Child Support

"Fourteen more years. Fourteen more fucking years!"

Yeah, I know, that sounds like a shout, but it wasn't, it was something I muttered under my breath. I had just written another child support check, dated May the first, to my cheating whore slut ex-wife. $1,200.00 fucking dollars a month, and I never even got to see my kids anymore.

Oh, I was due visitation every other weekend, plus two weeks in the summer, but when my job transferred me from Maine to California, well it wasn't like I could just pick them up every other Friday from clear across the country, could I? When Eva-Marie wanted to leave Portland, to move back to her hometown, the judge threatened her with changing the custody agreement, because she'd be moving the kids away from my ability for visitation, but when it was me who had to move, nothing was said, oh nosireebob!

Not that I had much choice in moving. The promotion was a big one, which raised my salary over $1,500 a month, a lot more than the $400 a month my child support was increased. Of course, with state taxes so fucking high in California, and the cost of living out here so much worse, it seemed like I was worse off, in real terms, not better.

But, one thing did make it better: I met Maria on a Tuesday, and she just flat moved in on the following Thursday. Maria was divorced, just like I was, and she had a couple of kids herself, Julia and little Ricky. Her ex-boyfriend was a deadbeat, who avoided child support by fleeing back to Mexico. Maria was eking out a cheap lifestyle, working two jobs, as a waitress at two different restaurants, and her mother looked after the kids while she was working. Maria was a citizen - I made sure of that early - born here, though her mother was 'undocumented.' Maria's deadbeat ex was undocumented, too, but while California looked the other way at the illegals as far as their immigration status was concerned, the state welfare agencies did not look the other way when it came to child support, and Luis, or whatever his name was, had to get the heck out of Dodge. The fucker probably sneaked back in, but took an assumed name to keep from getting garnished.

It was Maria's attitude to cheating which got my attention: Luis had screwed around on her, apparently with half the women in Antioch, and she hated, hated! cheaters. I guess that was one of the reasons we clicked, because it was Eva-Marie who screwed around on me. I blew up and walked out, as soon as I found out. She cried and denied everything, denied everything right up until the last time I saw her, in court, but I knew better. Lying skank was just trying to get the judge to grant higher child support, is all.

I might not have done myself any favors, and my attorney kept trying to get me to shut my stupid mouth, when I demanded DNA tests on my kids, to make sure I wasn't having to pay child support on anyone else's bastards. It was a gamble, I know, but the tests came back the way Eva-Marie said they would: both of the kids were my children.

Supposedly, the judge couldn't take my attitude into consideration when it came to setting child support, but the judge was another bitch, and I'm sure that she favored Eva-Marie when she set the amount. I got lucky when I moved, and it was a different judge who made the support increase decision, or I'd probably have seen the increase set at my salary increase.

At least I always got some sympathy from Maria when I had to write out the child support checks. She said that yeah, it hurt, but I was being a real man about it, living up to my responsibilities as a father. She kept her mouth shut at the second part of it, never dissing Luis for being a deadbeat, but I knew that she felt it, and my being an honest man really improved my standing in her big, brown eyes.

"John," she said to me, "summer will be starting soon, and I know that you missed it last year, but we need to start preparing for your children to come out for their two-week visit. And maybe we can even get your ex-wife to agree to four weeks, since they had to miss last summer."

"Maria, how can we even think of four weeks? It's tight enough in here as it is."

That was true enough! Our house on Alcala Street was a three bedroom, but it was only 1,050 square feet, and the two kids' bedrooms were small. With my two kids here, that'd be two kids in each bedroom, and since both of mine were boys, there was no splitting up two girls in one room and two boys in the other. That put Julia and Ricky in the same bedroom, and while I hadn't checked the laws out here, my guess is that the state would frown on mixed-sex bedroom sharing between children.

Then again, it's California. I could just tell them that Ricky identified as a girl, and they'd be happy as shit.

