BACKSTORY: Two of my favorite things in the world are Johnny Cash and basketball. Living in California, about halfway between San Francisco and Wine Country, I played hoops with a bunch of guys three mornings a week at a local gym. Pulling into the parking lot one day at about 5:30 A.M., I saw a woman sitting in her car in the space next to me. Two seconds later, a young guy in a sports car pulled up. She jumped into his car, leaving hers behind, and they sped off, obviously not going inside for a workout. My internal writer’s alarm went off—who were they and why did they meet so secretly? The scene immediately reminded me of a modern day Johnny Cash song, like “The Sound of Laughter” or an updated “Long Black Veil.” That morning while working up a sweat on the court, the following story developed. Over the years, I could never get the scene out of my head. The resulting story blends together a lot of what I had seen and heard during the boom years of dot.com mania with this clandestine meeting on a cold, drizzling Northern California morning.
JACK AND CHLOE TURNED THEIR ONE-TIME affair into a routine. It was simple.
Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday at about 5:35 in the morning they met at the Novato Fitness Center. Chloe parked her shiny red convertible, the one with the V-8 that her husband insisted she have—you know, just in case she needed to go zero to sixty in less than six seconds—and climbed into Jack’s midnight blue sedan, the heater blasting hot air at her passenger side seat, just like she liked it. From there, they drove the six-tenths of a mile to his apartment. Well, you know the rest.
About an hour later, give or take a handful of minutes, they pulled back into the parking lot, surveyed the occasional sweaty soccer mom leaving the gym in a heap of soiled terrycloth, and disengaged.
No one seemed to look twice and certainly no one cared. Or so it seemed.
Frank, Chloe’s dupe—err . . . husband—sleeping soundly in their pretty little home in their pretty little cul-de-sac no more than three miles away, had a recurring nightmare, the same one that haunted him for the last several years. The dream returned whenever Frank felt the chaotic strain of stress pull on his senses due to the enormous pressure he placed on himself.
The adult Frank—the one with the $3,500 mortgage payment and the sixty-five-hour-a-week job writing speeches for alternatively glamorous or vilified high-tech CEOs (often depending on that week’s stock market intrigues)—suddenly found himself back on campus, a blotchy, much older version of the dapper young achiever he had been at the University of Pittsburgh. Smack dab in the middle of Benedum Hall, the school’s largest auditorium, Frank walked in to discover that the final was about to take place and he didn’t even know what class it was, though he vaguely thought it might be something math-related.
Frank’s initial panic intensified as he looked around and saw all the smiling faces of the young frat rats in hooded sweatshirts and dirty baseball hats who didn’t seem the least bit worried about the impending exam. On his left, a cadre of geekier kids pored over loose-leaf notebook pages and traded monosyllabic grunts. Not only did his newfound peers look prepared, they were confident.
Suddenly, it dawned on him, without passing this particular exam, Frank wouldn’t graduate with his class and would have to fork over another couple grand to pay for a summer-school course. A dull thud at the base of Frank’s skull let him know that this wasn’t going to be pleasant.
The professor entered the cavernous room. A flurry of activity ensued, students grabbing for bluebooks and checking and re-checking their pens. Frank sat there stupefied, but did recognize the prof—a German classicist and star recruit brought in from Harvard to beef up the Philosophy Department. A hush fell over the auditorium.
“For those of you who studied, this exam will be a breeze,” the professor gushed with a heavy guttural-laden accent. “Outline the first twenty-three chapters of the Iliad, providing three plot points for each and a one sentence overview.”
Then, with a thin smile, “Begin now.”
Beating himself up for not studying, and furthermore, never even showing up to this class for an entire semester, Frank stewed silently, wondering where he had left his bluebook and if someone would let him borrow a pencil.
Jack had a goofy smile and seemed kind of aloof. In fact, when Chloe first saw him (eight months earlier when she was hired as a senior consultant at Venture Consulting), he had his back to her.
