"The Talk" Leads to Explosive End

Maria giggled and looked up playfully at Brent. "Of course, I will, Brent, and I tried to explain to him this is just seeeeex. What I have with my husband is true love," she smiled at me, "isn't it, Dave?"

"You have a fucked-up way of showing it!" I responded angrily.

Brent turned back to me with a smirk and said firmly, "Now, Dave, calm down and don't do anything stupid that you'll regret. I'll have her home tomorrow afternoon or Sunday at the latest, in the same shape she is now. Well, almost the same." They both laughed.

He helped her into the expensive suede coat I'd given her for Christmas. Arm in arm, they walked down the steps together and out of the porchlight. I stepped outside and stood there stunned, nauseated and trembling. Anger, jealousy, hurt, and fear seethed through me. I heard a high-performance engine growl into life, and some European sports car shot out from the blind spot behind the tall hedge at the corner of the yard.

I called Robert and related what happened. He said, "Don't do anything, Dave; I'll be there in half an hour."

When my brother-in-law arrived, I was still sitting on the porch in the late January cold, clad only in jeans, boots, and a long-sleeved flannel shirt.

"Come on, Dave, let's get you inside," Robert said, helping me stand.

After pouring me a stiff double-bourbon, Robert asked me to describe everything in as much detail as I could recall, and he captured it all on a small digital recorder. Due to the shocking nature of it all, I could relate events in explicit detail. Most puzzling were Maria's over-the-top reactions whenever I was angry. I recalled that Flannigan reacted similarly, too.

Robert confirmed that neither I nor any other man had the legal right to stop their wife from walking out of the marital home on a date. Furthermore, even though this home was my sole legal property, Maria had a right to return until she was legally evicted from the home.

"So, what about when I grabbed her wrist to try and keep her from going?" I asked, half-afraid of the answer.

Robert shook his head, "You can't do that. It could be construed as domestic violence, especially with a witness like Flannigan."

"Look, it was just a reaction, and she twisted right out of my grip."

Robert nodded sympathetically. "Don't worry about it. What's done is done. Legally, she could file assault or even domestic assault charges on you."

"Fuck. I can't believe this," I said, defeated. It was as if my heart was being torn from my chest, and I felt tears welling up again. "What can I do, Robert?"

"Legally? About all you can do is divorce her. Texas still allows filing on the grounds of adultery, which often impacts property division and spousal support. Of course, the court can order counseling, so you'd at least get her in front of a mental health professional of sorts. Hell, Momma can't even get her to keep her doctor appointments to check on her hormones."

I wiped my eyes with the flannel sleeves. "Man, I still love her. I can't piss away all these years, and she's using that against me."

"Maybe it is depression or hormones or a combination," my brother-in-law said. "I'd play it by ear for a few days and see if she figures out how bad she fucked up."

"I don't know," I intoned. "You didn't see her, man. It was like she was possessed. The look she gave me when she answered the door was evil. Then, her attitude, the way she kissed him in front of me. They were out for fucking blood the way they did this.

"Hell, she could've said, 'I'm off to fuck my boss and shack up with him,' and drive off for his place, but he came to my fucking front door like it was a high school date!" My pulse was pounding in my ears.

"Well, look who he is, Dave. His old man is B. Alton Flannigan. This bastard thinks he can do anything and get away with it, and he probably can," Robert explained. "They just started up this law firm about a year ago, but Flannigan Sr. is making it rain for junior. They're almost out billing us, from what I hear, and we're long-established.

"I can't even imagine, Dave. But the woman doing this isn't my little sister, man. It's not, and you know it." Then, he asked, "When Flannigan mentioned his marriage, that was all he said? That he was 'taking a break' too?"

"That's it. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if this is a fling or wide-open affair? I wonder if he threatened his wife with 'financial destruction by law firm' if she made waves?"

"It doesn't make sense. The trouble with what Flannigan said is that both you and Mrs. Flannigan can use marital funds to pay an attorney. Maybe it was bluster. Or maybe he's willing to burn everybody's house down if you or his missus makes waves," Robert wondered.

We talked it to death, and in the end, I chose the option of hoping for the best, which is pretty pathetic, but at that point, what did I know? Maybe Maria was mentally ill. Perhaps she was just evil. For the moment, I played a waiting game. Looking back on it, I think both Robert and I believed the genuine Maria Brown would emerge in the end, and we could work through all our problems.

