My Ex-Wife Visits

Yeah, we were going to need to talk! There were going to have to be some rules settled for this, and soon.

While sex had been the last thing on my mind, I guess that Donna wanted to remind me just which one of these wives was my real wife, because she started things off. Even at our ages, we always slept naked - we'd started out that way and never changed - and we had barely made it into the bed before she was up on her right elbow, looking down at me and kissing me. It didn't take too long for my body to respond the way it is supposed to, especially with Donna's hand starting to prime the pump, and then she climbed on top of me for the ride.

That was really unusual! Oh, it wasn't unheard-of by any means, though over 35 years the number of different 'positions' we used had gradually decreased, and good old man-on-top missionary was almost always the way we did things.

This time, Donna had no problems, none at all. She was already very wet, and when she got on top of me, she took her hand to guide me where she wanted me, and then settled down to take me inside of her on one long, smooth move. She put her hands on my chest for balance, and then started rocking away.

Man, this was really great! Donna was setting the pace, which was vigorous enough for a 58-year-old woman, and even though it had been almost a week since the last time, with me being on the bottom I was able to keep the tension off my ass muscles, making it easier for me to last.

One thing was certain: yeah, Donna was sending a message to me, that she was my wife and not Joannie, but she was also sending a message to my ex, because she wasn't quiet at all. Yeah, she'd been pretty vocal before we had kids, but we'd naturally quietened down once there were children in the house who were old enough to understand what mommy and daddy were doing. Now that the kids were grown up and gone, we'd stopped restraining ourselves, but were still nowhere as vocal as we'd been in our youth.

Tonight? Donna made it sound like we were in our twenties again. Hey, if this was going to be a continual side effect of Joannie being here, then maybe her being here wasn't all bad.

And one thing was sure: Donna wasn't doing this just to send a message. She'd always been pretty responsive, and I could see her climax rising in her quickly. This looked like one of those special nights where she gets off more than once, and that was the way it turned out, because she came just a few minutes into riding me. When I saw that her climax was close, I changed the angle of my pelvis, pushing up hard into her, putting more pressure on her clit, and she erupted in orgasm.

Me? I still wasn't close and thought, fuck it, Donna wants to send a message? Well, I can, too, so I rolled us over, held myself hard within her for a few seconds, and then began to make love to her from above.

No, check that: this wasn't making love so much as it was just plain fucking, a rarity with our ages these days, but again, not exactly unheard-of. Her fingernails on my back communicated what she wanted, to be fucked fast and hard, and if her fingernails weren't enough, her repeated "Fuck me! Fuck me! Fuck me!" just reinforced the message. Somehow, she hit just the right volume that it clearly wasn't faked, yet Joan might have been able to hear us from 'her' bedroom down the hall.

Well, my own need was rising in me, fast, and I knew that I didn't have much longer, but Donna's climax was rising in her again, and I had just enough awareness to see that she was going to win the race, but not by much. Suddenly an "Oh, my God!" scream came from her, and she pulled my head and chest down to hers, and I released myself into her, being a little vocal myself.

Two of our bedroom windows face the east, and this time of year the sun rose early. We're normally early risers anyway, and while we have some light curtains, there are no blinds on the windows; being out in the country, it's not like we have any peeping tom neighbors who could see in anyway. Donna was snuggled up, her head on my shoulder and her left arm idly playing with my chest when I woke up.

Me? I felt great, as any man would after a night like that. "Message sent?" I teased her, which got a sing-song, "Why, whatever do you mean, Carl?"

That was quickly followed by a "C'mon, let's get our showers," as she grabbed a robe and threw me a pair of gym shorts so we could head for the bathroom.

We didn't usually shower together, as the shower wasn't all that big anyway. My father had gotten rid of the old claw foot tub - I guess he didn't realize just how much money he was throwing away - and we had a regular tub-shower stall combination, 1950s style, and while two people could shower together, there still wasn't all that much room for it. Donna was determined, and I'm guessing that this was yet another message being sent to my ex.

