situation, but I would have at least tried." Mr. Ortiz said as the angry tone was replaced by one of sadness.

Mr. Ortiz turned to me with a pained look on his face before speaking to me in that "time to get down to business" tone he'd used on me twice before.

"What do you want to get out of the divorce settlement, Joe? I honestly thought you and Mare would be together for the rest of your natural lives or I never would have buckled on having you sign the pre-nup my attorneys had prepared before the two of you got married. I tell you right now that I'll spend the money on legal fees so that you don't get half of Mare's inheritance if that's what you're thinking of getting."

"I don't want a divorce, Mr. Ortiz. The only reason I'd want one is if Mare insists on having, keeping, and raising another man's child if she is pregnant. I won't be a father to someone else's child; it would be too painful. The child would be a constant reminder of what Mare did and I wouldn't ever be able to forget or forgive with another man's child around.

"The best solution would be for Mare to have an abortion." I told her father while struggling to control my emotions.

"There will be no abortion." Selena Ortiz, Mare's mom, said emphatically. "Mare will not kill my grandchild even if you aren't the father."

"But that's the most practical way to handle an unwanted pregnancy, Mrs. Ortiz. I don't want to live without Mare, but I can't stay with her if she keeps any child she may be carrying right now." I replied to Mrs. Ortiz with my voice rising in volume from the anger I was beginning to feel.

"She wouldn't have to keep it to have it. When she has it, we'll take it and raise it as our own. No abortion, no divorce, and everything works out to the good for all of us." Mrs. Ortiz answered me while remaining cool and calm.

"I don't see how that will work. The new school year is only a month away and a couple of months after that Mare will be showing. How to we explain that she's pregnant for nine months and then suddenly she's not and the baby is gone also?

"I won't lie to anyone about Mare being pregnant nor can I act happy that she is when I know it's not my child. An abortion is the best way to deal with the situation." I was literally yelling at her at that point.

"Mare will have to go away to have the baby so that no one here knows she's pregnant. If the school won't give her the time off, she'll be able to get another job coaching quite easily somewhere else." Mrs. Ortiz lectured at me and I realized for the first time where Mare's in charge voice came from.

"Where can she go that she won't be recognized? How can she keep her pregnancy a secret when a photographer manages to take a picture of her with her belly big and full with child? She was in the news all last week because of the convention. She was on ESPN's "SportsCenter" for God's sake. Like it or not, Mare's a minor celebrity so tell me how she's going to be able to hide a pregnancy now?"

"She stays with us in our compound in Mexico until she's ready to have the baby. I guarantee that the child will have a US birth certificate and that Mare's name will not appear on it. No one will be able to get any pictures of her while she's pregnant and no one outside of my people and us will know she was ever pregnant as long as we don't tell them." Mr. Ortiz said as he took over the argument as to what to do about Mare's pregnancy from his wife.

"But where does that leave me? I finally have a teaching job that could lead into a career and, more importantly, an assistant coaching job with the baseball team. I can't take time off to be with Mare in Mexico and keep my hopes of being a baseball coach alive and I don't want to be separated from her for however long it may take for her to recover if there are complications from her pregnancy or the birth of the child.

"I still say an abortion is the best way to go." I implored of my in-laws.

"Does anybody care that I'm standing right here listening to you argue about what do to about a problem that we don't even know we have yet or not? Have you forgotten that it's my body that you're talking about like I'm not even here? No matter what the three of you decide, I will be making the final decision on what happens if I am pregnant.

"I love you all, but I will be doing what I feel is the right thing to do if it comes to that so stop arguing about it." Mare yelled at my in-laws and me before fleeing up the stairs to what used to be our bedroom but was hers now.

Mrs. Ortiz followed her up the stairs after she saw that I wasn't going to and I heard the door to Mare's room close with a small click that was barely audible even in the suddenly silent air in the entry way to our home. My father in-law and I stood there staring at each other for a few minutes before I managed to break the tension between us.

"Roberto, make you at home. Since neither of us drinks it, I think the only coffee we have in the house is instant, but you're welcome to it. I have to take care of some business in the restroom, but I'm sure our wives will be back down shortly." I said to him before turning away and going back into my room for some fresh clothes.

I did my morning constitutional, took a quick shower, and walked back into the kitchen where I could smell that someone was cooking. I saw Mare and Selena working together to get a good breakfast together for the four of us while Roberto sat watching them and grimacing every time he took a sip of the hot cup of instant coffee someone had made for him.

We sat at the dining room table and ate with me and Mare on one side and her parents on the other. When Mare returned from removing our dirty dishes from the table and sat down with her parents instead of rejoining me that they had decided on they wanted to happen in case Mare was pregnant and that together they could persuade me to agree with their decision.

"Joe, I love you, but I need you to listen to what I've decided to do in case I'm pregnant without you getting angry. Please Joe, I promise everything will work out for us if you can do that for me." Mare asked me with tears beginning to glisten in the corners of her eyes.

"I'll try, Mare. That's all I can promise and I need you to know that I already feel like I'm being ganged up on here and it makes me nervous and a tad angry. You promised me you'd take my side in any disagreement we might have with your parents, but you're sitting over there with them instead of over here beside me." I managed to say without too much of the anger I was feeling being expressed in my tone.

Thus began the discussion between the four of us that would set the course for what would happen to both Mare and I in the foreseeable future and beyond.

To be continued...