Fathers, Brothers, and Sons

I let myself cry for a good, long time. I mourned my marriage and the notion of my son. I mourned the happy times that had been built on lies and the future that I wouldn't have. I mourned a family that would split-- that had split-- but which, for now, I'd pretend was still as happy and healthy as ever for the sake of my children. For Megan and for Julie. And, yes, for Travis.

And when the tears were gone, at least for the moment, I pulled back onto the road and headed home.

The house was dark when I got there, but only superficially quiet. From the outside, I heard nothing, but as I opened the door and headed for my bedroom, there were soft sobs coming from Julie's room. At least Alli had fucking listened to me enough to let me sleep by myself.

And sleep I did. For the first time in a week, I was out almost as soon as my head hit the pillow. Part of it was exhaustion from the expended adrenaline and shed tears, some of it was finally getting to vent at someone, but mostly it was that I now had a real path forward, even if it wasn't one I was happy about.

The next morning, Alli was up before me. By the look of her, the puffy red eyes and disheveled hair, I'm not sure she actually slept. I told myself that I didn't give a fuck one way or another, but secretly I was happy. 'Shoe's on the other foot now, bitch. How does it feel having someone else decide your fate?' Petty thoughts, but I felt entitled to them.

There was coffee and breakfast. I didn't trust Alli as far as I could throw her, but I trusted her enough to not poison me, so I pulled up a chair to drink and eat in silence. She picked at her food; it was clear that this was for me more than her. Or maybe it was for her, in that it was an olive branch to me, which... 'No. Stop,' I told myself. 'It doesn't matter why she did it anymore. Her motives don't matter, just her actions.'

After I'd eaten and drunk enough, I said, matter-of-factly, "Here's what's going to happen." Allison looked startled; our marriage had always been a partnership, one where we had a dialogue and decided on important matters together. That was over, and she was going to have to get used to it. This was the fucking "Luke Takes Care Of His Family Show" now.

"We're not getting divorced--" Her shoulders sagged with relief. " --yet." The tension returned, and Alli opened her mouth to speak, but I stepped on the words. "We are going to get divorced eventually, but I'm not going to have your infidelity and your lies hurt the kids. When they're old enough, when Megan is in college, we're going to split up."

"But I don't want that!"

I banged the table with my fist. "I don't give a FUCK what you want! I didn't want any of this, but I've got to deal with it, and now you do, too. Actually deal with it! Not just fucking lie to everyone and hope you get away with it!"

Alli frowned but stayed silent, so I continued. "We're going to pretend that we're still the happy couple. You've pulled it off for long enough--"

"I wasn't pretending! I love you!"

"-- long enough that you should be able to handle it. I'm going to have to work at it, though, because lying to my family hasn't been an every-fucking-day thing for me. So you get to cover for me, too. Get used to phrases like, 'Dad's just stressed from work.' You're going to need them."

After another sip of coffee, I said, "We're going to share the same bedroom until Julie goes to school, and then we'll reevaluate. If I can't stand being around you, you'll move to her bedroom because... whatever fucking reason. Come up with something that makes neither of us look bad. You snore or you've got restless legs now or something. Not 'Dad wants to throw up everytime he looks at mom.' You know, a lie. You're the expert there."

Alli flinched at that, but so what? She deserved it. "There are going to be some other changes, too. You don't need to know what, exactly, or why, but I expect you to roll with them. I'm going to be spending more time out of the house; that's all you need to know for now. And I'm opening my own bank account. My paychecks will go there, and I'll deposit the appropriate amounts to our joint one."

"Why?"

I sighed. "See point fucking one: 'You don't need to know.' I want to separate our finances, and this is the first step. I want to do it because I want to fucking do it, and that's all you get until I decide otherwise. You've kept your fucking secrets for long enough; mine are at least out in the open. You know they exist."

Alli looked at her hands. "It doesn't need to be like this. I love you. I'll do anything to make this up to you, Luke."

I snorted, "There is no 'making this up to me,' Alli. You lied to me for sixteen years, you fucked your brother, you had his kid, and..." The anger was building again, but I needed to get through this. It was good practice for when the kids were back.