It wasn't long before we were downstairs, in the kitchen, and getting breakfast ready. Donna made buttermilk biscuits, from scratch, while I started the sausage. Fortunately, we had some orange juice in the fridge, and a ten-cup coffee maker. The kitchen windows also faced east, and that meant morning sun to help start the day while cooking breakfast. The summertime coop was on the east, so I could visually check on the chickens from inside.

I could hear our 'houseguests' upstairs. Joannie had always been punctual, so I guessed that they'd make it downstairs just about five minutes before seven. I guess we were going to get lucky, and Donna not get called in.

Breakfast was really good, better than most days. Why? Well, while it's always nice to have things being just Donna and me, having company is great, even though part of that company being my ex-wife was still a bit strange. We still had summertime morning cool, and Donna and I served breakfast out on the glass-topped table on the porch. There weren't any clouds, and only a slight mist over where the creek ran, and the still-low morning sun illuminates the farm really nicely. My ancestors had really chosen this land well, possibly the best homestead site in the whole county.

Nevertheless, we still had to have the 'big discussion,' didn't we? My ex-wife and her handicapped son, under the same roof as my real wife and me? That was a prescription for early disaster.

I asked myself, how did I still feel about Joannie? She was my first love, and no man ever forgets his first love, but I wasn't starting Alzheimer's: I could also remember, quite clearly, how it had ended. Joannie had a one-night stand, one morning stand, really, and I found out about it the hard way, by getting sloppy seconds. It didn't really mean anything to her, she had said, it was just sex, she had said.

And, stupid me, while I lost my temper and stormed out, I still came back, and pretty much let it slide. We didn't even talk about it much, no real apology from her, no statement of forgiveness from me, it was as though ignoring what had happened was the easiest way around it, and that's what happened.

After all, it was just sex, right?

But taking the easy way out didn't mean that I wasn't more alert for clues. I found myself taking mental notes, paying more attention to the little things, trying to make sure that everything added up.

Trouble was, with me working full-time and Joannie still in school, she had the free time to be able to have more 'it was just sex,' and I knew it. I wasn't seeing any direct evidence that she was screwing around, but there were the little things, like the dishes not getting done or the floor not getting swept which told me that she wasn't spending that much time in the apartment.

It was mid-September when things blew up. Joannie had gotten her MSW at the end of the summer session in August, but seemed to be making no effort at getting a job. She didn't get many interviews, as jobs were hard to come by under Jimmy Carter's fucked-up economy, and she had (supposedly) sent out résumés to every place she possibly could, but with no classes to go to, no more research to be done, no internship to fill, the apartment still looked neglected, as though she just wasn't there much. She was never a neat-freak, but the place always looked drop-by clean in the past, and it no longer did.

I confronted her, and she didn't even bother to lie. Yes, it was still just sex, yes, she certainly did love me, yes, the 'other stuff' didn't really mean anything, but this was no longer just like a pick-up volleyball game: she had been screwing this one guy for a while now. That coming Saturday, I gathered up my stuff and started crashing at the place of a friend of mine from work.

Joannie said that she didn't want a divorce, she wanted us to get back together, but no, I wasn't going to live that way, I wasn't going to bust my ass on a construction site all day, to make enough money that she could have all day free to go out and fuck somebody else. No, she said, he wasn't better in bed than me, no he wasn't 'bigger' than me, and no, he wasn't better-looking than me. He was just 'different,' she had said.

At any rate, she was the one who filed for divorce, the following month, when she realized that I wasn't coming back. Since she still didn't have a job, I didn't know how she was going to pay for it, but it didn't take long for me to find out: she met another guy, Jimmy Riggins this time, and he was going to help pay for it. Even after Tigger has pissed on his pants when he left them on the floor that first night in her bed - the same bed we had shared for six years! - he moved in quickly.

I had wondered how fucking Riggins had liked living in the same apartment I had shared with Joannie, and maybe it didn't bother him too much, but they had gotten a new place the following March. I remembered how Joannie had made it clear that I could have taken her in their bed - they'd gotten rid of the bed Joannie and I had shared - in that new apartment, and maybe it would have been a nice revenge fuck, but I'm glad that I didn't. I remembered how Joannie fucking around had made me feel, and I hadn't wanted to do that to Donna.