After Robert left, I went into my home office and laid down on the futon, but I was an idiot to think that sleep would surely come my way. My mind replayed the loop of Maria, me, and Brad Flannigan, complete with the gut-wrenching humiliation, the vision of Maria dressed as she was. In my imagination, I saw her beautiful legs wrapped around a rutting, sweating Flannigan. I could imagine him pounding my beautiful wife and then looking up at me with that smirk. After taking a Benadryl at 2:00 a.m. I fell into a fitful, troubled sleep.

Awakening around 9:00 a.m. I choked down a piece of toast smeared with butter and grape jelly with plenty of hot coffee on the side. The day was cold, gray, and threatened sleet, which seemed to reflect my mood.

Maria's mom called me about ten o'clock and said she'd been trying to contact her daughter since the night before. "Dave, we know this isn't really Maria! I'll snap that girl back to reality, and she'll start being a good wife to you again!" she said, her voice anxious and full of tension. In the end, I was the one comforting Beatrice.

Robert called and told me he'd brought in one of his law partners, Bethany Robinson, a family law specialist. She advised me to start separating our finances on Monday, but as soon as I hung up, I started that process to the extent that I could online on a Saturday. I called two of the credit card companies, both with zero balances, and canceled them. I printed out all the paperwork I needed to change beneficiaries on insurance policies and investments. I took those documents to Robert's home, where his wife, Sandra, also a paralegal with his firm, notarized them. At the Fed-Ex agency, I set up the paperwork packets for a Monday morning delivery.

Then, the waiting started. When your wife is on a sleep-over date with her boss, the human brain tends to feed on its misery. With no factual information, the imagination begins to run wild, creating a tortured, worse-case reality.

I had to do something, so I started researching Brent Flannigan. I confirmed he was B. Alton Flannigan's namesake and probably trying to follow in the old man's footsteps. After searching the Internet and public records, I also found out that Brent Flannigan was married to Tonya Barrett-Flannigan. Seeing the hyphen, I imagined a Birkenstock-wearing feminist, but I knew that was unfair. She was in the same damn boat I was. What I couldn't find was her phone number.

I had dinner at Robert and Sandra's Saturday, and nobody was at ease with the 900-pound gorilla there in the room playing the bagpipes. Like us, two of their children were away at college, and their oldest son was on active duty with the Marine Corps, afloat somewhere in the Indian Ocean. The conversation was nervous and stilted, and the movie we watched served mainly as a distraction to an uncomfortable conversation.

Unable to sleep, I decided to check on the downstairs hot water heater again, where I'd noticed some pipe corrosion. A better check revealed that the gas supply line installed during the changeover from L.P. gas to natural gas had a couple of problems.

One issue was pipe corrosion, and the other was the pipe coming from the inline ball valve had been badly cross-threaded by the installers and weakened by corrosion. I shut off the gas supply at the ball valve and would deal with the repairs next week. I also needed to find the tiny water leak in the basement wall or plumbing causing the corrosion. I made a mental note to call a plumber and have him redo the whole line.

Working on some of my consulting projects also occupied my mind, and before I realized it, it was nearly 4:00 a.m. Again, I slept fitfully for about four hours and had another nearly-nothing breakfast.

When I heard the key in the front door, it was 12:33, Sunday afternoon. Maria came in wearing jeans, a designer pullover top, sneakers, and her suede coat. She had on almost no make-up, and her hair was in a tight chignon. Without a word, she walked past me and went straight upstairs to our bedroom.

Was I stunned? Truthfully, yes. Mostly it was the bold, almost arrogant way Maria returned home that didn't sit well with me. Was I surprised? No, because nothing my wife did would ever surprise me again, or so I imagined. To her departing back, I said acidly, "Just fine, thanks, and how are you, my darling wife?"

I was getting somewhat proficient at sitting on the sofa, staring into space, and thinking about nothing. I was doing this when, a little after one o'clock, Maria came downstairs wearing her terry-cloth robe with her hair up in a towel. She sat down on the opposite end of the sofa and turned towards me as she began combing out her long, wet hair.

