The Will

"It wasn't just about the sex, Mary," I protested. "Michael was a nice guy. He was romantic and smart; we always had a great time."

"And you always ended up at his place staring at the ceiling while he satisfied your needs."

"Well, yes."

"And how long did Michael last? Until he tired of being seen out with someone old enough to be his mother? Until he wanted to settle down and have children with someone his own age?"

God, this was embarrassing.

"Um, no. Michael was killed after about five or six months."

"Killed, how?"

"I never really found out. He'd invited me over for a barbeque; he was going to cook me one of the burgers he said he was famous for. Then, after some bedroom time, he intended taking me out to meet some of his friends at a football match. I... er, did what I normally did, parked at the shopping centre about two blocks away and walked to his place. As I approached his house there were firefighters all over the place and the house was partly collapsed and fully on fire. I didn't have a choice, did I? I went home. Michael wasn't answering his phone and in the paper the next day it was reported the homeowner was killed. I went back two days later and talked to a neighbour. Apparently, everyone thought that Michael was trying to light the barbecue and the gas bottle exploded; oh, Mary, it was horrible."

"Yes, I can imagine. Having a friend killed can be traumatic."

"Yes, that too. But it could have been me. If Michael had waited until I got there to fire up the barbecue, I could have been killed as well. Not only that but the investigators were still there and the neighbour introduced me as someone Michael knew. They questioned me like the explosion wasn't a horrible accident. I convinced them I couldn't help, but I lived in terror for the next few months that they'd discover more and somehow Dave would find out.

"Don't look at me like that, Mary. I know you think I'm a serial adulterer and, maybe even that I'm a self-centred bitch, but I only wanted to protect Dave and my family from the fallout."

I lapsed into silence, remembering the extreme fear of that time, years ago.

"So, you reverted to being a dutiful wife and mother after that?"

I debated with myself on whether to stop my confession at that point, but I couldn't. The fact that I'd not known my husband nearly as well as I thought I'd done; to the extent that he'd successfully hidden his knowledge of my affairs for god only knew how many years, had severely rattled me. I was a Christian but not a Catholic. I couldn't get solace from a confessional and the thought of unloading on a relative stranger was abhorrent.

"For about three years, yes."

Mary just looked at me, deadpan.

"Again, Mary, I don't think it was all my fault. Dave's erectile dysfunction got worse and worse. Oh, he tried, but he never made it past half-mast, if you know what I mean, and that changed him. He continued to emotionally withdraw from me; it was horrible. I bought sexy lingerie, tried talking dirty, but nothing seemed to work. He began staying later at the business and working the weekends. He was still great with the kids but being with me seemed to make him embarrassed or something.

"Then there was all the pleasure I was missing out on; you know; in the bedroom. It was like all the orgasms young, well-built men could give me had a hold on me. So, I went out and found a replacement for Michael. His name was Jerome. He looked like a real stud. You know the sort; muscles on top of muscles, gym-junkie but, I have to say, he was a little disappointing in the sack. He'd done steroids at one point and I think that shrunk his whatsits. It only lasted six weeks or so and I was going to break off with him, but before I could, he disappeared."

"Disappeared?"

"Yes. I went around to his house one day and it was empty. Packed and gone. Between you and me it was a little insulting. I thought he had some genuine feelings for me and would at least have called to say goodbye, but, no, he just up and left. I haven't heard a peep from him since."

This time when I stopped, Mary's raised eyebrow was all I needed to keep going.

"I... er, hooked up with Mario not long after that. He was the best of them, in bed, I mean. He couldn't make love to a woman if he tried. He just took me whenever he wanted to. Oh, Mary, you wouldn't believe how good that makes you feel. It was like being back in high school."

Mary's renewed look of disgust made me skip the details.

"Mario was a bad boy, or so he tried to appear. Said he ran with hard men in Melbourne. I thought he was full of shit until... Anyway, he started getting pretty demanding. Said my insistence on only meeting him privately was cramping his social life and insisted we go out in public with his friends. I only went once, to a bar on the other side of town, but I spent the whole time there petrified that someone I knew would see me. Besides, he was starting to arc up about having to use condoms. I didn't want to risk my health like that. I knew Mario had other girls he was seeing besides me.