That day, Ellen, Chloe’s new boss, led her around the floor on an initial meet-and-greet tour. They stopped at the entrance to each cube, where Ellen delivered a few quick bullets of information about Chloe to each of her new “teammates.” A whirlwind of faces and forgotten names ended back in the bullpen area where Ellen’s immediate team occupied eight or ten spaces.
“That’s Jack,” Ellen said, pointing in the direction of the lone male in the bullpen who sat with his back facing them. No one could see what he was doing and his wide shoulders blocked out the laptop in front of him, but the sound of tapping keys gave him away.
“Don’t mind him, he’s in the middle of a big, ultra hush-hush project,” Ellen told Chloe. Then, loudly clearing her throat, “Jack, meet our new teammate, Chloe.”
He barely turned, kind of giving her a quick wave over his shoulder. Chloe’s first impression was that this guy was cute, but had the personality of a cucumber.
A few hours later, she was at her welcome-to-the-company lunch out with Ellen—a late forties, kind of librarian-looking woman, but jazzed up in expensive suits—and the team of smart, Gen X women she put together. She listened to them dish on Jack and detail flirtatious interactions with him in the lunchroom or in the couple minutes preceding team meetings. Ellen simply “loved” Jack, thought he was gorgeous, and liked a little male eye candy in the overly female office.
After the initial burst of gossip and storytelling ended, Ellen took center stage again and gingerly scanned the room to see if anyone else from Venture was there. In hushed tones, she drew the group in and let them in on a secret.
“Keep this quiet,” she said, “but I found out that Jack was married several years ago, right after graduate school, but his wife left him after a year.”
“No way” was the general consensus among the shocked women. At least one let out an audible gasp.
“Supposedly, one day she just hit him with a bombshell, announcing that she considered this her starter marriage, and she was running off to live with an old boyfriend from college,” Ellen continued. “Jack was devastated and basically dropped off the face of the earth for a while.”
Chloe wondered what a starter marriage was, but didn’t want her boss of only about six hours to think she wasn’t hip. Luckily, one of the others asked.
“You’re asking me? Isn’t that the trend among you and your age group—to try out a marriage for a year or so, then divorce if it doesn’t seem to work?” the boss answered.
“Sounds like another ridiculous Hollywood influence that has filtered down to the masses,” Chloe said, after pondering whether to chime in for a number of seconds. A roar of laughter and Ellen’s broad smile told Chloe that she was going to fit in fine with this group.
“Well, whether it’s a passing fad or another nail in the coffin of Western civilization, it nearly killed Jack, the poor baby, he needs a whole lot of TLC,” Ellen said. Another round of laughter ensued.
Frank’s main speechwriting gig was for Tony Montaro. Montaro made billions of dollars by writing a little piece of software that attached itself to e-mail and served as a kind of certified mail for the electronic age. All of a sudden, no one had to wonder whether an e-mail was received or not. When the message hit the receiver’s inbox, another little message zapped through cyberspace, letting the sender know it landed.
Starting a grassroots marketing campaign by giving the product away to a couple hundred people, then watching it spread to thousands, then tens of thousands of others, Montaro landed on the cover of Fortune magazine and a writer profiled him for The Wall Street Journal. Corporate America gobbled it up, virtually revolutionizing human resources. A year or so later, Montaro took the company public, cashing in a small percentage of the millions of shares he held.
Frank met Montaro at a software industry function, introduced by another founder/CEO tech guy, who proclaimed that Frank’s handiwork with speeches “could turn a monkey into a guru, if he could get the damn thing into a three-piece tux.” The software mogul and the plain-spoken kid from hardscrabble Western Pennsylvania bonded almost instantly despite the twenty or so years that separated them.
