One Helluva Mistake

Another thank you to blackrandl1958 for her editing and encouragement.

"Hey, mister, a little help, please?" the young girl called over to me as I sat on a bench in a park near my house on a sunny Saturday morning.

I looked up to see a Frisbee sitting about a foot away from my spot and two young girls about 15 yards away. Without even giving it a thought, I grabbed the disc, sprang to my feet and flipped a laser back to the girl who called to me.

"Wow. That's pretty good for an old guy," the youngster snapped back at me.

"Old guy?" I queried, wincing.

I knew she was a young girl, but I was only 44. Did I really look that old?

The child realized she had upset me, and trying to be nice, attempted to put some salve on my wound.

"Well, not too old for somebody's grandfather," she said with a smile as the other girl nodded and smiled at me as well.

"Somebody's grandfather? Throw me the Frisbee back. I'll show you scamps old," I said with vigor, my body straightening and responding to what I perceived as a challenge.

The youth threw the Frisbee back to me, and I snatched it out of the air behind my back with my right hand, then quickly snapped a sidearm throw off my thumb over to the other child.

"Wow. That was really cool. Can you do that again?" the first child commented.

I motioned for the second child to throw the disc back to me. She did, and this time I moved back a step and grabbed the throw through my legs. I straightened up and threw what I called a "hovercraft" back to the first child, the Frisbee starting out heading down before heading back up and floating over to her. Both children looked at me like I had just landed on earth from another planet.

"Not bad for an old guy, huh? You two want to learn how to really play Frisbee?" I asked.

They both nodded and ran up to me. In the span of a minute, I went from being an old guy to the Pied Piper.

I got down on one knee and spent about two minutes explaining and demonstrating the grips on several throws, and how to make the disc curve in both directions. I then had them move off about 10 yards and we did some throwing for about 10 minutes. I grabbed a few catches between my legs and behind my back, and even popped the disc high in the air one time before snatching it neatly one-handed as it came down.

"Can you teach us that, too?" asked the first girl, a skinny, long-haired blonde with freckles across her nose.

"I can, but first I think you've got to learn to make the regular catches most of the time. You guys are dropping as many as you're catching," I said.

We worked on the catching thing for several minutes. As I did when I coached Little League baseball many years ago: I focused on the girls concentrating on seeing the Frisbee all the way into their hands. Suddenly, catching became much easier, and everything got more fun.

We played for about 20 more minutes before the girls ran out of patience and wanted to get on the swings. I remembered it was a 7-year-old thing, and it didn't hurt my feelings.

"Thanks, mister. We're going to go swing now," the second girl said. "Do you come here a lot? Will you be here next week?"

I honestly had no clue what I was going to be doing next week, but since I never really had plans to do anything anymore, I told them I would come back the next week and teach them the "fancy catches." They thanked me for my time and ran off to the swings.

I smiled to myself as I walked back to my apartment. I always enjoyed coaching kids, and quite honestly, it had been a long time since I had made any new friends, of any age.

The next Saturday morning I was again sitting on the bench when the two youngsters, who told me their names were Angel and Jackie, came back to play some more Frisbee. Instead of the old-fashioned, baggy gray sweats I was wearing last week, I was dressed in athletic shorts and a T-shirt, honestly hoping to look a little younger to the pair.

We worked on catching some more, and when I was pretty satisfied with what I saw, we started working on some of the fancier catches. They both found out that fancier meant tougher, although I still heard a lot of laughing and giggling. We played for about 45 minutes before they said their good-byes and ran off to the swings, but not before asking me if I was coming back the next Saturday.

I wasn't expecting the girls to be accompanied by an adult the next Saturday, but probably should have been expecting it sooner or later. If my young daughter had been meeting "some old guy" in the park for the past several weeks, I, too, would have shown up to meet this man.

I guessed the woman to be early 30s as she headed straight for me. I also guessed her to be the blonde girl's mother as she also had blonde hair, done up in a high ponytail that fell to her shoulders. She, too, was on the thin side, maybe weighing in at a buck-10 and standing 5-4, maybe 5-5. I tried not to be too obvious as I gave her the once-over as she approached.