"I tried to break it off after that, but I just couldn't. I'd grown addicted to the sex I think. I rang him a week or so later and he must have missed me as much as I missed his cock because he agreed that I could come around to his place the following Friday."

"So, how long did good old Mario rock your world after that? Did you find out he wasn't full of shit after all? Let me guess. You turned up at his place on the Friday and all his mob mates were there waiting to gangbang you."

My dejected facial expression seemed to cause Mary to mellow her sarcastic tone slightly. I remembered that time painfully.

"No. I never went to his place that Friday. His sister, who I'd become friendly with, rang me on the Thursday night and asked me if I'd watched the news. I hadn't. Mario had been killed in a car bombing. It seems he really was running with the wrong crowd and there was a turf war going on among the local drug dealers. That shook me to the core. Again, it could have been me."

Mary watched as tears escaped my eyes. She didn't reach around to hug me. I couldn't blame her. Even I didn't know if it was pity for my former lover or the remembered fear from that time four and a half years ago. She allowed me to settle.

"Was he the last, Rita?"

Now came the hardest one to divulge. Now came the confession that my conscience hadn't had time to justify yet.

Now Mary would find out that while my husband was receiving CPR on a golf course, I'd been in bed in a seedy motel with my latest lover, happily rutting away with my phone safely ensconced in my car at another shopping centre carpark. Which is why I was one of the last to learn I was a widow.

"No, Mary. Sadly, Mario wasn't the last." God, this was hard. "I behaved for over two years this time. Then I met this new guy who started on the church committee, Justin."

"Not Justin Smith?"

Shit. I'd forgotten Mary was on some of the same committees with Justin as I was. Somehow, the fact she knew the guy made it infinitely worse.

"But he was married, with two little kids."

Shame made me miss the obvious verbal clue I'd just been given.

"I was trying to break off with him. He was getting too clingy. He'd started to say that we were meant to be together. Said he would leave his wife and everything. I was starting to worry that he would tell Dave just to break us up. I've lain awake the last couple of nights worrying he might have sent Dave an email or rung him. Someone told me that just before Dave... passed, he received a call. What if that was Justin and that's what triggered his heart attack?"

I finally had the courage to look at Mary's face. All colour had drained from it. Her mouth was working but nothing came out. I was confused. Finally.

"My god, you don't know do you?"

"Know what?"

"Justin is dead, Rita. He died the day before Dave. Someone sent his wife a letter telling her he was having an affair and she chucked him out of the house. He went straight out to the garden shed and apparently set fire to himself with a twenty-five litre can of petrol he had stored there."

I was aghast. I'd been isolated in my grief for the first four days after Dave's death and drunk since the reading of the Will yesterday. Or was it the day before? Obviously, all the well-wishers who'd come over this week hadn't wanted to burden me with the bad news local gossip. I looked at Mary's face again. If possible, it was even paler, now with shades of green.

"He knew," she whispered, shaking her head. "All along, he knew..."

"Who knew what, Mary?"

"Dave. Think about it. Can't you see the pattern?"

"What pattern? What are you talking about?"

Mary looked at me impatiently. "He knew, Rita. Dave knew about all of them. All of your lovers."

I shook my head, unable to speak. No, no, no, screamed my internal voice. The pain of Dave knowing of all of my affairs was too much.

For every shake of my head, Mary nodded. Even in my stress I was reminded of our childhood arguments. Those infantile 'No, I didn't,' 'Yes, you did,' rants that would continue until either Mum or Dad would tell us to be quiet.

"Yes, Rita. He knew about each and every one of them. Think about it. Your first lover, Brian. Blinded when something exploded in the chem lab. Who was the next one?"

"Michael," I whispered.

"That's right. Michael. Died when a gas bottle exploded the day you were going out with him to a public football match. That Jerome guy disappearing without a trace. Mario? Soon after you and he started going out in public, kaboom! Died in a car bombing. Now Justin. He was possibly going to expose your affair, but, no, again, kaboom, he's dead.