Slugging down whiskey and waters, the main topic of conversation was a big heavyweight bout the older man recently attended (the once-unbeatable Mike Tyson got the crap kicked out of him by some unknown British slugger in four rounds). Shortly thereafter, the topic turned to fighting in general. Montaro, despite the almost universal past all these guys shared as computer geeks and engineering nerds, viewed himself as kind of a tough guy. There were whispers around Silicon Valley about Montaro’s infamous sparring sessions with world-class fighters from all over the world. Over time, this persona increased exponentially—in direct correlation with his net worth.
Frank shared his stories about the brawls he witnessed and participated in as a college student, which seemed to get more dramatic as time passed. However much exaggeration took place though, the scar across Frank’s nose from his last battle—on the losing end of a broken beer bottle, pushing the tuft of skin all the way under his right eye until he reached up and re-jiggered it back into place—lent credibility to the younger man’s tales.
“The blood spurted straight out at a high arc about two feet in the air,” Frank explained, while Montaro laughed. “I couldn’t see very well and every time I turned my head, all these people standing around got sprayed. The girls were flipping out as blood sprayed on them.”
“Then, you just reached up and pushed what was left of your nose back in place?” Montaro asked.
“Yep, luckily, I was just drunk enough to numb the pain,” Frank said.
Montaro hired trainers to craft his aging muscles and chefs to painstakingly plan his caloric intake to support the weight work. In the gym, he dabbled in a number of martial arts and trained in Brazilian grappling, where one uses an opponent’s aggression as a weapon to defeat him—usually by breaking a wrist or popping a shoulder out of socket. Montaro also hired a small team of bodyguards, particularly after a handful of threatening, anonymous letters showed up at his private office overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.
None of the men employed to protect Montaro were criminals, but one could say that each had a slightly checkered past. Through Montaro, Frank met Steve Mogar, the defacto leader of the protection team, a former Special Forces grunt who wasn’t quite sure what to do now that he was deprogrammed. It was through one of Steve’s backdoor connections (which they didn’t discuss in detail) that Frank got the gun.
Venture Consulting occupied the top three floors of the Bank of America Tower in San Francisco’s Financial District. The company spared no expense to impress its big-time software clients, particularly when they visited the offices for day-long brainstorming sessions.
As project leader for the KnowledgeBase account team, Chloe orchestrated every detail, right down to which muffins and pastries would be on the breakfast trays that lined one long row of desks in their large conference room looking out over the Golden Gate and north into Marin County. Alcatraz was just a dot below, but that always gave their business partners something to talk about at the various breaks in the day’s schedule. Chloe also prepared Ellen for the client’s arrival, writing out her “talking points” and delivering gossipy tidbits on the ranking execs from KnowledgeBase.
Getting a call from reception, Chloe got word that the client was running late, thus the meeting would begin about half an hour behind. As she turned to tell Ellen, both women looked up as Jack walked into the room, carrying his laptop and precariously balancing a giant coffee mug on the keyboard.
“Chloe, I’ve asked Jack to sit in for at least half the day,” Ellen said, quickly switching from her chatty voice to that of stern female executive. “We’ll need his expertise on database taxonomy.”
“Looking forward to it,” Jack said, smiling, and gave Chloe a little wink. “The meeting . . . and the free breakfast.” He took a seat at the opposite corner from Ellen and plugged his laptop into the network connectors running up from holes in the dark brown boardroom table.
Jack looked at the printed nametags on each side of his seat and saw that Chloe would be in the next space over. A last-minute addition to the meeting, he’d have the unceremonious duty of wearing a handwritten one. The people from KnowledgeBase would probably figure that he was some kind of intern or low-ranking grunt.
With time to spare before the client arrived, Chloe sat down next to Jack, wondering how she would put up with such a boring task for an entire day. She secretly nicknamed him “Mr. Cucumber” for his bland personality and wondered how such a great-looking guy could be so utterly devoid.
She peeled the paper off an oversized blueberry muffin and pulled a chunk of the top off. Chloe smelled its sweet, sugary aroma and felt her stomach gurgle a little. My nerves must be getting the best of me, she thought. Then, Chloe turned slightly away from Jack, slowly enough that he wouldn’t notice, and washed the first bite down with coffee.
