Memories

Kevin Reilly unlocked his front door, kicked off his shoes and walked down the hallway to the kitchen. He had just taken his wife Keri to the airport where she was going to be catching the 8 a.m. commuter flight to the state capital. It was her biweekly three day trip to perform secretarial duties for her boss, Bradley Knox III, or as Kevin always referred to him, Trey. Every time he used that nickname for her boss's pretentious official name Keri would remind him that her boss hated it. Although he never admitted it to his wife, it was one of the reasons that he always found a way to bring the nickname into a conversation. She might think that Bradley Knox III was a great guy, but Kevin didn't really care for him; there was something about him he simply found phony.

He looked at the clock and saw that it was only 7:30 a.m., which left him a lot of time to drive to the shop by nine when it opened. There was time for another cup of coffee, and as he poured it he realized there was also time for him to check his email and maybe do a little surfing around the Internet. He was not big on computers or the Internet, but he did find that email was a good way to keep in touch with some of the guys that he'd been in trade school with. There had been four of them who had stuck through it as a group, learning the intricacies of diesel mechanics together. The other three had all taken jobs away from the city, while he had been fortunate to catch on with one of the major heavy equipment sales and service firms right here in his home town.

At the age of 30 Kevin was now one of three head mechanics and had a crew of five men working under his supervision. Being the head of the group didn't mean that he didn't have to pull wrenches with the rest of them; he still got just as dirty as they did, although he primarily worked on fuel systems. Kevin enjoyed his job even though it could mean unexpected overtime and the occasional need for out of town work. At least he didn't have to travel as much as Keri did with her job.

She had only been at the Crosby and Knox law firm for six months, getting the job the week after she completed the upgrading courses necessary to move from a job as a real estate secretary to a better paid one as a legal secretary. She and Kevin had met at the college while each was learning their craft. That had been over eight years ago, and the two of them had been married for the last six. When they married Kevin had just started at the shop and Keri had been hired as a secretary for a local real estate firm. With the two of them working they had been able to make a down payment on this home they now lived in. Being able to move into their own home had occurred less than two years after they started their respective careers, something they both took pride in.

With his coffee in hand Kevin headed down the hall to the spare bedroom where their computer was set up. He hoped it was still on because he had noticed Keri use it for a few minutes after getting dressed and packed. At least he wouldn't have to wait for it to boot up if she left it on. As he entered the room he could see the picture that they used as a screensaver slowly moving across the screen in its random journey around the face of the monitor.

"Damn, we're a fine looking couple," he said to the empty house as he watched the photo of them move in front of him. They were side-by-side on lounge chairs surrounded by nothing but white sand, with the blue of the Gulf behind them. Both of them were nicely tanned, smiling and wearing the briefest of swimwear. It was one of many pictures they had taken during their vacation to Cancun 18 months earlier.

They both had sunglasses on so you couldn't see his gray eyes or Keri's blue ones, but there was very little left beyond that that you couldn't see. Keri's shoulder length blond hair was lighter than his sun bleached light brown hair, and their tans were almost a matching shade. With the two of them lying back in their chairs you couldn't tell the she was 4 inches shorter than his 6 foot height.

This wasn't the picture that he wanted to use as their screensaver, but Kerry wouldn't let him use one of the photos that had been taken when they spent a day on the nude beach at the resort. She was afraid that her parents, or someone else that she wouldn't want to see the picture, would somehow walk in while it was on the screen. In deference to her fears he had left those pictures in a secure folder, hidden behind a password. Maybe if he had time he would take a quick stroll through that folder before heading out to work so he could pay homage to Keri's luscious 36Cs. Then again, with having to spend the next two nights alone in their bed, he decided that perhaps it wasn't such a good idea.

After watching their photo travel from the right margin diagonally to the top of the screen, he finally moved the mouse to clear the screensaver. The photo and the black background dissolved, and he could see that there was an email on the screen from Keri's email account at Crosby and Knox. He wondered why she left it on the screen, as she had told him their corporate system had to be kept secure for a multitude of legal reasons. She was always paranoid about him seeing her messages when she got onto her corporate account from home.

After a second of thought he glanced to the top of the screen where he could see the familiar hourglass figure hovering over the Logout command. He realized then what had happened: their flaky high-speed modem was acting up again. Every week or so it would quit communicating to the equipment at the cable company, and the only way to get it working again was to cycle power to the modem. This brute force reset would always get it going.

He was just reaching for the modem so that he could turn it off when a phrase jumped off of the screen from the email that Keri had left showing in her haste that morning. The phrase that caught his eye was 'bra and pantie', and as he stared at it he couldn't quite understand why it was there in an email on her work account. It was at that point that he pulled his hand back from the modem and sat transfixed reading the email that his wife had received that morning from her boss. It wasn't very long but the words went through him like a spear.

Keri

Hope I catch you before you leave. I really want you to bring that black bra and pantie set I got you on our last trip; the one with the teal accents. You never had a chance to wear them for me.