The only other solution would be to put the three boys in one room, and that would really be crammed full.

oo0oo

It was pretty tight, and I know that my kids were disappointed that everything wasn't California surfing cool, but Antioch isn't a coastal town. In the San Joaquin Valley, we were fifty miles inland, and if San Francisco was cool during the summer, Antioch was just plain boiling hot. We managed to put together one Pacific beach trip, but the rest of the time it was just visits to Contra Loma, an inland lake. I had managed to use up just five days of vacation, by working five mornings and taking half days off in the afternoon. I didn't even try proposing the four-week visit to Eva-Marie.

But I did find out stuff. My cheating slut ex-wife didn't have her loverboy move in, and apparently hadn't even dated for over a year. Who knows? Maybe he fucking bolted once she was free and the responsibilities of being a step-father were looking him dead in the eye. Yeah, he was man enough to fuck a married woman, man enough to laden me down with horns, but not man enough to stick with her.

Mother fucker was probably married himself! I didn't know who he was, other than his name and where he worked, and, naturally my slut ex kept claiming that there was no one. At times I wish I had shot the mother fucker, but it sure wasn't worth going to prison.

Sometimes I'd find myself hoping that he had fucking AIDS, and gave it to Eva-Marie, but let's face it, she was the mother of my children, and they depended on her.

There were some dark scars on my soul. I had loved my slut ex, and now I hated her fucking guts.

But now, Jerry was telling me that his mother was going to get married, that she was engaged to some carpenter. That's just fucking great: she had a solid, white-collar professional for a husband, but she threw that all away, and is downgrading to a blue-collar mother fucker. Scumbag probably voted for Donald Fucking Trump!

Mike was only four, so he didn't really understand about his mother remarrying, but Jerry was eight, and he knew what was going on. This carpenter hadn't moved in with Eva-Marie, not yet, but it wouldn't be long: they were just going to get married by a judge, no fancy ceremony, and then he'd be moving into the big bedroom. At least we had just rented, not bought, so I had no particular attachment to that particular bedroom.

I wonder if he'd get rid of 'our' old, queen-sized marriage bed, or if he wanted to fuck his new wife in her ex-husband's bed.

That brought up black thoughts of her boyfriend, the one she cheated on me with. If he'd ever fucked her in our bed, I never saw any evidence of it, but my slut ex was apparently a master of deception; I never saw anything, not the first fucking clue, never one bit of evidence, and wouldn't have known one damned thing if my old buddy Carl hadn't told me she was cheating on me.

I managed to drag myself out of those old, dark thoughts. Eva-Marie getting married reminded me that I hadn't made an honest woman out of Maria. She had never married Luis, so there was no divorce paperwork in the way, and she had moved in with me so quickly that there was no thought of getting married. I had to rent the Alcala Street house pretty quickly, what with her having two kids, but we really hadn't made honest plans for the future. Little Ricky was a bit too young to understand the difference between a couple being married and one just shacking up, but Julia knew. There are so many kids these days living with parents, and step-parents, who aren't married that it's no longer any surprise, but somehow I think that kids know, and those living with a shacked-up couple have a lower status in school than those with married parents.

oo0oo

Maria and I got married just before Christmas. Christmas in Antioch is pretty miserable, cold and rainy, but it never snows here. I remembered Christmases back home in Maine, with the ground covered in white, and, if we were lucky and it snowed on Christmas Eve, the pine trees laden as well. Maria's children had never seen snow, not real snow, but only pictures of what life was like in other places.

Fortunately, as down as my attitude was that there was no such thing as a white Christmas in Antioch, not only was our marriage good news, but I was getting another promotion, meaning more money. Since I was so far away from Portland, I was able to just ignore my raise, and not let the courts in Maine screw me out of more child support. I was sending enough for the slut and her fucking blue-collar husband to live on, they didn't need more. The last thing I wanted to do was subsidize his working-class money even more, so that Eva-Marie wouldn't stop realizing that she'd downgraded.

What I really needed to do was to adopt Julia and Ricky! Luis was completely gone, and not even listed on their birth certificates, so it was really pretty easy. They were really my kids, with no real memories of the sperm donor who beget them. I went down to see the padre at Holy Rosary Church - someplace I should have gone, but where I'd never been - knowing that the Church had connections and could get things done as far as getting people pointed in the right direction to get the state stuff taken care of as far as families were concerned.