Trouble is, Joannie having screwed around on me, and my paying attention to things I hadn't before, also led me to being suspicious where Donna was concerned. Donna had never done anything wrong, never done anything to justify me being suspicious, but you know how it goes: once burned, twice wary. Her being an RN, working around all of those doctors, she had plenty of opportunities to cheat on me, and even dump me, and I knew it. It took a long time before I stopped worrying about Donna maybe cheating, and that was my paranoia.

So, how did I feel about Joan today? Well, I certainly didn't hate her. Even as pissed off as I was in 1978, when everything came crashing down, I never hated her; back then I still loved her! Now, here it is, 36 years later, and I'm seeing the 62-year-old Joan, not the 26-year-old girl I had remembered. Yeah, I had feelings for her, who wouldn't, but I didn't love her anymore.

Did I?

Yeah, what could possibly go wrong?

"Joan," I asked her off to the side, "how will Alex do around the farm? It's time for me to go feed the chickens and gather the eggs; would he enjoy coming with me and seeing that, or would it frighten him?"

"I think that he'll do alright," she said. "I'll go with you, because while Alex is trusting, that would be his first time alone with you, and that, coupled with the chickens, might be too much for him. Maybe tomorrow just the two of you could go over there."

Donna went into the kitchen to do the breakfast dishes, but like I said, the coop is visible from the kitchen windows, and I'd bet you dollars to doughnuts that her eyes were on us. I'm sure that Joannie knew that too, and she made sure that Alex was walking between us, not her next to me.

It was then that I realized: Joan had talked about Alex and me going down to the coop tomorrow, just the two of us, and behind that statement was the assumption that they'd be here tomorrow, and that hadn't yet been established. Yeah, we needed to have that talk.

I kept the chicken feed in the barn but wasn't going to need it this morning; I had filled the gravity feeder just yesterday, and it held four days' worth of layer pellets. Chickens will eat almost anything, and leftover vegetables and stuff, things that we used to throw in the compost pile, and now most of our leftovers go to the birds. I thought that I should introduce Alex to the barn as well, but maybe that would have been too much on his first full day here.

Alex did surprisingly well; he was fascinated by the chickens and watched what I was doing. I had rigged the back of the layer boxes so that I could collect the eggs without having to enter the coop itself. That much, I suspected Alex could learn to do by himself someday, and when I realized that that thought had occurred to me, I realized that behind the thought was the assumption that he was going to be here long-term.

As long as it was above freezing, I always washed the eggs off at an outdoor sink I had attached to the barn, and I showed Alex how to do that. We have nine chickens, and I had harvested eight eggs; Alex seemed to do OK as I showed him how to do it. I didn't tell him that he was getting a little bit of chicken shit on his hands, but made him be sure to wash his hands after he was done.

I told Alex to carry the clean egg basket into the kitchen and give them to Donna, a task he happily accepted. There was an innocence around that poor boy, in a man's body, a sense of pride in the accomplishment of a simple task any first-grader could do. Thing was, I was proud of him, too, when I realized it: in less than a single day, I was treating like I would have treated my own son, were he similarly handicapped.

What could possibly go wrong?

After the morning chores, I asked Donna to take a walk down to the creek with me. Last night's chat had been too brief and was pushed by the fact that Joan and Alex were here, in the evening, with no place else to go. It was probably too late already to arrange lodging for them for tonight, but we had to make some decisions about the next few days, at the very least, and really plan for the longer term.

Donna might have had some of Professor X's telepathic powers, or at least Deanna Troi's empathic ones, because she could always read me like an open book.

"You still have feelings for her," she said to me, and it wasn't really a question.

"I can't help but have some feelings for Joan, but it's not love. Yeah, she and I were together for almost seven years, but that was a long time ago. We did break up, remember?"

"I remember. And I remember how hurt you were; those feelings hadn't gone away when we got together, and I knew that you were struggling with them. It took you a while to get truly comfortable with me, you know."

Yeah, I knew; I just didn't know that Donna knew.