My first appointment isn't until 2 p.m. with the Governor, so maybe we'll have enough time for you to put them on and for me to take them off for you this morning.

Bradley

He reread the message three times, hoping that it would somehow make some sense to him, beyond the obvious. He was left with only the obvious, however; Keri was having an affair with Trey, her boss. Kevin didn't realize it but had there been a witness to him sitting there at the computer, their description of him would have been that he was staring at the screen, intermittently opening and closing his mouth like a goldfish in a bowl.

Finally Kevin shook his head and staggered to his feet, pushing the chair hard enough that it bounced off the wall as he left the room. He knew which black bra and pantie set Trey was talking about; he had seen it in Keri's lingerie drawer when she packed, and it had still been there when she closed and zipped her suitcase. He prayed that it was still there now as it might mean that the email had been a joke, some kind of sick joke. His hand was shaking as he pulled the drawer open, and it was quickly obvious that the black bra and pantie set, the one with the light blue-green bows decorating the front clasp of the bra and the thin ribbons at each side of the pantie, was no longer there. He quickly checked all of her drawers, praying she had simply moved them, but they weren't to be found.

As the realization that his wife had returned to the room and taken the missing lingerie with her sank in, Kevin sat down on the edge of their bed and tried to think of what Keri had told him about them when she had brought them home. Kevin had seen them as she unpacked that day, and had taken them from her hand saying, "For me? I mean, for you to wear for me?" He remembered grinning at her like a fool.

Keri had smiled at him coyly as she took them from his hand and said, "Not for tonight. I wouldn't want you ripping them off me in your haste to get me naked. I got them on a half-price sale at Victoria's Secret, but they were still expensive." He remembered her putting them into the drawer and they hadn't come back to his mind until this very morning. They had made love that night, just as they always did when Keri returned from her biweekly trips. She didn't need sexy lingerie to turn him on; she could always accomplish that by simply being near him.

Kevin sat there for several minutes thinking about the email and the lingerie. He finally decided that it couldn't mean what it seemed to mean. There weren't any of the signs or signals he had always assumed would be present if a wife were cheating on her husband. She was as loving as ever, eager to be with him. He couldn't remember the last time they had a serious disagreement let alone a fight, and if anything their lovemaking was more frequent than when they enjoyed their Mexican vacation. There simply had to be something he was missing that would explain that message.

He returned to the computer and after manipulating the browser stop button, and moving forward and back from screen to screen, he was able to get back to a normal cursor. With any luck her logout command hadn't gotten through, and he would be able to look at her email account to see whether there was anything else there from that bastard. Mentally he crossed his fingers as he reset the modem and waited for the green lights to reappear on it. When they did he took a closer look at her email and the folders displayed on the web page behind it.

After minimizing the lingerie message he looked closely and could see that the only open folder was her Inbox, so he clicked on it and found four other messages. He opened them one by one and discovered that each was related to legal cases that meant nothing to him. He was beginning to fear that perhaps there wouldn't be anything else for him to use in his attempt to figure out what, if anything, was going on between Keri and her boss. It was when he began looking through the titles of her folders that he got lucky. Tucked between folders named for two local businesses was another labeled Personal. He didn't hesitate before clicking on it, hoping it might be the one that he was looking for.

There was a screen full of message headings in the folder, and he could see that about half of them were from her boss. The folder was sorted by date, and he opened the first one apprehensively, scared of what he might find. The first message was very long, and as he read through it the color and emotion drained from his face. He read it a second time, clenching his teeth as he did so. When he finished the second reading he reached over and turned on their printer and printed out the entire email.

While the message printed he happened to take a glance at the clock and saw that he would be late if he didn't leave immediately for work. There was no way that he was going to be able to concentrate on his job now, so he grabbed his cell phone and called in sick, a statement that was not so very far from the truth. The printer was finished now so he closed the message he had read and printed and went on to the next one. For the next hour he moved mechanically, selecting and reading messages, printing most of them and then forwarding copies of all of them to his own personal email account. By the time he was finished with the messages his eyes were filled with tears, and he knew that his marriage was over.

After taking one last look at Keri's email account at Crosby and Knox and not finding anything else that appeared relevant, he logged her off the corporate web site and went to his own email account. He set up a separate folder and moved all of the forwarded messages into it. The last thing he did was change his password since he couldn't remember if Keri knew what his old one had been. He wanted those emails to remain available in case he needed to print more copies.

After he shut down the computer he picked up the printed messages and his now cold cup of coffee and returned woodenly to the kitchen. He grabbed a beer from the fridge and then sat down at the kitchen table and reread the messages once again. He was surprised by how much they told him, especially when they were placed in context with what he remembered of the past six months and Keri's trips with Trey to the state capital.

Keri had only been at her new job for a week when they told her that she would be required to accompany her boss to the capital to take statements, find and print whatever he might require from their corporate files and generally provide whatever assistance he needed. Their firm was doing some lobbying with the governor's office on behalf of local businesses and business people, as well as making representations at the state court level for other clients. It all seemed so above board when she first told him about it. He could see now that Trey had probably targeted his wife and that some of the trips hadn't really required her presence for business purposes. He could also see that Keri had soon been a willing participant in her encounters with Trey.

