50 Ways: Her Parents did it for Me!

Copyright 2020, PostScriptor

It was a Friday night poker game, held, this time, at Jason Billing's office in the 'Billings Waste & Disposal' building. The Mayor was there, as well as one of the County Commissioners, as well as a few good ol' boys who rotated in and out of the game, drinking coffee and kibitzing. They had all known each other forever. It was always a friendly game; no one got in too deep and the stakes were kept low. They knew that the police wouldn't be busting this illegal gambling game. The fifth player was the Sheriff.

Jason's wife walked into the room with a tray of ice-cold beers that she put onto a side table where the players could help themselves. Then she turned to leave.

"Okay guys, I'm going home now. Jason, you be home before midnight; remember you have a doctor's appointment at 8:00 A.M. tomorrow morning.

"See you all later!" she called out as she left the office and closed the door behind her.

"Jeez, Jason," asked the Sheriff, watching Jason's voluptuous, gorgeous, red-headed wife as she walked out to her car, "How did you ever con Amanda Svenson into marrying you? She must have been drunk or something, because she is clearly out of your league!" He guffawed at his own witticism.

"Asshole," replied Jason with a smile on his face.

"Let's take a break and I'll tell you about how I barely avoided making the biggest mistake of my life, and instead found the best wife a man could ever have..."

~~**~~

Jason Billings was looking at his fiancée, Jane Jones, and her father with a look of total disbelieve. Jane had asked him to come over to her parent's house for a 'small talk'.

"I can't even believe this shit!" Jason exclaimed with a bitter and angry look on his face, holding up several sheets of paper that he was waving in his hand.

"You wait until two weeks before the wedding and then you try to lay this on me?" he stated, the question being strictly rhetorical.

"Listen son," Roger Jones started, not knowing that calling Jason 'son' irritated him to no end.

~~**~~

Jason and Jane had been together for almost three years — their last year at the University and two years since then. Six months before, Jason had asked Jane to marry him and she had enthusiastically accepted. Since that time was planning the grandiose (overly so in Jason's opinion) wedding.

Everyone seemed to think that they were 'right together. Jane was around 5' 5", slim and athletic looking with medium tits and a tight butt. She had that classic oval face framed with light brown hair. She had hazel eyes, was quick to smile and her smile was inviting and generous. Jason also had an athletic build that he maintained with running and a regimen of weights, not to bulk up, just to keep as buff as he had been in college. He had a rugged face, with twinkling blue eyes, and a dimple in his chin. He stood at 6' even and his head was capped with a crown of curly hair — just a shade lighter than Jane's. He was a couple of years older than his peers due to the hitch he spent in the army after High School.

Needless to say, it was a rather unpleasant surprise when an envelope arrived at Jason's house one Saturday with two documents enclosed and an 'invitation' to visit at his future in-laws place and discuss the contents. He had been out with Jane on Friday night, but she had gone home to her parent's house, where she was going to work with her mother on details of the wedding.

Inside the envelope was a proposed pre-nuptial agreement as well as a document suggesting how the financial responsibilities should be split between the couple, as seen through Jane's eyes — or more likely, her father's.

Jason was not a lawyer, but he had a couple of business law classes and had read a lot of contracts as part of his job. He sat down to read the documents with no preconceptions, his attitude a tabula rasa as it was. He wasn't particularly upset at the idea Jane might want to spell out whose assets were hers and which were his in the (he hoped) unlikely case that they split.

That was, until he began reading the proposals in detail. Ah! The devil himself.

So it was that on Sunday, exactly at 2:00 PM as the note specified, Jason was ringing the doorbell of the Jones' residence.

Jane's mother, Iris, who had always been somewhat tepid, albeit polite, towards Jason, answered the door. Jason tried not to be curt with her, but he was not feeling especially warm towards her or her husband at that moment.

She showed him into the living room where Jane and her father were seated.

Jane's father, Roger, looked up at Jason, trying to look pleasant, and even before he was seated asked, "Well? What do you think? Have you signed it?"