“Damn, I dread these meetings,” Jack said both to Chloe and no one in general. “But, with you running it, I know it will at least be somewhat productive.” He smiled and averted his eyes.
“Thanks. . . . I think,” Chloe said.
She feared getting pulled into a conversation with Jack and started scanning the agenda in front of her, hoping that some detail would jump out and force her to attend to it. She spun a little more, hoping he would get the hint. Other members of the team started filing into the room, including several of Ellen’s fellow managers.
Standing, Chloe smiled at each person and motioned them to the pastry tray and coffee. Out of the corner of her eye, she sensed Jack fiddling with something, but didn’t want to look down, in case he saw her. When she sat back down, Chloe felt something on her leg, just a couple inches above her knee. Quickly turning to Jack, he moved his index finger to his lips, giving her the universal quiet sign.
Chloe looked at her pant leg and saw that Jack had affixed a sticker there. It read, “Property of ______” and where the blank was, Jack filled in his initials, “JD.” It must have been a shipping sticker from the desk.
“Now you’re mine,” Jack whispered.
Just then, Bill Nesbitt, Chloe’s counterpart on the client team, walked into the conference room and waved to Ellen. As Chloe rose to greet him, she forgot about the sticker for a second and it stuck there on her leg. Then, remembering, she reached down as discreetly as possible, pulled it off, and stuck it on her laptop, below the keyboard.
After exchanging pleasantries, Chloe sat down and looked at Jack. “That’s our little secret,” he said, pointing to the sticker. “You can keep that as long as you want.”
For the first time, Chloe’s heart melted as she looked into Jack’s green eyes and watched him transform from bland to beautiful. She sipped at her coffee in hopes of clearing the giant lump in her throat and silently prayed that no one would call on her to clarify anything for a few minutes.
Under the table, out of reach of the office’s prying eyes, his knee brushed hers. Chloe moved it so that they would continue touching. The fire in her chest burned.
Frank soon found himself in Montaro’s inner circle, surrounded by a posse of moneygrubbers that he liked to call cling-ons. The boss’s secretary called to request his services and Frank loaded up his laptop, tape recorder, and notepads and raced to Montaro’s personal compound nestled in the hills outside San Rafael, about a twenty-minute drive directly north of the city. When he arrived, Frank usually found that it wasn’t a speechwriting gig Montaro wanted, but to trade stories or work out together in his gym.
Occasionally, Frank and Montaro put on heavy gloves and went at it in the ring. With oversized headgear, the sparing sessions never turned ugly, though pride forced each man to expend what he had. Montaro, lean and ripped, could still wheel and deal in the ring.
Frank found himself slowly getting back into fighting shape and thought that he had better start training on his own if he hoped to keep pace with his most profitable client. Writing gigs like this one don’t come around all that often, Frank thought, especially with the fringe benefits Montaro offered. I’d better start using that gym membership Chloe signed us up for when we moved. He made a mental note to stop by and check out the weightlifting equipment and see if they had any speed bags there.
Frank sat on a long wooden bench outside one of the sparring rings and plunged his left hand deep into a steel bucket filled with water and ice, watching Montaro receive instruction from the guy who coached the U.S. fighters at the 2000 Olympics. The last two knuckles on Frank’s hand ached, despite the extra tape the trainers applied. He busted up his hand in the first real fight he ever had in eighth grade. The class bully called a girl he secretly loved a whore and Frank finally stood up to him. No one knew he had quietly been training for just such an event. The bloodbath that ensued shocked everyone who saw it because Frank thoroughly punished the bully. He won his secret crush’s heart, which played to his budding romantic side. No one messed with him again for years.
Although he enjoyed working out with Montaro, Frank realized that the financial gain from writing speeches for him could potentially change his and Chloe’s lives. Montaro paid well and promised to introduce Frank to his CEO buddies, an ever-growing list, considering that many middle-aged white guys wanted to hang out with Montaro and his hard-charging cronies.