With a deep sigh, I continued. "...and, Jesus, Alli. I got a vasectomy after Megan. You encouraged me to after I brought it up! Even though you knew I didn't have a son of my own. You made sure I couldn't ever have one, whether that was your intent or not. How fucking evil is that?

"There's part of me that says I should divorce you right now and sue you for fraud. But what would be the point? I ruin the kids' lives like you ruined mine? They don't deserve that anymore than I did.

"No, there's no making it up, Alli. I mean, even if we divorced right now, and you gave me 100% of what we own and full custody of the kids, I'd still have to hold Travis together when he learned what you did, and --"

"Why?! Why do we need to tell him? He could go his whole life and never learn that..." She sighed. "He loves you so much. You say that he's not your son, but you are absolutely his father. Why would you take that away from him?"

My fists clenched and unclenched. "I didn't take a goddamned thing away from him, Alli. You did, just like you took him from me."

Alli looked at me imploringly. "I know that, and I'm so sorry that I hurt you like that. But why hurt him?"

"Are you serious? You think that's why I'd tell him? To hurt him, or even to hurt you?" I shook my head in disgust. "God, if you do... just, honestly, I don't know what to say."

"Then why?"

"Because he needs to know, Alli. Not because of my pride or ego or whatever, but because..." God, I'd only known he wasn't my son for a week, and who his father was for two days. How could she possibly have not thought this through? But maybe that's how she did manage to lie to me, by thinking about the consequences of what she'd done as little as possible.

Closing my eyes and rubbing my forehead with one hand, I said, "Think, Alli. Think. His father died of cancer in his twenties. Who knows what else is in his family tree, in terms of his medical history? Parkinsons? MS? What else? At the very least, he needs to get genetic testing to find out what he's at risk for, and what he might put his kids at risk for."

She started to raise an objection, but I ignored her. "Yes, we could do that anyways, without need for a paternity check. Did do it, actually; I had all three of the kids tested to see if they were mine. Oh, spare me the hurt look."

"But even with that, every time I look it turns out something new has a genetic component. He needs to be able to give a family history, which he can't right now. Or, rather, he can, but it's going to be wrong. So for health reasons alone, he needs to know eventually.

"And then beyond that, there's Jake's mom. She abandoned him, right? When he was pretty young?"

"Yeah. Five."

"So, she was pretty young, too. What do you think the odds are that she remarried? That she has kids out there? Grandkids? Ever heard of 'genetic sexual attraction,' how family members can be intensely attracted to each other if they don't know that they're related, like, say, if they're the bastard child of an abandoned son? What happens when he runs into a girl at college that--"

Alli scoffed, "Oh come on! How likely is that?"

With a shrug, I admitted, "Not very. But possible. And I'll tell you what is likely: a few years down the road, he gets curious, or his wife does, or one of our other kids does, and he decides to get one of those genetic ancestry kits. Hey, maybe he gets one for Julie and Megan, too. What then? Do you want him to be surprised like I was? To feel betrayed and lied to by both of us?

"Or what if it doesn't happen in a couple of years? What if it's in forty years, after you and I are dead and he wants to learn more about his family? Maybe find out about his dead grandpa and grandma that he never got to meet, and he learns that I'm not his father then? So he's left wondering--"

"I get it! I get it!" She sighed, "I just didn't... I hoped it would never come up. I don't know. It's not... I did my best to not think about this. To me... to me, he was your son, even if... regardless of what I had done."

I sighed again, already exhausted at nine in the morning. I didn't want to explain all of this to her. I shouldn't have to clean up a mess she'd made. Because of her irresponsibility, I had to not just get through my pain but prevent her son's, too.

"But he's not my son. And that's got repercussions beyond what happens to you and me when the kids are in college. Even beyond the heartbreak the kids are going to have at us splitting up."

Alli sat quietly for a while, head bowed. When she looked back up, her eyes were wet. Quietly, she said, "I know you think there's no hope for us, Luke. But I'm going to do everything I can to show you that I love you and that you can trust me. I will do anything to find a way back to us. I made a horrible mistake, and I lied about it because I didn't see another way out. But you know everything now, and I'm going to--"

"Save it." I stood up. "I know exactly three things right now: I have two daughters that are mine, I love my kids, and there's not a chance in hell things will ever be the same between us. I have to assume anything else I thought I knew is a lie." And with that, I left for the rest of the day.

