Following a Map to the Treasure Chest of Betrayal
Rachel didn’t need a real map to find the treasure chest of breakup betrayal in her home. She used her woman’s intuition to search for clues that Tony, her husband, had been cheating on her. Little things around the house seemed noticeably different and she felt something was amiss. After a while she became more and more certain that it was a Miss who was causing these doubts. Perhaps even a Miss Tress. And each clue bought her closer to the Treasure Chest of Breakup Betrayal.
The Tale of Rachel
Rachel was not a suspicious person by nature, but one day she came home from work and, smelling a pleasant scent in the air, picked up her dog Curry and sniffed him, just in case he had been into her hand lotion again.
Her mind traveled back to the last time she felt things weren’t right. That was the day she discovered cigarette ash on the coffee table, lying there like a sausage-shaped mini volcanic eruption next to the mule that wore a sign around its neck that read “Souvenir of the Grand Canyon.” When she asked Tony who had been smoking in their home, he said Kevin had visited and had smoked a cigarette or two. Rachel knew he was lying for two reasons. Firstly, Kevin hated all things smoky. In fact, he wouldn’t even eat the smoked ham and cheese sandwich she made him when they all watched the Superbowl together, because the smoky flavor made him cough. Secondly, she knew her husband well enough to recognize when he was lying, because when he lied his eyebrows twitched. When Tony mentioned Kevin’s name, the twitching began, first the left eyebrow, then the right, resulting in a tiny but distinct frenzied eyebrow samba. Rachel never told him she could tell when he was lying because it was a useful tool for her, so why give up a good thing? But who had been smoking in their house and why did Tony lie?
A week later Rachel was in the kitchen making a pot of green tea. As she looked into the sink, the map of suspicion in her mind made her see something she ordinarily would not have noticed. Lying in the center of the sink was a big metal X. Everyone knows all treasure maps have an “X” on them, which marks the spot where the treasure lies and her sink was no different. There lay the culinary evidence, blatant as the results from a lie-detector test. Two sets of silverware and two plates from a cooked lunch were stacked in the sink. Two greasy knives with a little potato residue lay across each other, making a large X. Probably one set of dishes was Tony’s, but because he never cooked more than scrambled eggshells Rachel wondered who had cooked the meal and eaten from the other plate? She stormed into the living room, brandishing a greasy knife in her fist.
“Who cooked this meal?” she asked Tony, waving the knife in the air as a blob of wet potato slopped onto the rug. Silence. She headed back into the kitchen. After a few minutes, Tony followed her in. He watched her as she picked up the tea kettle and poured boiling water into the teapot. She turned to face him. “And who ate from the other plate?” She spooned sugar into a cup then she poured out a cup of tea for him. He took it from her. The excuse he gave her was weak and unacceptable, just like the cup of tea he was holding. The lie that came from his mouth was so far-fetched it would have put even an uncreative lying teenager to shame.
“I was really hungry,” he stated feebly, “so I had two lunches.” She stared at his honest eyebrows. They were twitching furiously like two mating caterpillars on a honeymoon. She turned away with her tea and didn’t speak to him for the rest of the evening.
The next day would reveal everything.
The next day (the one that would reveal everything), Tony came home with a banana crème pie he said a friend at work had made for him. Even though the problems of the previous day stood like bars on a jail cell forming a barrier between them, Tony and Rachel shared the pie. It was so delicious they agreed it was the best pie they had ever tasted. It was so good they extended themselves, along with their belts, and ate it all.
With tears slipping off her chin, she left the sleazy-smelling bedroom and dragged herself into the living room to confront him as he watched television. She asked him three times if he had a girlfriend, and like Judas Iscariot, he denied her each time. His face was so animated with shock and emotion that it was difficult for her to establish whether he was lying or not. It was a standoff, but Rachel wasn’t giving up. She stared at his face until he looked into her eyes, then he finally admitted that there was someone else. When she saw his eyebrows innocently dozing in the lamplight she knew it was the truth. Her questions and his explanations flew back and forth like a hypnotist’s pocket watch as they discussed the details of their relationship, old and new, and a few bottles of red wine coursed through their brains. Finally, as dawn pushed the sun awake and daylight leaked into the room, their words were all spent and relationship changes hung in the air like a lead piñata. Rachel thought she could never forgive him.
Tony stood up to leave and to spend what was left of the night in a hotel. Suddenly he smiled at her. Through the murkiness of the red wine recently consumed, her anger melted and she smiled back at this man whom she still loved. It broke the ice and they both knew right then that no one could take away the rapport they had. Maybe she could forgive him after all.
She followed him through the kitchen, towards the back door to say goodbye. Reaching for the door handle, he momentarily hesitated and turned back around. She felt a burst of love for him as he looked into her eyes one more time. “He’s going to give up his girlfriend!” she thought desperately to herself. “He still loves me!” But it was not to be. He reached over to the counter, picked up the empty banana crème pie dish and handed it to her. She gazed at it; perhaps he was giving it to her as a gift because they had both enjoyed the pie so much. Tony smiled again as he asked “Do you mind washing the pie dish before I leave? I want to be sure it’s clean when I return it to my girlfriend later on today.”
Rachel felt the blood move up to her face, making her hot and dizzy. His careless words reached into her body, tore out her heart and cast it down the garbage disposal. She saw the color red dancing around her eyes. How dare he ask her to wash the dish! Had she suddenly become a maid to his girlfriend? It was humiliating enough that he had encouraged her to eat a pie baked by her. The very same girl who had touched the pie dough and Tony with the same hands. The hands that reeked of Eau de Slut.
Her stomach churned a crème pie-like mixture inside her as she used the dish he had given to her to catch the partially digested pie that spewed up from her stomach like a rancid milkshake. The sickly aroma permeated the air of the room and stifled her olfactory senses. He watched as she retched, horrifically mesmerized, and when she handed the dish back to him with its fresh new contents, he took it without a word. She looked him coldly in the eye. “Now you can bring the dish back to your girlfriend,” she said, “and you can tell her I saved her some pie.”
Comment
Often we can overlook one or two little clues that indicate something is going on in our home with our partner, just because we want everything to be all right. Sometimes a twitch of the eyebrows speaks a thousand words of mistrust, but often it’s a trail of clues that makes us suspicious. It could begin with dinner and end with pie but somewhere in-between there has to be confrontation. We may love our partner to heaven and back, but if they have someone else on their mind, usually there’s little that can change that. You have to know if there’s someone else, so you have The Big Talk, where you look into their cheating eyes or caterpillar eyebrows and ask if they are having a little dessert on the side you don’t yet know about. If they refuse to be honest with you, at least be honest with yourself.
Are you aware of clues that are adding up on the map of doubts in your mind? If so, the outcome will find us standing at the treasure chest of breakup betrayal. Unfortunately, in this case, the only bounty the chest held was something regurgitated. It was time for Rachel to follow the map back home and right out of this relationship.
Excerpt from the book Breakup Cocktail: 5 Parts Humor, 1 Part Healing and a Twist of Revenge from Barbara Kingsley Singer
Breakup Cocktail book contains about 60 Tales including this one, but without illustrations
Click here to buy on Amazon.com
Copyright© 2012 Barbara Kingsley Singer
No comments:
Post a Comment