"Donna, I'm worried. I've got you here, and that supersedes anything I might still feel for Joan." I was being very careful to refer to her as Joan, and not Joannie! "But the problem I'm having is that I've taken to Alex, so quickly, almost as though I was his father. He's a little boy, who needs help and guidance and care, even though he's in a man's body. I've already caught myself wondering how much he can learn to be comfortable around the farm.

"Donna, we've got to set some rules, and get that done fast, or this situation is just going to fall into place without them, maybe for the long-term."

"Well, I don't work until Friday, but I can call Meg, the hospital social worker, and see if there's anything she can help with."

"Joan has her Masters in Social Work, you know."

"That won't help her with Kentucky programs, but maybe it means she could get a job with the welfare department or something."

"You do realize that if she got a job, Alex would need some form of day care. Despite his age and size, he's just a six-year-old mentally. If she got a job around here, I can already see it: we'd get stuck with caring for Alex during the day.

"And that still doesn't answer the biggest question: how long is she going to be staying here?"

"Carl, we can't just kick her out, no matter how odd this is. If it was just her, yeah, we could tell her that she has to find someplace else to live, but not when she's got Alex with her."

"Donna, realize just what you've said. If we can't tell her to leave, she's going to be here until she decides to leave, and that might be never."

"I know," Donna said, and her voice kind of trailed off. "And I've already noticed how she looks at you."

"Donna, if she's looking at me like 'that,' it's because she's maybe found a rescuer, someone who will be able to take care of her and her son."

"Yeah, uh huh, right. Damn, for such a smart guy, you can be so freaking stupid at times."

Wednesday, October 1, 2014:

We had gotten luckier than I had ever imagined, and the social worker at Donna's hospital had gotten a line on a job perfect for Joannie. It was only part-time, in the Powell County welfare office, but it was better than nothing. At first she had been doing twenty hours a week, 8 until noon, Monday through Friday, but she quickly traded shifts with another part-timer, and now worked eight hours on Monday and Tuesday, then until noon on Wednesday.

Kenny Joe and I had maintained her old car, a 2002 Nissan, which had nearly 140,000 miles on it and clearly hadn't been properly maintained, at least not for a while. When I had drained the oil, it was brown and about as thick as cat piss, a clear sign that it was way too old, and about a quart and a half low to boot. But, once that was done, and Donna had showed her around Stanton a little bit, Joannie took upon herself some of the running around chores; she was doing what she could to make herself useful.

She was also contributing money to the household. The Social Security she was receiving for Alex and herself now was no longer spent in 3½ weeks trying to survive for a month, and she was putting every penny of Alex's check into a savings account; with her own check, she was buying some of the groceries as well as paying some rent. Joannie didn't know it, but Donna had started another account, and was putting all of the 'rent' money Joan was paying into it, so if she wanted to move out, she'd have a nest egg with which to do it. Once she got her first paycheck, Donna refused to take any of it, telling Joan to save it up.

I had been wondering: why didn't Joannie have more money? I had heard that Riggins had been a PhD candidate, going for a professorship no doubt, and Tuscaloosa was a college town, home of the University of Alabama. If he'd been a tenured professor, there should have been major health care benefits for his family, especially with a disabled son.

Well, it hadn't quite turned out that way. Riggins hadn't gotten his doctorate, and wound up working in the admissions office at the University of Louisiana at DeGarde. He had done well there, and had made it up to assistant director, but then he got caught helping some cute coed with poor grades by going into the system and changing Ds and Cs into As and Bs, in return for some college girl pussy. A little checking, and it was discovered that this wasn't the first coed he'd 'helped.' He was allowed to resign for that, with no retained benefits, though he did have a 401(k) with some money in it.

Because DeGarde didn't want a public stink, they agreed to give him the standard recommendation, and he wound up in the admissions office at Alabama, but it was part-time, just thirty hours a week, enough to qualify for health care, but with no other benefits. They wound up pulling money from his 401(k) early, because they had to live, but it was getting frittered away. Joan had stuck with his cheating ass, because with Alex, what choice did she have? When Riggins croaked, the health care benefits ended and there was only a bare $5,000 in insurance, barely enough to get him buried.