I drove again for a while, but eventually my thoughts were too much of a distraction. For lunch, I stopped at a diner and ended up staying there for hours; the waitress got a very, very nice tip. Plans for my future twisted in amongst recollections of the past, now newly illuminated in the sickly light of Alli's confession.

My brother's actions and attitudes towards me over the last decade and a half suddenly made a lot more sense. Evan wasn't just being a dick: he was laughing at me behind my back. I needed to have an in-person chat with that asshole, but it would have to wait. He was three states away, I had to work, and he was still such a testosterone-addled manchild that the chance of us, two grown-ass men, coming to blows was pretty damn near one hundred percent. Either he'd take a swing at me, or he'd needle me until I took one at him, and I needed to be ready for that. But there would be a reckoning, one way or another.

My last meeting with Jake pushed its way to the fore next. To be more specific, something he said finally made sense. I remembered him affectionately patting my hand and saying, "Thank you for taking care of her. Of them." At the time, I thought it was merely odd phrasing, possibly due to the pain meds, but knowing what I knew now-- or at least what Alli had told me, assuming it was true-- he didn't mean "Alli and your family," or at least not primarily. He meant "Alli and my unborn child."

But there was no malice in his eyes, no air of either superiority or of guilt. He really thought that we were okay. On one level that pissed me off; we most definitely were not. On another, he was a dying man who thought I'd let him have a chance at his last wish. Part of me hated him, but not as much as I thought, and it was relatively easy for me to push that anger aside. He was dead and gone, beyond any judgment I could mete out.

No, my rancor was reserved for my loving wife. "Loving." That's what hurt worst of all: I still loved her, or at least the person I had believed she was. I wanted to believe that she loved me, that she had made a horrible mistake that she kept compounding with lies until it finally blew up in her face. But I didn't know if that was true, and I could never know. No matter what happened in our future, for however long we were together before Megan left home, I would never know. And that made me doubt everything she had ever told me, up to and including her confession.

"Trust but verify" goes the adage. But I didn't trust. I couldn't verify. Jake was dead, and he had no living relatives that I could contact for a DNA sample. Maybe the story about Jake was bullshit, and Alli had fucked some stranger; what she told me made a perverse sort of sense, and all of the pieces fit, but she'd had sixteen years to come up with a convincing lie. Even if she was telling the truth, I couldn't really know. I'd never know.

I could talk to Alli's psychologist, but I had no idea what the ethics were on lying for a former patient, or even if Dr. Brandt would stick to those ethics; they were just guidelines, after all. I knew that her first loyalty would be, or at least should be, to the health and safety of her patient. Evan probably knew at least part of the truth, but he was enough of a dick to lie just because he thought it would be fun to tie me up in knots.

No, there was no way to verify, and given that my wife lied to me with a straight face for so long, no reason to trust. I had to plan for a future by and for myself. For my kids, too, of course, but I had no idea how all of that was going to shake out; yeah, the girls were closer to me and Travis was closer to his mom, but who knew how that would shift over the seven years before Megan turned eighteen?

As adolescence hit, would Megan suddenly turn to Alli for discussions that only a mother and daughter could have, and would that destroy my bond with my youngest? Would Julie find someone to love and marry, then decide that what Alli had done was wrong but acceptable in the interests of keeping a family together? Hell, would Travis suddenly hate me when he learned the reason we'd always been so different? Or would he hate his mom for lying to all of us? Or would it be both, and he'd turn his back on his family?

No, I couldn't plan that far out. I would show all of my kids I loved them, and I would be there for them in every way that I could. But I needed to start separating my life from Alli's. The bank account would be the first step, but it would be far from the last. With cup after cup of cheap coffee, I added to my to-do list, action items that would bring me closer to a life independent of the one person I'd once promised to devote the rest of my life to. The one who had failed to hold herself to that promise long ago.