The upside to more work always came back to paying down the mortgage on their house and taking some of the pressure off his wife. Venture Consulting worked her like a dog. They talked about starting a family, but who could afford to in Northern California? Childcare alone would kill them. Despite the pain shooting through the knuckle on his ring finger, Frank smiled at the thought of having children, and the financial gains he made from his new boss that might make that possible.
At the end of his session, Montaro leaned over the ropes, looking at Frank. “How’s that hand holding up, champ?” he asked. “Am I going to have to take it easy on you next time?”
“It’s good, Tony,” Frank said. “The damn thing has been sore so long that I hardly even notice it anymore. I’ll be okay in a day or two.” Montaro laughed, which led to a chorus of catcalls from his workout partners.
Frank pulled his hand out of the icy water, sending a chill up his arm to the base of his skull. Looking down at the pinkish white flesh, Frank shook it a little, wondering if his wedding ring would fit over the swollen digit.
Jack and Chloe started going out to lunch a couple times a week, just to get out of the office and blow off some steam. The attraction was obvious, but neither strayed from within the bounds of office flirtation. At meetings, often during the endless strings of PowerPoint decks filled with tiny, unreadable fonts and brightly colored pie charts, Jack caught Chloe staring at him. When she realized that he returned her gaze, Chloe turned away red-faced.
Their favorite lunch hangout was an old-fashioned diner, remarkably different than most of the places around the Financial District. It specialized in meat and potato kinds of meals, which meant that no one from the office would be caught dead there. Jack and Chloe’s teammates concentrated on carb-friendly establishments, while the older partners went to expensive restaurants where they covertly downed martinis to steel them for the afternoon’s work.
One day over matching plates of fried chicken and mashed potatoes, as they discussed weekend plans or some other totally innocuous subject, Chloe told Jack how impressed she was with his easygoing personality, which stood in such stark contrast to her own. “You know,” she said, brushing her hair back from her face, “that’s one of the things I really love about you.”
Jack’s smile betrayed his emotions. He looked into her eyes. Had she just basically told him that she loved him, he wondered?
“Ugh, I can’t believe I just let that slip out,” Chloe said, her face turning crimson. She put her right hand over her eyes, trying to cover her whole face.
Jack reached across the table and moved her hand away. As she dropped it, he saw the smile on her face and felt waves of warmth cascade over him. He took her hand in his, stammered for a second, and said, “I love you, too, Chloe.”
He knew by the look on her face that life could not get better than it was at that very instant. Chloe was so beautiful that it looked like she had permanent backlighting. For the first time since his wife left, Jack looked forward to something—anything that put him in close proximity to this amazing woman—yet he had never even kissed those perfect pink lips or held her through the night as they slept wrapped together.
The waitress approached. “Can I get you two lovebirds any dessert today?” she asked. They looked at her and giggled; now someone else shared their secret.
“Umm, no thanks,” Jack answered. As she cleared the table, they locked legs underneath—her knees clutched between his own—and held each other’s hands tightly, as if doing so could freeze this moment in time and enable them to stay together forever.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to pick up the edge in Chloe’s voice each night. Frank heard it loud and clear, particularly when she questioned the time he spent at Montaro’s lair and the puffy spots under his eyes from the most recent sparring match.
What does she want from me, Frank wondered, trying to concentrate on the sidewalk ahead. I’m just trying to solidify things for us on the tail of a rich computer geek with a typically oversized ego. When I’m not working enough, she’s unhappy. Now that I have a steady client—a bit on the odd side, but steady, nonetheless—she’s still not satisfied.
He faintly caught the sight of his breath in the chilled morning air. The thin cotton gloves Frank wore to protect his hands from the cold scratched his eyelids and burned a bit as he wiped at the beads of sweat rolling down his forehead.