We talked about my marriage. Maria and I had gotten married by a judge, where my divorce from Maine was no issue at all, but for the Church, my previous marriage would be a problem. Had Eva-Marie and I been married by a judge, a simple lack-of-form annulment would have been easy-peasy, but no, we'd been married in a Methodist Church, and I had gotten the dispensation from my local Catholic parish for that marriage by a minister from one of our 'separated brethren' churches. I could get the kids baptized, something Maria had put off, but we couldn't take communion ourselves, not unless I could get a Church annulment . . . and the Church liked money too much, and would want some sort of payment, a big, four-figure payment to make that happen.

I was still shelling out big, four-figure payments to keep my ex slut and her blue-collar husband living a lot better than they could otherwise.

But, if I couldn't afford the annulment, at least the kids understood what my adopting them meant: they'd have a real father! Maybe it shouldn't have, not in 2004, not with all sorts of new family arrangements being legitimized, but apparently it did, did among the kids.

oo0oo

Things were going so well for us! With my promotion and having more money available, we were doing really radical things like going out for dinner. The kids were normal and healthy, and Ricky showed signs of becoming a pretty good athlete. He was doing really well in Little league, and his coach told me to keep him in baseball; he just might have a future there.

And, after six years renting, the owner of our house on Alcala approached us and asked us if we wanted to buy the place. He was planning on selling it, and listing it for $290,000, but, if we wanted to buy it, as is, he could do everything without a realtor, save a lot of money and fees, and let us have it for $250,000.

Have I mentioned how utterly insane housing prices are in California? But $250,000 was a pretty good price for this house in Antioch. If he sold it out from under us, we'd have to find someplace else, and probably pay so much in rent that we'd be falling behind. Buying this house just made sense.

Maria got pregnant! We'd been together six years now, married for 3½ of them, and she was 31 years old. I was ecstatic, I was going to be a father, again! It was absolutely the right time to buy, and the house had enough room for us to get an addition, another bedroom, built on, making it a four bedroom, just right for our growing family. I was hoping for another son, but Maria refused to have an ultrasound done in any way which would tell us what sex the baby was. "Things like this are best left up to God," she said, "and a surprise to men and women on earth."

oo0oo

I guess that I shouldn't have been surprised to see Eva-Marie there. Yes, it was my father's funeral, and yes, it was back in Falmouth Foreside, just north or Portland, and yes, she was the mother to my father's grandsons, but somehow I had just never expected to see her there. Like, what, I should have expected her to send them there with no adult supervision, or maybe with their grandmother?

"Hello, John," was all that she said. She was with a kind of big guy, her husband, I supposed, when she introduced me. "John, this is Colin, my husband."

I suppose that I shouldn't have been surprised, but Colin had a very firm handshake, the kind men often use to show dominance over another. At 6'2, I was just as tall as he was, but he easily had 40 pounds on me, and it looked like it was mostly muscle. Though he was blond, he was still very tanned, I suppose from working outside all of his life. I disliked him immediately.

Naturally, I kept that to myself, as I spoke with my kids. Even though I was now seeing them every summer, I couldn't get over just how big Jerry and Mike, Mike especially, had gotten. Eva-Marie had never even suggested that Colin adopt them, obviously because I was still alive, and sending child support checks, but it didn't take long to see: Jerry and Mike were Colin's kids now. He was dad, not me.

And then there was Duncan, a babe in arms, a babe in Eva-Marie's arms, her new child with Colin. I disliked him even more, but at least I didn't have to pay child support on this kid.

After the funeral, we went to my parents' house on Town Landing Road in Falmouth Foreside. Fall comes early on the east coast of Maine, and the leaves were already gone from the trees. The icy winds out of Canada hadn't really started yet, but I still remembered enough of Maine to know that they weren't far off. I was sitting in the back seat, next to my mother, as we rode in Eva-Marie's and Colin's SUV to get back to mom's house; Jerry and Mike were in the back.

"That's our house," Jerry pointed out to me, as we passed a huge while colonial. Great, I thought, my $1,200 a month has put them in that place. There was a white Ford F-250 in the driveway, with subtle green and gold lettering on the door, "Emerald Isle Contracting," and, right below the driver's side window, "Colin." The fucker had his own company truck!

