Ain't Talkin' Bout Love

"I'm not paying you a dime in alimony," said Josh.

"Okay, fine," she said. "Who cares? Just have the papers ready. How soon can you be there?"

"I'll call him now and have him schedule us for six this evening. He'll need a few hours to amend the agreement and draw up the papers concerning the kids," he said. "See ya then."

Josh met with Valerie that evening and came back with signed papers. We were married as soon as the divorce was final, and three weeks before our daughter Esmeralda was born. Esmé as we call her was named after Val's mom who although biologically no relation, is the only grandmother she knows.

Esmé was followed very quickly by J.J. which is short for Joshua Beckett Jr. We settled in and made a life for ourselves. But it isn't the way it sounds. Josh and I were perfect for each other, but we weren't perfect. We had arguments and we had our ups and downs but there was never a time that I even looked at another man.

At the same time I often noticed that while women, including some of my friends looked at and made comments about Josh, he never seemed to notice any woman except me. Several of my friends commented on the way his eyes lit up when I walked into a room.

It was ten years into our marriage that Valerie came back. We were having a holiday barbecue with the entire family including Val's parents, when she just showed up at our doorstep out of the blue.

Josh was playing with the kids in the pool. Mom was making a salad and I was on the grill. Dad as usual, was asleep in the hammock. So Robbie, who was fifteen, went to the door.

He came back and walked straight over to me. "Mom, there's a really weird woman at the door. She spoke like she knew me, but I've never seen her before," he said.

"Well, invite her back," I said without thinking. A few minutes later he came back to the yard with her. It took them a while because she was using a walker.

"Hello," I smiled. "Have we met?"

"Of coursh we hab you home wrecking whore," she slurred. "It wazh you hoo stole my life and ruined it."

I have to describe her so it becomes clear what she looked like. Her beautiful black hair had been bleached to a very light blond. The harshness of the constant bleaching had made her thick healthy hair brittle and lifeless. Her eyes had been widened and her nose had been sculpted so it looked more like a Barbie doll's tiny upturned nose. Her lips had been injected with so much collagen that they resembled pillows. The skin on her face was so tight from repeated facelifts that she could no longer blink both eyes at the same time. The work on her face had her skin so tight that she could barely speak. That and the fact that her lips were too big was the reason she slurred a lot of her words. Her entire face looked as if it was ready to crack at any moment.

Her naturally large breasts had been lifted and enlarged to porn star proportions. Her waist was un-naturally thin. I had heard about the procedure for making it like that. The plastic surgeon removes one or two of the lower ribs and then pulls the oblique abdominal muscles in tighter.

She had probably had massive abdominal liposuction done as well. Her hips were much narrower than they had been. She had clearly opted for the pelvic sculpting procedure to permanently narrow her hips. They had done lipo on the thighs to the point where they were nothing but skin, muscle, and bone.

The most startling thing was that she had somehow followed in Michael Jackson's footsteps and had her natural Olive skin tone lightened to the point where she was fairer than I am.

Complications from the surgeries had rendered her barely able to walk. She smelled like a distillery so maybe liquor had something to do with her condition as well. We were looking at more than a million dollars worth of plastic surgery.

Josh got out of the pool and came over. Mom was in shock. She came over and did what she usually did. She put one of her hands on my shoulder and stared at Valerie as her head reeled.

"Valerie; is that you, Honey?" she asked.

"What the hell happened to you?" laughed Josh.

"Itsh not funny!" she snapped. "She planned all of thish. She knew what I would do. I spent most of the money on trying to get my body back. And then in ten years I never found anyone to be with. Some of them stole some of my money. I was always alone."

Her screaming had awakened her dad. He came over. "Something smells goo ... What the hell ... I mean who the hell is that?"

"You don't recognizh your own daughter?" asked Valerie. "Good lord how many God damned kids do you have?" She was talking to me then.