"I'm Maddie... Madison Weber. I'm Angel's mom," she said as she extended her hand to me. "I just wanted to meet 'the Frisbee guy' the girls have been talking about for a couple of weeks."

"Rob Drake, Frisbee guy, at your service," I said glibly as I took the proffered hand and looked directly into a pair of bright blue eyes. "I'm actually comforted by the fact that an adult has come around to check up on things... being a parent of two children myself."

I saw her take a skeptical look at my left hand, looking for a wedding ring but not seeing one.

"Are your kids somewhere in the park?" she asked, trying to be clever, I suppose.

"My kids are 19 and 17, now," I answered. "One's in college and the other is a high school senior. The younger one lives with her mother."

She clucked her tongue. I could tell she felt a bit better about her youngster being in my presence.

"Well, I'll leave you to your fun then. Nice to meet you, Frisbee guy," she said as she turned to walk off.

"What, you're not staying to play? I can teach anyone to play Frisbee," I said hopefully.

I'm not blind. I noticed that she, too, wasn't wearing a wedding ring.

Okay, I'll admit it wasn't the line of the century. I really hadn't been doing too much practicing in the two years since my divorce. She gave me a crooked grin that practically screamed "lame," but then she stopped and turned around.

"I'm pretty sure you can't teach me. I don't have an athletic bone in my body," she said.

Her daughter jumped in at that point to agree with Maddie.

"Nobody's going to confuse Mom with Mike Trout," Angel said giggling.

The two girls stayed in close while I gave Maddie some Frisbee basics. We then split apart and played catch for about five minutes. Well, three of us played catch; one of us was pathetic. When that pathetic one split a fingernail, she was done for the day.

"Damn, I just got my nails done Thursday," Maddie whined.

"Oh please, Mom. The park is a no-whining zone," Angel said in a child's sing-song.

"Little wisenheimer," the woman said. "You guys keep going. I'm going home to fix this nail."

She gave me a small nod and turned to leave. I choked. I said nothing... absolutely nothing.

The girls and I played Frisbee for about 45 minutes. I am good at multitasking. I was able to play Frisbee and kick myself for not doing better with an apparently single woman.

As I walked back home, I continued kicking myself for not having game. Of course, I told myself, I wouldn't need game if my wife of 19 years hadn't cheated on me three years ago, causing me to get a divorce. Since then, I'd been on exactly... zero dates.

******

I never thought I'd ever go on a date again when I married Traci Wilkins after dating her for two years, starting when we were seniors at Michigan State. We had a perfect marriage, I thought, with two perfect daughters. Traci was a beautiful woman when we met, and three years ago at 41 was still beautiful, at least according to me. She had mid-back length auburn hair, green eyes and... well, to be truthful, almost watermelon-sized boobs that still stood high and proud on her chest, even after nursing two children years before.

There were many times through the next 21 years when I wondered how I got lucky enough to land this goddess. I was a business major in school and she was a journalism major, so we might never have met if it wasn't for a marketing class that was a requirement for both of us. There were 15 of us in the class, and it wasn't an exaggeration to say that all seven guys just about lost their shit when she walked into the room on the first day.

You could see the woman knew she was beautiful, but she seemed to be able to get along with everyone in the class, which was a good feat considering that young women are among the most vicious people on the face of the earth, especially with each other. We hit it off enough that I asked her out on a date after a month, and she accepted.

We were exclusive soon after that and were married a year after we graduated.

No one has a perfect marriage, but I thought ours was pretty damn close, which is why I never gave a second thought when Traci said she and her co-worker and friend, Carol, had front-row tickets for the hottest young singer on the planet for the last night of the marketing seminar they had to attend for their company a month from then.

I had known that Traci and Carol were attending the seminar for several weeks, but the news about the concert was new information. And since I wasn't born the day before yesterday, I knew that tickets to a show that hot had to have been purchased on the very first day they went on sale, which according to the Internet was a month before she told me about her trip.

While I was curious, my daughters were just about through the roof with jealousy. Nelson Rollo was a 25-year-old former rapper and model who had moved full-blown into popular music and was raking in cash by the handfuls as the "next Mark Wahlberg." He had six-pack abs and big biceps, which everyone knew because he rarely wore a shirt whenever he performed.

"Aw, Mom, why couldn't you get four tickets and take Hailey and me along?" Becca whined.