"Can't you see? You must. You can't be that blind."

At my silence, Mary snorted. "What did Dave do for a living, Rita? How hard would it be for a guy with his expertise in explosives and pyrotechnics to rig some targeted explosions while leaving no evidence? If anyone knew how to make any one of those explosions look like an accident it was Dave."

I was incapable of speech as the symmetry of all Mary was saying sank into my exhausted, hungover head. It all made ugly, horrifying sense.

"If I'm right, and I'm certain I am, Rita, Dave knew about your dalliances all the way back to your first. He either faked his problems in the bedroom to avoid boning your cheating ass or really did have trouble getting it up with you. He kept an eye on you and your fuck buddies and when there was a chance of your dalliances being publicly exposed, and thus him being forced to act, he took measures."

"But that can't be right. He would have confronted me," I offered lamely, still trying to cling to my delusion.

"What? And risk breaking up his family. You know better than me that family was the most important thing in his life. No, he would wait until Anne was out of the house before making a move like that."

The pieces of the puzzle fit so well that I knew they were the truth as unpalatable as it was. The man I'd thought loved me completely was setting up to ambush me in the very near future as soon as our nest was empty. It was the most devastating certainty I'd ever known.

I was only vaguely aware of Mary standing. Her voice shocked me when she spoke from behind me, between me and the back door. I flinched.

"I'm going now, Rita. I know you need me, but, frankly, you disgust me. I would never have believed this of you if I hadn't heard it from your own mouth. Besides, I have to cook Pete's dinner."

With those condemning words, she left me as well. I have no memory of the following hours, as the next thing I remember, it was dark.

CHAPTER 4

I was roused by quiet noises from the bathroom. Curious and a little afraid, I stood and walked in. Anne was there holding a clear plastic bag with Dave's hairbrush in it. What the hell?

"Anne, honey, you scared me. Why do you want that?" I asked, pointing to the brush.

She glared at me with a venomous expression. I took a step back.

"Because, Mother, something Dad asked me to do years ago made sense to me today."

I was really confused by her response and hurt by her facial expression.

"What?"

"When I was about eight, Dad took a DNA swab from me. Told me it was to check for any genetic weaknesses. I swallowed that at the time, but today it hit me; I think he wanted to check that I was his biological daughter. So do I, now."

Anne glared at me as the implications of this statement hit me between the eyes.

Brian had been my first lover since I'd been married, but Dave didn't know that.

By the time I'd recovered enough, I was too late. A glance out the window showed me Anne lugging two suitcases down the front path. She turned to walk along the street. I raced outside but was just in time to see and hear my husband's old Mustang pulling out and away.

I'd never felt so utterly alone in my entire life.

I used logic to delay the crippling emotions I sensed circling; trying to find a way into my head and explode it. I went through what I could remember of Mary's logic, wanting desperately to believe Dave couldn't have known for eleven years. The only evidence to support my wish was my belief that he was too open and honest to hide his knowledge from me. The Dave I knew couldn't have feigned that amount of love.

A niggling memory came unbidden. The day before the reading of the Will, I'd been going through Dave's closet to find a suit for the funeral home, I'd thought he had more clothes than that. Jumping from the couch, I raced upstairs to the master bedroom and flung his cupboard open again. Sure enough, the remaining clothes were spread along the hangers to give the illusion of bulk. Dave was moving his clothes surreptitiously out of our house. With a shock, I realised that when Anne finally flew the nest, Dave would have been right behind her.

The one burning question searing my soul was, 'How long had he known?' Mary's words came back to me and fit into a neat, unarguable pattern. The answer was eleven years.

With a dread certainty I now accepted that Dave's sexual problems weren't physical. He'd somehow found out about Brian and no longer wanted to have sex with me. That was horrible. Dave had been what? Forty-nine at the time. To practically give up sex at that age. Just because your wife wasn't strong enough to resist the allure of unemotional monkey sex with a young stud.

But eleven years. Hanging around in a house, in a relationship with me. Why? The answer came to me instantly. It was exactly the man Dave was. In his eyes, he'd made a mistake in marrying me, but from that marriage three lives had been created. Three innocent lives. Dave would have felt they shouldn't pay for his bad judgement. They were his responsibility. Walking away from the marriage would have put the emotional welfare of his children at risk and that is something he'd never do.