"I have four," I said. "Robbie is fifteen. Yvette is fourteen. Esmé is ten. And J.J. is about to turn nine."

"Why aren't you fat?" she hissed. "When he got me pregnant, I got fat. It's just not fair."

"I think it's time for you to go," said Josh.

"I can't go," she whined. "I have nowhere to go. I'm broke. And I have no one."

"You can stay with us for a few days," said mom.

"But no God damned longer," said Dad. "I knew that woman was going to take her in."

Over the next few months Valerie stayed with her mom and dad. Mom and Dad visited us frequently as they always did. Valerie rarely came with them. She was bitter about her life and the way it turned out. Her health faded rapidly and she was bedridden within a few weeks. She developed breast cancer and had to have her implants removed. The scar tissue around the implants was where the cancer cells proliferated.

I went over and visited her several times a week to give Mom a break. Surprisingly Josh never visited her. Mom told me that women have a bigger capacity to forgive. Dad and Josh took Val's betrayal a lot harder. My older kids wouldn't go, but the younger ones went with me several times.

"You're a lucky woman, Sylina," Valerie told me one afternoon. We were watching my two youngest kids run around chasing each other.

"Your kids are adorable and Josh loves you so much, you can see it in his eyes," she said.

"I have you to thank for it," I said. "If you hadn't left Josh, he and I would never have met."

"I've been searching for ten years and have never found anyone who feels about me the way he treats you," she said.

"Valerie, everything that I have was yours first," I said. "Maybe you just weren't ready for it when you had it."

"The problem is that I was too selfish to place any value on it," she told me. "I always thought I was more than I was. Josh loved me just the way I was. The way my dad loves my mom. But I wanted to be glamorous. I wanted to be a famous rock star's girlfriend. Screaming Steve died a few years ago of a drug overdose. He's selling more records now that he's dead than he ever did while he was alive.

In death, he's become so much more than he really was. He died a bald headed, beer bellied, drug addict, but he'll be a rock god forever," she said.

"You must've really loved him," I said.

"I had feelings for him," she said. "I ain't talkin, bout love. I'm not really sure I know what love is. I think I envied Steve and wanted to share his celebrity. I wanted to be famous and have every one think that I was beautiful. I wanted to be more than I was. I didn't want to be a chunky woman with a big ass. I wanted to be so much more.

Look at the way I treated Josh and my parents and even my kids. Now at only forty-five years old, I feel like I'm sixty. My body is fading to the point where I can't really take care of myself. I don't know what will happen to me next."

"Don't worry, Valerie," I said. "We'll make sure you're taken care of."

"Josh won't waste a penny on me," she sobbed. "And I took all of your money. That's another thing I envy about you. You were willing to put everything on the line for love and you won."

"I didn't really risk anything," I said. "Josh was worth so much more than the money I gave you. If I had given you every penny I had it would have been worth it."

That conversation was the last that Valerie and I had. I never told her about the rest of the money that Josh and I had because there was no point to it. Valerie developed all kinds of infections and diseases due to all of the changes in her body and surgeries. The constant resculpturing and changes in her body over a ten year period were simply too much for her immune system to recover from.

In death she was finally the center of attention. A long line of friends and acquaintances, including oddly enough, Screamin' Steve's widow, Brianna stopped by to leave flowers and see her embark on her last journey. Almost no one recognized her. We chalked it up to an overzealous mortician, but the truth was that Valerie had so much plastic in her that the mortician didn't have to do much.

Josh and I are now retired and helping to raise our grand children. We've been parceling out money to our kids when they need it and occasionally when they don't.

We decided against just giving them the money because we want them to be independent and contributing members of society. We also learned from Valerie and made sure that they realized that looks aren't as important as a good personality and a caring nature.

We've also made sure they understand the importance of loving relationships. The older kids seem to understand it much more than the younger ones do. I think they remember Valerie more than they want to admit. So in the end, perhaps Valerie helped her kids more than she ever knew.

The end.