"Because it's a work trip, dear, and I wasn't going to bring you and your sister along so you could spend three days sitting in the hotel room before the concert. It's on that Friday night, and Carol and I will be on the plane home first thing Saturday morning," my wife told her.

"Since when are you such a big fan of this rap kid?" I asked my wife.

"Ohhh... I've been kind of following him for a while now," she said, not looking me in the eyes.

Ah, to be a trusting fool. I never gave it a second thought. After all, she had never given me a moment's doubt.

As was our usual, she called home both Wednesday and Thursday nights about 9 PM and we talked about how her day had gone at the seminar. As we were finishing up on Thursday night, I told her to "be careful" Friday night at the concert. She knew that was "Robspeak" for "keep the flirting to a minimum" since I wasn't there to watch over her.

"Oh, please, Rob, there's going to be thousands of young women at the concert. Nobody's going to give Carol or me a second glance," Traci said.

"Carol's not my worry, but you, on the other hand... are," I said. "Anybody with a working pair of eyeballs is going to give you a second glance... and probably a third."

"Come on, Rob. You know I'd never step out on you," she declared.

"I know, but it's always going to make me uneasy when I'm not with you," I said.

******

Who the fuck calls someone on a Saturday morning at 6:15? An ex-friend, that's who, was my initial thought when I heard my cellphone ringing on the end table next to my bed. My kids were asleep in their beds, and I knew it wasn't Traci because it wasn't the happy ringtone I had set up for her calls. Whoever it was, was about to have his or her ears ripped off if there wasn't a real good reason they were calling.

"Is Molly all right? Who died?" I asked my best friend in the whole world, Carl Franklin, when I saw his name on my screen as I picked up the call.

I heard a quick gulp before he started to speak rapidly and loudly at me.

"Molly's fine. Nobody died. Are you sitting down?" he asked.

"Actually I'm laying down. What's up?" I asked, confusion gaining the upper hand in my brain.

"Get your laptop up first, then turn on your TV. Do it right now!" Carl instructed me in rapid fire.

"Oh shit, Carl, I don't need to see any stinking cat memes at 6-fucking-15 on a Saturday morning!" I yelled.

"Shut up and listen to me," he said, his voice suddenly as serious as a heart attack.

"I know you're not very familiar with xHamster, so listen up," he said. "Go to that site and scroll down some. It won't take very long for you to find it..."

"What the fuck? What the hell am I looking at?" I screamed into my phone when I found... IT.

I stared at it. I mean I STARED AT IT. My stomach lurched. I closed my mouth and covered it with my hand, but soon I couldn't hold it back... barf coming out through my fingers and out my nose. I started to choke.

"Rob! Rob! Robbie! Are you okay. You still there, bud?" he yelled.

I had run into the master bathroom and grabbed a hand towel to clean myself as I hit speakerphone. I then headed back into my bedroom and grabbed the computer again.

"Oh my fucking God," I mumbled quietly.

"Exactly," Carl answered quietly.

Unbelievably, on the screen in front of me, was a photo of my wife... MY WIFE... in apparent mid-orgasm riding that fucking kid singer sometime after the concert last night.

Words failed me. Rational thought failed me. I wished my heart would fail me as well so I wouldn't have to endure what would be coming next.

Carl was saying something to me as I scrolled through four photos of my wife having sex with another man. It seems the kid singer was married, Mrs. Kid Singer walked in on him and my wife going at it in a hotel room after the concert and snapped several photos. In a rage, she had someone post them on a site that allows explicit photos.

I guess the term is viral. The site, which normally focuses on videos, had posted four photos, and in less than eight hours they had each garnered more than a million views. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. FUCK!

"Hey, you there?" I finally heard Carl say.

"Yeah," I said.

"So that's really her with him?" Carl asked.

"Yeah. She and her friend Carol were at his concert last night after a marketing seminar," I said. "I knew she was going to the concert. I just didn't know about..."

"This is all over social media," Carl said. "Not quite the photos you see here, because social media can't post them, but Facebook has a photo of Nelson Rollo and the photo of your wife's face in mid... well, you get it; announcing the scandal."

"This is going to be... hell, this already is... a nightmare," I responded, "and I imagine it's only going to get worse as the day gets going. How did you find out about it?"