It was just another half-mile to my parents' house, another white colonial. I knew something about real estate prices, and figured that it was worth close to a million bucks, in this town, on the road down to the rocky shoreline. Hell, the fucking Portland Yacht Club was within walking distance! My father had inherited the house from his parents, back in the late sixties, and thus had paid almost nothing for it. I was their only surviving child, so yeah, I did figure that I'd inherit that colonial when mom passed away.

The wind started to pick up, when Colin's cell phone went off. I could only hear part of his side of the conversation, but it was obvious that something had gone wrong on a jobsite. He made his excuses, kissed Eva-Marie - Grrrr! Right in front of me, the bastard! - and headed out the door.

Other people had shown up, and, unsurprisingly, everyone was bringing food; there was enough grub to feed a small army! It wasn't so much a sit-down dinner as everyone getting plates and walking around eating. No one ate in mom's living room, though; that was simply Not Done.

I had filled up on potato salad and beef brisket and raw veggies with ranch dip, so I poured myself a scotch and water and headed out into the back yard; I needed a break from the noise. I stood there, looking over the edge of the hill, across the roofs of the homes situated lower on the descending road, at the grey Atlantic Ocean stretching out in the distance. Mom's home was less than half a mile from the coast.

"John," I heard, and then turned around, to see Eva-Marie standing there, holding a cup of coffee in her hands as if trying to warm her fingers.

"How are you doing, Eva?" I asked her, falling back into the old habit of not adding the Marie; I think I was the only one who ever did that.

"We're doing pretty well, John." I noticed that she said that they were doing well, not just that she was doing well. "Colin's construction company is really busy, and the boys are doing great in school." What, Colin's construction company? I thought that he was just a carpenter, not the fucking business owner. "How about you?" she continued.

"Oh, pretty well. Maria and I bought our house, and we're expecting another child. I've been doing well enough at work that we'll be able to put on an addition by the time the baby's born."

"That's great, John. I'm happy for you." My ex then sat down on a cast concrete bench in the back yard, one which overlooked the descent, toward the grey water. She looked down at her feet, before raising her head again, saying, "You should have believed me."

Believed her? About what, about her affair? "Why? I knew about Mario, I knew that you fucked him, fucked your boss." My anger, never too deeply buried, was bubbling up again.

"No, you know what that asshole Carl told you, that's all you knew, and you got so pissed off about it that you'd never listen to anybody. You had no other 'proof' because there was no proof, there was no affair. You dumbass, Carl told you that shit because he wanted to get in my pants, and I wasn't about to let him. He made up the whole thing, and you fell for it.

"Well, now I have a better husband, a better lover, and someone who trusts me as well as loves me." With that, Eva-Marie stood up and walked back to the house.

oo0oo

The flight into Oakland was a long one, and Maria should have been at work when the plane finally touched down. I had my car in long-term parking, so I didn't need her to come and pick me up. It's a long drive from Oakland, through Pittsburg, to Antioch, so there's sure no sense in dragging her out.

The long plane ride was too much, gave me too much time to think, and the guy beside me kept to himself, which was good. You can't just skip your father's funeral, but I sure wish that I hadn't gone. Seeing Eva-Marie was like a fucking dagger in the heart, and her crack that Colin was a better husband and better lover was just an additional twist of the knife. The blue-collar carpenter turned out to be not just a business owner, but a very successful business owner, doing high-end remodeling in some of southeast Maine's coastal homes. Their home on Town Landing Road had been his house before she met him.

But, what the fuck! I had a great wife, too, two fine step-children, and another one who'd be my son on the way. Seeing Jerry's and Mike's attitude to their step-father helped; I wouldn't miss them nearly as much knowing that they weren't really missing me, weren't really thinking of me as their dad anymore. I guess that I was just the schmuck sending $1,200 a month in child support.

There can be a lot of traffic in Antioch, a small town which grew too big, too fast, and Alcala Street can sometimes be kind of noisy. I guess that's why Maria never heard me, as I opened the door, and saw her, on the couch, with Luis' dick balls deep in her ass.