Jason looked back at his prospective Father-in-Law with a grim and angry visage.

"Are these some sort of joke? An example of 'lawyer humor', because I can't believe that you would seriously expect me to sign off on these pieces of rubbish."

"What is the problem?" Roger replied, acting as if he didn't understand Jason's objection. He had expected that Jason wouldn't actually read the documents with the small print, written in legalese, and would simply sign them. He had written them in his most lawyerly prose intended to obscure their true meaning.

"I can't even believe this shit!" Jason exclaimed with a bitter and angry look on his face, holding up several sheets of paper that he was waving in his hand.

"You wait until two weeks before the wedding and then you try to lay this on me?" he stated, not actually asking a question.

"Listen son," Roger started,

"We are just trying to protect my daughter on the off chance that anything should ever happen to your marriage and you decided to split," Roger tried to explain. "A pre-nup agreement is fairly standard for people going into a marriage who are already well off, or who are expected to inherit a substantial amount of assets. That's all this is."

"I call bullshit," Jason spat back.

"Jane, did you know about this? Did your father tell you how one-sided these agreements were? While they were supposed to protect you, they actually could have given all of my assets to you in the case of a divorce. For any reason. The house that I inherited from my Grandmother? You would get it. My shares in the family business? You would get them. This wasn't an agreement to protect you — it was a crooked scheme to steal everything that I already own from me.

"And the proposal about how we would 'share' the expenses? I pay for the cars, the utilities, the property taxes, the insurance, the groceries, and anything else that would be an 'us' expense. Jane? She would pay for, let's see," Jason read from the second document, "Oh yes, here it is. Stripped of all of the language intended to camouflage and trying to hide the true meanings, Jane would be spending 'her' money on her clothes, her personal grooming expenses — nothing for 'us', just things for her!"

By this time, Jane, who knew nothing about what her father had written up, was a in a panic. She was crying and trying to, through her tears, telling Jason that they could get it fixed. But she couldn't get out the words.

Roger took advantage of the moment when Jason paused to interrupt.

"Look Jason, we can fix this. Just calm down and we can negotiate..."

Jason looked at him with disgust.

"The very fact that you would try to do this to me on the eve of our marriage means I can never trust you or your family."

He turned back to Jane and held out his hand. Jane eagerly reached back for it. But when he had her hand in his, instead of raising her up and pulling her close to him, he slipped the engagement ring off of her finger and put it into his pocket.

"What are you doing, Jason!" Jane cried.

"You didn't think that I would let you keep my Grandmother's engagement ring, did you?"

It suddenly occurred to Roger that he and Jane's mother had put down deposits on all sorts of things for the wedding. Invitations had been sent. He was going to lose a great deal of money as the result of Jane and Jason's wedding being called off.

"Listen, Billings! Calling off the wedding now is going to cost a bundle. If you do this, I am going to sue your ass off for the expenses!"

Jason pulled out the envelope with the pre-nup and the expense split proposals in it from his pocket just long enough for Roger to see that he still had it. Then he put it back.

"Go ahead, old man. Any jury in the country, when they see how you tried to swindle me, will find for me. Then you'll be out not just the deposits, but all of the legal fees as well. And I might just counter sue for my attorney's costs. And just imagine what this will do to your reputation when it gets out. I won't hold my breath waiting to be served!"

And with that, he turned and walked back out through the front door, slamming it behind him. He could hear Jane and her father screaming at each other through an open window. He heard her father say, "So what! I never understood why you wanted to marry some guy whose father was a garbage collector in the first place. Just wait a few days and he will coming crawling back to you."

That attitude probably explained some of the snarky remarks that Jane had made over the past 6-months or so.

But Jane was wailing, "But Daddy, what if he DOESN'T?"

Jason stomped down to the end of the block and went around the corner where he had parked his car.

As soon as he had turned the corner, his entire demeanor changed. He wasn't angry anymore, in fact he was laughing as he opened his car door.