"I was catching up on my Facebook stuff when I saw the post about the scandal... and I thought I recognized Traci in that portrait shot. I couldn't believe it, so I linked over to the site and... there she was," he said. "I'm sorry man."

"Yeah, me, too," I said.

******

Maddie showed up again at the park the next Saturday, ostensibly just to watch Angel, Jackie and I play Frisbee. She brought a travel mug of coffee with her and sat on a bench drinking it while watching the three of us, until the girls ran off to play on the swings. I walked over to the bench and sat down. I guess to save me from myself, Maddie started the conversation.

"You must live pretty close if you walk over here all the time," she said.

"Yeah, I live about a half-mile over to the west," I said, pointing in the direction of my apartment.

"We live about a half-mile over to the east," she said, pointing in the opposite direction. "We're almost neighbors. Yet I wouldn't have probably ever met you if it weren't for the girls playing Frisbee. Did you ever wonder about the randomness of life?"

"I used to wonder about a lot of things," I replied. "Now I don't wonder about anything anymore. Haven't since..."

"I get it. You just feel numb. That will eventually go away, you know. I was numb for about a year and a half," she said.

"You ex cheated on you?" I asked, somewhat shocked.

"Not that I know of," Maddie said. "I was numb after he died in a car-truck accident. He was an alcoholic. He was drunk and kind of drove his car under the wheels of a semi."

"I'm sorry. How long ago was that?" I queried.

"Five years ago. Angel was two, just a baby," she said. "So she really never knew her father, although now that I look back on it that might have been a good thing."

I raised my eyebrows in consternation. She dropped her eyes from mine, looking uncomfortable. She looked like she was deep in thought for a few seconds before making her mind up on something. She exhaled.

"You know when you're young and you party almost every weekend. That's what Avery... that's my late husband... that's what we did in college. And that's what he continued to do after college, even though we really couldn't afford to do that if we were going to save up for a house and someday have kids. I tried to get him to stop, but he just couldn't give up the drinking. I guess they call it binge drinking. As far as I knew, he didn't drink much during the week.

"When I got pregnant, I stopped drinking completely, and I stopped going to most of the parties because I didn't need to be around all the smoking and the weed... and other stuff. He went by himself, even though I wasn't happy about that.

"After Angel was born, well, I couldn't go then. Somebody had to stay home and watch the baby. You know, there wasn't a lot of money for a babysitter. That didn't stop Avery from going out, though. He stayed home until Angel was about three months, then started partying again.

"From what our friends said, I don't think he was sleeping around on me, but he was still hitting the drinking hard and occasionally smoking weed. Then one night, he didn't come home, but the police showed up around 2 AM. That was five years ago."

She sniffled, and I saw the tears in the corners of her eyes, but I could tell she was trying to keep them from falling.

"I'm sorry. You're the first person outside of family and friends I've told that story to. It's not something I'm proud of, but it's who we are—Angel and I."

"She seems like a great kid. So does the other one—Jackie. Not as outgoing, but they both seem nice," I said.

"Jackie's a neighbor kid. She lives a couple of doors down from us. Nice parents. Her father, Mike, occasionally helps me out with small fix-it jobs," Maddie said.

"You know, you're not near as old as Angel made you out to be," the woman continued. "The way she described you, I thought for sure you had to be 55 or 60. Maybe a Senior Citizen. You're what... 45 at most?"

"Almost on the money!" I said. "But I guess to a 7-year-old, anyone older than her mother would be... old... old-d-d-d, with three or four Ds."

We both chuckled at that. I looked into her periwinkle blue eyes. It was now or never.

"Uhh... umm... uhh... ah shit," I mumbled, totally pissed off at myself.

I saw the look of... pity in her eyes. Fuck me!

"Yes. I'll go out with you," she said with a grin on her face.

"Uhh... you will? How did you know..." I stuttered.

"Women's intuition," she said with a bright smile.

I laughed liked the weight of the world was off my shoulders.

"I... I couldn't even ask you last time," I said.

She gave a hearty laugh. It was... almost lyrical.

"You couldn't even ask this time, but at least you gave me a hint," she said.

"Yeah," I admitted sheepishly.