The first step in his workout plan—if he was going to catch up to Montaro—was to put in a couple miles of roadwork. Frank didn’t pump off jabs, like Sylvester Stallone did in the Rocky movies as he canvassed the streets of South Philly, but he did attempt to visualize various scenarios that he would face in the ring. Chloe, however, kept slipping in and throwing off his concentration.
Slowing just a bit to check his stopwatch securely tied to his left hand, Frank plodded along, being extra careful not to trip on the uneven pavement. He’d never again run the six-minute miles he could nail like clockwork in high school and college, but his time was still respectable. He tugged on his sleeve to keep out the chill and thought about his breathing pattern.
I’ve got so much energy to burn this morning, rather than end the route at home, I’ll duck into the gym and hit the heavy bag for a couple rounds, then jump some rope, Frank thought. He knew the place would be practically empty. Few noble souls dragged themselves out of bed into the pitch darkness to work out. The ones there passed from exercise machine to machine quietly, like ghosts, an occasional nod or faint smile the only thing that proved they weren’t sleepwalking.
Frank retreated into his own dreamlike state, feeling the way his hands molded into the heavy leather covering the punching bag with each syncopated thud. He heard the sound of his breathing, but it seemed filtered through some faraway speakers. Frank bobbed his head, ducking imaginary jabs, and fired successive left hooks into the ribcage of his fake opponent. Sweat pooled on the floor beneath him.
Taking a short breather, Frank drank from a small paper cup and gazed out the thick, dark glass that lined most of the exterior walls. Using his discarded sweatshirt as a towel, he mopped his forehead and neck. Out of the corner of his eye, Frank noticed a car speed into the parking lot, coming to an abrupt stop near the back of the parking lot. He saw a woman emerge from the passenger’s side. She quickly walked around the back of the vehicle and went to the driver’s door, leaning in to give a last kiss.
Her familiarity caught Frank off guard. Is that Chloe? Frank felt a ball well up in his throat and drop like cement into his stomach.
After several long seconds, the two broke apart and the blue car sped away. Then he saw it and couldn’t believe he had practically been looking at it for the last half-hour without noticing. The red Mustang, her dream car, stood there, not more than twenty-five yards away. He watched Chloe climb in, adjust the rearview mirror, than slowly pull away.
Frank swallowed the spit welling up in his mouth through the lump in the back of his throat. He fought off the dizzy ringing in his ears. Frank felt blood pulsing at his temples and inflame the sore patches on his face, left over from the snap of Montaro’s gloves.
In the future, when Frank replayed this moment in his mind, he didn’t even have to visualize it—he could taste it. More importantly, however, he questioned his actions that morning and came to believe that he should have run out into the parking lot and confronted Chloe right then and there. He imagined the yelling match that would have broken out between he and Chloe and the fight with the fucking guy in the car, who wouldn’t have stood a snowball’s chance in hell of keeping Frank from kicking his ass.
The memory that slipped from Frank’s thoughts as time passed was the sensation of utter panic he had felt and the strength it took just to keep standing there, watching his worst nightmare unfold right before his eyes. There really wasn’t time to think in that brief moment or lay out some elaborate plan. Fate, gut instinct, or something akin to blind fear kept Frank cemented to that one spot in the gym. It really made no sense to second-guess himself.
“Do you know who I am?” Frank spit out the question between clenched teeth.
“I have a pretty good idea,” Jack said. “I recognize you from the picture on Chloe’s desk.”
“Don’t say her name again, goddamn it. You have no right to say her name,” Frank said, pushing the barrel of the gun a bit harder into his temple. He was tied down, on his knees, execution-style, completely at Frank’s whim.
It didn’t take much in the way of James Bond moves for Frank to follow the man home after one of his trysts with Chloe, particularly after stumbling upon their meeting place. What surprised Frank was in all that time, weeks really, leading up to this very moment, he never came up with what he considered a good plan.
“What’s your name?” Frank asked. “I want to know the name of the man who’s fucking my wife.”
“Jack,” he replied. His eyes were pinched closed. He bowed his head slightly and slumped his shoulders, like he already knew that the end was near.