There was my wife, fresh from fucking another man, sitting there methodically combing out her wet hair, as she'd done a thousand times or more in my presence. Visually, nothing was different. It was a familiar, even intimate tableau that screamed of normalcy. However, under the comfortable and familiar exterior - the camouflage layer - nothing was the same. The Maria I'd married, loved, impregnated, comforted, nursed through sickness, and pledged my love, my life, and my loyalty to was gone.

As if reading my mind, Maria said in a normal voice I hadn't heard in weeks, if not months, "So, Dave, here I am. The same woman that left here Friday evening. I feel better than I've felt in months." She grimaced as she hit a tangle of hair and then carefully worked it out. "Can we act like adults, or are you still having a pity party?" She just had to twist the knife.

I got off the sofa and started upstairs. Returning effortlessly to Bitch Mode, Maria hissed, "Where the hell are you going? We still need to talk, damnit!"

"Maria, we never talked. You and Fuck-Face Flannigan dictated terms of unconditional surrender. I wasn't okay with this shit Friday, I'm not okay with it now, and I won't be okay with it tomorrow!"

She leaped to her feet and yelled up the stairs, "I asked you where the hell you are going!"

I glared down at her. "Where I go no longer concerns you, dear wife. For the record, I'm moving my shit into the guest room."

"Like hell, you are, Dave Brown! You're my fucking husband, and you won't disrespect me in my own home!"

"That's grand irony, Maria! You know, if you didn't have double standards, you'd have no standards at all!" I shouted over her.

As I was moving my things into the empty guest room, Maria approached me, and in a halfway civil tone, she asked, "Did you make anything for lunch?"

"What makes you think I've had an appetite since Friday night?" She looked away from me. "Didn't Fuck-Face feed you today?" I growled.

An evil smile crossed her face. "No, he didn't. He was too busy showing me how a real man fucks before he sent me home to my sweet, little hubby," she said with a smirk. "So, there's not a single thing fixed to eat, huh?"

"No, dear. I've only been cooking for one since you left Friday." Suppressing an urge to choke the bitch, I added, "You want to eat? There's rat poison in the basement, Drain-O under the sink, and I'm sure there's still some cow manure piled up behind the garage."

"Fuck you, Dave, you childish bastard!" she said before she walked away.

"Ladies annnnd gentlemen... Love has left the building!" I yelled at her.

We stayed clear of each other for the rest of the day. I left my office only to eat a quick sandwich and to get a change of clothes from the spare bedroom. The futon finally wore me down, and I slept better Sunday night and awoke early. There was plenty of work to keep me busy until Maria left for her office. It further amazed me that my wife was so chickenshit that she made coffee only for herself. 'Oh, well,' I reasoned, 'if you openly cheat on your husband, you'll surely fuck him over on the coffee etiquette we've maintained for over twenty years!'

Then it got worse. A lot worse.

TOSSED OUT!

It was nearly two o'clock on Monday afternoon when I heard a loud, pounding knock on the front door. It couldn't be mistaken for anything other than a cop-knock. "Prather County Sheriff's Department! Open up!" confirmed my suspicions. I recalled Robert's words Friday night, and through the glass storm door, I saw the papers on the deputy's clipboard, rustling in the cold late-January wind.

Opening the door, I never got a chance to speak. "David Wayne Brown?" the deputy asked.

"Yes, sir," I responded.

"Please step outside and place your hands behind your back. I have a warrant for your arrest for domestic assault," he stated. The second deputy handcuffed me as the first deputy explained the charges, "The complainant, Maria Elena Sandoval Brown, alleges that you assaulted her in this residence last Friday, and Brent Alton Flannagan witnessed this."

They Mirandized me, and as the second deputy was locking up my home, I asked them, "So, if your wife's boss came to your home, kissed your wife in front of you, and then proceeded to tell you they were going away to fuck all weekend, what would you two fine, upstanding gentlemen do?" Both officers looked away, clearly embarrassed. "Yes, gentlemen, you better hope Brent Flannagan never takes a fancy to your wife because between him and his corrupt daddy, they'll fuck you both!"

As they were securing me in the cruiser, the second deputy said, "Look, man, we know this deal is fucked up. We don't like it any more than you."

The first deputy added, "Me? I'm afraid I'd have killed 'em both. Sorry people like that don't deserve to live, but as you say, Flannagan is well-connected at the Courthouse, and we're just working slobs like you. It ain't personal or nothin'."