"Well? Did you kiss your fiancée off?" asked the stunning redhead young woman waiting in the passenger seat. She reached over and pulled him into a lover's kiss.

When they finished their passionate greetings, he answered her.

"That I did, my dear. Not only that, but I laid the breakup on her father. I knew that son-of-a-bitch would try and pull something like that pre-nup crap. I am the innocent party in this break-up, you see. "

She laughed.

"There is no way I would call you innocent, darling. Experienced, sophisticated, skilled, and a lot of other words. But not innocent."

"Ah! In this case, though, Jane's father is at fault by trying to put one over on me.

"Even better, I won't have to pay them for the wedding expenses they've already paid. He was going on about suing me for it — but as a lawyer he should honestly know that it isn't enough to be worth going to court over."

Jason stopped and reflected for a moment.

"I was fairly sure that Mr. Big Lawyer Roger would sabotage this marriage when he and his wife pretty much blew off meeting my family. He wasn't interested in knowing anything about them. The man actually thinks that my Dad is a garbage collector, riding around in a truck and going to the dump. He thinks my folks are beneath him. What an idiot!

"First, he doesn't have a clue as to how much those guys driving the trucks make! They are well paid. And since the majority of the work is done from inside the cab by controlling mechanical arms, they don't get dirty or smelly like they would have 30 years ago." He laughed again.

Amanda, his once past and now currently renewed love interest, added to his thought.

"So he was completely clueless that your family OWNS all four of the local trash companies. Good lord, you have monopolies from the county government — no one can even complete. It's a license to print money!"

Jason nodded, "Yeah, most people don't have a clue how much money trash removal and disposal makes."

Amanda was curious, "Jason, really, you're the one who should have had a pre-nup. You and your family have a lot more assets than some guy who is a local estate planning lawyer."

Jason laughed.

"In my other pocket was the pre-nup that I had our lawyer write up. It was actually fair. We would both leave the marriage with the assets we came in with, any inheritance from our own families, and we would only split what we had earned during the marriage. But after Daddy Roger decided to try and stick it to me, needless to say, I never showed it to him. Anyway, you had come back on the scene by then."

They drove towards Jason's old, but well maintained by his Grandmother during her life, Victorian home. He and Amanda went for several minutes in a companionable silence.

Amada did have a question that was bothering her.

"Jason? Why were you even interested in Jane Jones? The girl I remember had a pretty enough face, but she didn't have an impressive bod. Okay, she looked athletic and fit, but she didn't have tits worth mentioning and her ass looked like a 16-year-old boys! I mean, come on. You always like your women with tits and a butt. Kind of like mine, come to think about it." She smiled at him as she said that.

"No," Jason replied, "You are completely correct. Jane was not generally speaking 'my type'. But she does have a good-looking face; she's intelligent enough, she's hard working and has a good heart. She's even a good cook. And she has a secret that even she doesn't realize."

"What's that?" asked a now very curious Amanda.

"Well, she's something of a submissive. She would do just about anything that I told her to do. I mean she would do some pretty kinky stuff for me.

"But the problem is, she was also pretty subservient towards her Dad. Nothing sexual; I don't want to give you the wrong impression. But if he told he to jump, she'd ask 'how high'. An overly obedient daughter.

"On the other hand, I could have had a lot of fun with her," Jason said with an evil grin on his face.

"My interest in Jane also involved one other factor: you weren't here.

"She's probably better off with my breaking it off now than two or thee years down the line after I got tired of her. I would probably be having an affair with you the whole time as well. I could have been a real asshole."

Amanda laughed at Jason's rationalization.

"'Tis a far better thing I do than I have ever done," she teased.

Then Amanda looked across the center console at him.

"Yeah, Jason, you're right. It seemed like everything was working against our being together. I really couldn't help it when my Dad got transferred across the country and we moved. But it broke my heart being separated from you. Still, I had no choice; I was too young to stay here by myself.

"Then I went away to college and as soon as I was back and available, you had joined the Army. When you got out of the Army, I was engaged to that moron. His family was rich, but entirely dysfunctional. Thank god I called that off."