When I finally arrived home, Alli had cleaned up. My wife looked less haggard, but no less unhappy. When she tried to talk, I just shut her down; I'd need to practice civility and even false warmth with her, but we had another day before we were supposed to pick the kids up. I wanted to wallow a little longer. Let her twist in the wind just a bit more.

When I headed for bed that night, she followed along but then waited in the doorway, like a vampire waiting for an invitation. After regarding her like a particularly bothersome insect for a time, I nodded, then turned to get ready for bed. Her smile was hopeful, but I dashed that hope pretty quickly, turning away from her in bed without a word, much less a kiss. I drifted off to the sounds of my wife quietly crying.

Breakfast the next day was pleasant enough; she had cooked again, and I ate in silence. There was tension, but I was able to get through it without glaring and she without cringing. Baby steps. When it was done, I thanked her, and she acted as though I'd given her the highest praise possible. That was when I put my hand up. "Stop."

"What?"

I sighed. "I'm going to help you keep your secret for a while longer. We'll live in this... charade of a marriage for as long as necessary to keep our kids safe and happy." She frowned but stayed silent. "But that's not going to work if you can't keep bullshitting at least as well as you did before I found out your dirty little secret. None of this over-the-top fawning nonsense. Do you understand?"

Alli bowed her head. "I'm sorry. I just... I already miss us. Miss what we were like before you knew, and I just..." She looked up at me, sadness etched on her face. "I just... I meant what I said. I'll do anything to get us back. Anything."

With a shrug, I said, "I don't see how you could. But this? The 'I'm not worthy' crap? I don't believe it, and it pisses me off. And what's more, the kids are going to realize something is wrong. The only reason I'm willing to even try to stay together is for them, but this bullshit? They're going to twig to the fact that something is off, and that it's something that you did, real damned quick. So knock it off."

Nodding, she said, "Okay. Okay." Then, quietly, "Thank you."

"Whatever. I'm not doing it for you." Then I smiled, as if nothing had ever been wrong at all and said, "What do you have planned for the rest of the day?"

We playacted for a while. Not in a rehearsed or planned sort of way, but merely me pretending that she hadn't stabbed me in the heart and her pretending that she didn't feel deep shame for her actions. Well, I was pretending. Maybe her guilty expressions and crying were the pretense; how the fuck would I know?

By the time we picked the kids up, we didn't seem normal, but we also didn't seem wholly abnormal, either. Travis seemed to sense something was up. He was already on edge from how I'd acted during the week previous, so that wasn't a huge surprise. But when we got home and I gave Alli a toe-curling kiss to the sounds of gagging by our youngest, I was confident that we could keep up the illusion as much as was necessary.

Practice makes perfect, as they say. By the end of that first month, only the keenest-eyed observer would notice the occasional hateful glare or despondent gaze passing between us. The kids were off in their own worlds, as kids are. A little reinforcement of the "love" the kids' mother and I felt for each other in the form of cringe-inducing PDA headed off any doubts with them.

In the bedroom, things were beyond chilly. Alli tried to initiate a few days after the kids came home, and I told her to fuck off, using those exact words. It may have seemed petty and silly, like I was cutting my nose off to spite my face, but I was in the mindset that I didn't trust her at all. I wasn't rejecting her because of her one drunken, depressed moment of madness; I was rejecting her for all of the other moments that might have followed, up to and including ones that could have happened that very day while we were separated during working hours. Rational? Maybe not. But not wholly irrational, either.

Finally, though, I couldn't hold out any more. I had needs, ones which had been unattended to for almost a month by the time I broke. But, as with many things in the following months and years, my plans and hers for how to deal with my needs diverged.

One night, Allison tried to spoon against my back and reach around to touch me. I had rebuffed her numerous times, even as her advances had more and more effect on me. But that night, I didn't stop her. Alli quietly moaned in my ear, "God, you're so hard," as she stroked my cock through my shorts. "Please let me take care of you. I just want to make you feel good."

There was a brief thought of swatting her hand away with the usual acid reply. Instead, I surprised her by wordlessly pushing my shorts down. Allison was thrilled at this, kissing the back of my neck while firmly gripping my dick and sliding her hand up and down the shaft in long strokes. I reached behind me and slid my fingers inside her panties to find her wet and ready, certainly ready enough for what I had planned.