I was arraigned at nine the following morning, and there stood my wife and Flannigan. To her credit, the bitch wouldn't even look at me or her brother, Robert, who represented me. When the judge asked me how I would plead to the charges, I replied emphatically, "Not guilty," which caused Flannagan to smile.

Then, the other shoe dropped.

Before Robert bonded me out, they served me with a temporary restraining order. The hearing to review the restraining order would be held in 10-days, on the Friday after next. I was given 45-minutes on Wednesday morning to remove whatever belongings I'd need to live elsewhere.

Since I work from home, this would mean trying to move the specialized plotter printer I use along with my high-end P.C. and all the related printers and hardware required to do my job. I would also need to transfer my office phone, and as of that moment, I had no place to live.

Beatrice called some friends and family members, one of whom had access to a box truck. During the move, a cold, wind-blown, freezing rain began to fall. There was no way I could move the expensive equipment out of my home. We wrapped up the P.C. and monitors and loaded them, but the printers and filing cabinets got caught between the 45-minute time limit and the horrible weather.

We asked the deputy for more time, and he went to speak to my wife, who sat in her car where the long driveway meets the county road. He shook his head 'no', which compelled us to leave. Robert walked down and tried to explain the situation to Maria, and she said, "No! I want him gone. He scares me." She still couldn't look her brother in the eye.

Without time to return the equipment to my home office, we had to leave the plotter printer, the other printers, and the filing cabinets, which contained all my business records, in the short hallway between the basement door and my office entrance.

I spent the next three days trying to make order out of this chaos which my life had become. Robert once again had to recuse himself from my case because the complainant was his sister. Robert shuffled me over to one of his other partners, Acton Forsythe, a late-twenties criminal lawyer, who was a dead ringer for the Australian actor Paul Hogan in his younger days.

Our strategy was simple. I would take no plea bargain to the domestic assault change, and ask for a jury trial to exonerate me. I would take the stand and testify as to the extenuating circumstances and how I was feeling in that moment. Any reasonable jury would see it for what it was, especially when Flannagan and Maria testified and the facts surrounding my "domestic assault" came to light. The most significant complication, of course, was the restraining order, which we'd get an opportunity to have lifted, hopefully before the trial, but certainly after and acquittal. Texas juries are very powerful and regularly "nullify" the law when it's clear that common sense dictates justice rather than blind obedience to the law as it is written or interpreted.

As I'd suspected, Maria recorded all the theatrics, where she told me to 'step back' and 'lower my hand'. The entire situation was fluid, but first, we had to overturn the restraining order, and Forsythe immediately began work on the coming hearing. He also appealed to the issuing judge, requesting the removal of the rest of the tools required to perform my job. While I was hopeful, I sure wasn't patient. And my anger was eating me alive.

Sandra insisted that I move into the small apartment attached to their garage, and truthfully, it was kind of cozy and well-suited for working and living in a small space. I had my office phone transferred to a new phone line there, but it took three days. I spent a lot of time on my cell phone making preemptive calls to my clients.

That weekend, I was still in limbo, and I was able to work a little in my new, somewhat cozy, place. By Sunday afternoon, it was clear that the stress, lack of food and sleep, and constant stress had suppressed my immune system. As January came to an end, I was coming down with one of the worst winter colds I'd ever had. I started taking zinc and vitamin C, trying to minimize its impact.

Forsythe called me Monday evening. He said that the judge tasked a deputy with taking me to my home on Tuesday morning to determine what else I needed to remove to perform my job and live away. I could take away what I could carry, and Forsythe had arranged for a professional moving company to pick up my office equipment. All I needed to do was tag those things with pre-printed labels.

The first thing that went my way was the assignment of Deputy Oliver Brown (no relation) to accompany me. He was just returning from a severe, job-related vehicle accident, and he was still in physical therapy and rehabilitation. His job escorting me was sort of a light-duty assignment.

When Deputy Brown and I arrived at my home, Maria was there, and she made a huge deal out of being inconvenienced. She informed the deputy that she was 'now working mostly from home', but she acceded to the court order. In a few minutes, Maria drove away and parked at the end of the drive next to the county road, which cleared the way for me to enter my own home legally.