Jason smiled, "At least this time when you moved back to town we got in touch. We only had to be together for a couple of weeks before I remembered how I'd felt about you. And no one could compete with you. You are my soul mate. You complete me.

"And now here we are, both footloose and fancy free. Since about twenty minutes ago!" He laughed again.

"I'm glad you were willing to dump her," Amanda remarked. "Just remember though: I'm not submissive. Adventuresome, and I have a hell of an imagination, but not submissive.

"Say, wasn't there some song about, like, '50 Ways to Leave your Lover', back in the olden days?" she suddenly asked.

"A song by Paul Simon. You're right."

Jason mulled over the song in his head for a minute.

"I was never quite sure about that song," Jason explained, "It was too ambiguous. There was no context."

"Context?" Amanda replied.

"Yeah. Compare it to that old Marvin Gaye hit song, 'I Heard it Through the Grapevine', or even a better example was the Eagles, 'I'm Already Gone.' They included some context and told a complete story.

"But Paul Simon's songs always seem to be just slices in time; maybe vignettes is a better word. A little more context could have cleared the meaning up.

"Was the woman in the song telling her boyfriend that she was leaving him? She's giving him a goodbye fuck and in the morning he'll figure out that he has to move on? That seems like the obvious interpretation.

"Or, was she saying that she thought that he was leaving her, but just hadn't gotten the courage or the words to tell her. So she is telling him that it is all right that she can deal with breaking up, just give it to her straight; babe, it's time for you to be moving on.

"Or maybe she was saying that since he was fucking her, he should leave his other woman to be with her. The song was like one of those stories you read that just leaves you hanging."

Amanda laughed. "Mister Billing, you are over-thinking the song."

Jason more or less ignored her.

"I am kind of curious, though. I wonder if getting your prospective in-laws to do something so stupid, to be such assholes, that you can just walk out on your lover without feeling guilty would have been one of the 50?" Jason pondered.

"Baby, maybe you just added a new one to the list. At least 51 ways to leave your lover," Amanda said, not without a little satisfaction. After all, she'd been after Jason for years, and now suddenly, the stars were aligning.

~~**~~

"Looking at things in the rear view mirror, I wish that I had not been such an asshole about how I broke it off. She didn't deserve it. But I was young and stupid. Other than that I have no excuse."

"Well," interjected the Mayor, "at least you're not young anymore!" Everyone laughed.

"So what happened to Jane?" the County Commissioner asked.

"She married one of the lawyers who worked with her Dad and they have a slew of kids.

"And she made sure that with her lawyer boyfriend her Dad didn't try his pre-nup shit!"

Jason continued,

"So that, gentlemen, is the sordid tale about how I avoided being married to Jane Jones and allowed Amanda Svenson to capture my heart and soul.

"Which, in turn, explains how I ended up older and wiser, with three red-headed kids and my beautiful wife at home!" he declared with a grin.

The End

~~**~~

I've actually wondered about the meaning of the 50 ways song. I know that it seems to be about the oblivious guy who is being told (with kindness and great subtlety) that his time with his lover is at an end. But he never asks, or even gets a chance to ask what the hell his woman is trying to say. So the song always left me a bit frustrated.

Now I'm certain that a number of the stories will have a truly evil, mean, monster of a lover, who, when the parting comes, will make the character walking out on the relationship a hero and everyone will cheer. I don't think that is actually in the tenor of the song. Most of the time people part ways with their 'lovers' for lesser reasons — probably because they've found someone else whom they prefer. Or maybe they are just tired of some aspect of the lover's personality or even physical appearance. They nag or have an irritating voice. 50 ways to leave, but a thousand different reasons for leaving.

But it isn't clear to me that when one person in a relationship wants to dump the other, while their other half doesn't want to part ways, that it will be kind or gentle.

So, yes, my character is kind of an asshole, and he admits it. The only redeeming feature is that his prospective father-in-law was an even bigger asshole!

Hope you enjoyed the story anyway!