At the time I met Brian, Molly would have been nineteen, Derek seventeen, but little Anne only seven. A cold shiver passed right through me. He'd intended to hang around until the nest was empty, then, with his duty complete, what? Where were his clothes?

I can't explain the depth of my shame... and frustration. Yes, I said frustration. I'd taken extraordinary precautions to hide my affairs. Now, Mary's logic implied that he'd found out about Brian somehow; the timing of him developing performance problems proved that. If he'd confronted me, the façade of a happy family would have been forever ruined. The children's welfare compromised. Unable to vent his anger on me, would he have lashed out at Brian? I couldn't reconcile the Dave I knew with someone capable of maiming a fellow human being. Much easier to convince myself that Brian's fate was an unhappy accident as I'd always thought.

Once it was known what I was capable of, it was exactly in Dave's nature to look for recurrences. What had he felt when he discovered Michael? Devastation is probably not a big enough word. My soul cringed at the thought of him tracking my movements and behaviour, all the while maintaining his rigid façade for the rest of the world. Burying his disappointment in me and hoping I didn't do anything to out myself and reveal him as a cuckold to the rest of the world; forcing his hand.

If Mary was right, and I instinctively knew she was, Dave was monitoring Michael and I closely enough that he knew we were about to enter the relational stage where the chances of discovery were high. Dave acted to protect my reputation and thus, his family. But could he kill? I couldn't believe he would. Much more likely the gas bottle exploding was only supposed to maim, like Brian.

The three-year break after Michael must have been a blessing for Dave, but his continuing avoidance of sex with me proved he'd passed the point of forgiveness already.

And then, again, the shocked disappointment when his surveillance discovered Jerome. The loneliness of hearing, seeing, reading all the evidence of my betrayal and having no other soul he could unload to. With Jerome, I'd been pretty indiscreet. We'd done it in the office at the gym once, just before Jerome...

Again, the pattern Mary had spotted immediately. How had I missed it? Dave ignoring the threat to his family until the chances of discovery hit a landmark that only he knew. I wonder if Jerome's bones would be found one day or he'd simply been made an offer he was smart enough to heed. Disappear without a look backward or...

How Dave's opinion of me must have sunk even lower when Mario appeared with what now seemed like unseemly haste. Was Dave present in the bar when I went out publicly with Mario for the first time? Did he sweat from the threat of my exposure? Was I not the only one fearfully scanning the bar for familiar faces? For lingering looks? If only Dave had known my resolve to never go out in public with Mario again, or never loosen my unshakeable insistence on condoms. That way I could have saved his soul the tarnish of killing for the second or was it third time?

The three-year break between Mario and Justin must have been a relief for Dave. Did he have hopes he could get all the way to an empty nest and his escape without another casualty? Did he have someone by that time who could share the debate on whether Anne was old enough to be emotionally untarnished by him revealing my shame and breaking up of the family? Whatever. I knew Justin well enough to know he wouldn't have felt bad enough about the destruction of his family to kill himself the way they said he did. His agonising last few seconds on earth when he walked into his shed, and Dave's trap, did not bear thinking about.

For once, I hoped and prayed there wasn't an afterlife. Dave deserved a long and happy one, but after the actions I'd forced on him...

All the logic and theorising made perfect sense after three big glasses of gin. What didn't quiet were my thoughts of Dave's loneliness throughout it all, and my frustration at the thought I'd never know what tipped him off in the first place. When did he see through my act? How exactly had he found out? And the worst; when was the first time he'd said, 'I love you', and been lying?

The gin bottle was empty when my shame finally morphed again. This time to a horribly bad conscience as I realised I, me, myself had been the one who killed or maimed those men. Not Dave. Dave had merely been the instrument. If I'd been strong enough to keep my damned legs together, or, at the very least, timid enough to keep my affairs discreet, each and every one of my ex-lovers would be alive or whole today.

Gutted and with the gin finished, I reached for the bourbon.

CHAPTER 5