Reconstructed from the emails and his memory Kevin knew that it was likely on their second trip that Trey had seduced his wife, although it was not impossible that it had happened on the first trip. The first email in her private folder was a reply from Trey to an email of hers in which she thanked him for the lovely Gucci handbag he had given her and for the lovely supper they had enjoyed together. She also mentioned how much she enjoyed 'everything else', although what that meant wasn't specified in her message. His reply, though, had mentioned their night together, so Kevin knew pretty much what she had been referring to.

That first message also explained the handbag she had suddenly appeared with months ago. When he asked her how she had managed to afford it, she had laughed and called it a $40 knock off she had purchased from a kiosk in the mall. Knowing that her cheating had started so long ago and how easily her lies had come to her sickened him. This didn't seem to be the Keri he remembered and loved.

The emails had continued regularly, usually just before or just after one of their trips. He assumed that between trips they would be speaking in person, with no need for email, or that the messages she had saved were more important to her. There was no way to tell, and in truth, it was irrelevant.

It was in the third or fourth email that he discovered how they hid their trysts from him and the corporate office. They always stayed at the same hotel, and reserved the same two rooms. Kevin hadn't realized it, but every night when he phoned her around 10 o'clock in room 612 of the Hyatt Inn she was only there waiting for his call. After he had called her she would join Trey in his room for the night. It seemed that he had become so predictable that the two of them were able to play him like a trout. Their jokes to the effect that they wished there was a way to get him to phone a little earlier so they could get together quicker had cut him like a razor. He had never seen that side of Keri before, although it fit with his impressions of her boss.

Another email explained the expensive looking diamond earrings that Keri had worn for the Crosby and Knox Christmas party. She had told him they were cubic zirconium, but the email showed him that they were real, a very expensive Christmas gift from her lover. Once again the message in her folder was a reply from Trey to her original message thanking him for the extravagant gift. It seemed to Kevin that she was overdoing the thank you, but it did make him wonder how she thanked him in person. He couldn't believe that the only time they were together was every two weeks for two nights in the Hyatt Inn. He was sure they must be meeting occasionally at other times and finally on his second reading of one of the more recent emails he got a clue when Trey mentioned working at the condo.

After some concentrated thinking Kevin remembered that Keri had told him once that her boss was on the 9th floor of the condo building overlooking the river park. It now seemed likely that the two of them met during the day at his condo, either on the pretext of doing work there, or perhaps meeting there at lunch time. As much as Kevin tried, he couldn't think of a single instance where Keri had seemed freshly fucked. If she was screwing Trey during the week while she was in town, as he was now certain had happened, she was very careful to remove any evidence of it before she came home. Of course it might just have been a case of him fitting into the mold of the blind and trusting cuckolded husband.

It was almost noon when he finished rereading all of the emails and put them aside. He knew he was going to have to decide what to do before Keri came back into town with Trey. She usually got in early in the afternoon on Friday and came directly home by taxi from the airport. Most days she would phone him at work to let him know that she was safely home. As he thought about that, the irony was not lost upon him that the biggest danger had already caught up with her while she was out of town.

Kevin got up slowly from the kitchen table and grabbed two more beers from the fridge before heading into the living room where he sprawled on the sofa with the first of the bottles in his hand. He had noticed that it was already noon and he wondered where the time had gone. It didn't seem possible that almost five hours had passed since he had walked in the door after dropping his wife off to join her lover at the airport. He realized that the two of the must have planned a lot of things carefully because he rarely saw Trey when he walked Keri into the airport. A couple of times he had been visible standing in the departure lounge, but he had always ignored the two of them completely.

By six o'clock that evening Kevin was barely conscious. During the afternoon he had made a number of trips to the bathroom and then back to the kitchen, bringing two more bottles of beer back to the living room each time. His last trip had come up short though, as the fridge was now empty of beer. He paused for a moment to look at the row of empties on the kitchen counter and realized that there were 12 of them, the full contents of the two six packs he had purchased only the day before. They were supposed to last him for at least a couple of weeks and under normal circumstances they would have. Now, having drunk the whole dozen and without having had any food, he was sorely in need of sleep. He managed to make it to the bed before passing out fully dressed on top of the covers.

It was 10:15 when the ringing of the phone stirred Kevin from the place where his mind had taken him when he passed out. It had been a place full of images of Keri and him doing the things they had enjoyed since meeting eight years ago. As he struggled to stand, a glance at the clock told him that it was probably Keri phoning to find out why he hadn't called her at the Hyatt Inn. Everything that he had found out came rushing back to him, and on the spur of the moment he decided to wait until she returned home before confronting her.

The answering machine was just starting to take the call when he picked up the phone and said, "Hello. Is that you Keri?"

"Yes, it is. Why haven't you called? You always call by this time. Is something wrong?" He could tell there was a bit of concern in her voice, and he wondered why.