“Let’s hear it then, Jack. Why are you sticking your dick in my wife? My wife, get it Jack? My wife. . . .” Frank said, moving the gun away.
“Look, I’m sorry. I . . . I mean we . . . didn’t want this to happen. Please, whatever you want, I’ll never see her again. Just don’t shoot me. It isn’t worth it.”
“Well, this is certainly an interesting turn of events,” Frank said. “This morning you were having sex with another man’s wife, now you’re begging for your life like some little bitch. You don’t deserve to live.”
“If it’s any consolation, know that I love her,” Jack said. “I love Chloe.”
“Well, buddy, I’ve got some bad news for you. Chloe’s dead. My decision now seems to be whether or not to kill you, too.”
Letting the news settle in, Frank stuck the gun into Jack’s cheek, watching tears roll down onto the barrel. Jack fought back sobs.
“Go ahead, pull the trigger. Pull it. I don’t care now.”
Frank moved the gun around and put it directly between Jack’s eyes. “How romantic. How stupidly romantic,” he said.
“Actually, I’m not going to kill you,” Frank calmly stated. “After today, you’ll never see me again, unless you decide to go to the police, then I will put a bullet between your eyes. I’m not going to kill you, because you’ll have to go through the rest of your life knowing that you caused her death. Her blood is on your hands, live with that.”
Placing the gun on the dining room table, Frank picked up the ether-stained rag he had used to knock Jack unconscious and held it firmly over the man’s nose and mouth. He let Jack fight back just a little, as Mogar, the Special Ops vet, instructed him to, knowing that the more Jack struggled, the faster the drug would work. Then the kicking stopped.
Frank cut the ropes binding the man’s hands and feet and put them in a knapsack, along with the rag and gun. He slowly opened the door and looked up and down the hall, seeing no one. He slipped out, and walked briskly to the fire door. A few minutes later, Frank was on the road.
Days later, as daylight crept up on the horizon in front of him, Frank replayed the scenario in his mind, wondering if he should have just pulled the trigger. The question would haunt him forever.
Although they had been married for only five years, Frank and Chloe were together for more than ten. She grew to become his best friend, in addition to his lover and soul mate. Now, all that was gone. He could not imagine life without her, but he could also not conceive of moving ahead with a partner who wasn’t faithful.
As he drove on, headed home to Pennsylvania, the land of his people for generations, Frank wondered what Jack’s first move was once he woke up. Did he call the police? Did he frantically dial Chloe’s cell phone, knowing that there would be no answer and praying against all hope that she would somehow pick up? Frank chuckled and a thin smile formed on his tired face.
Looking back, he could never have killed Chloe, not the woman who meant so much to him for so long. She may have destroyed his dreams, but he wouldn’t take her life. Instead, he simply walked out the door.
The timing couldn’t have worked out better. One of her biggest projects went south that afternoon, forcing her to fly to Tampa last minute in an attempt to salvage the work. Before she left, Chloe darted around the apartment, literally throwing clothes into her suitcase. She mumbled to herself, checking off an invisible list of items in her mind. Chloe barely noticed Frank hovering around, but he tried to stay out of her direct line of sight. The final word Chloe would ever speak to him was a hurried “good-bye,” followed by a peck on the cheek.
Frank waited until the scheduled takeoff time then called her cellphone carrier and cancelled the policy, putting her out of reach for the time being. Then, he packed the few belongings that meant something to him and his laptop and put his plan into action.
Jack’s immediate pain and suffering would be enough. Even if the ruse lasted only for a few hours, Frank realized in that space of time, those hollow moments while he contemplated Chloe’s death, he had gutted the man’s soul.
BOB BATCHELOR is an award-winning writer and historian. He teaches public relations in the School of Mass Communications at the University of South Florida. A noted expert on American popular culture, he is the author or editor of the books: The 1900s (Greenwood Press, 2002), a history of the first decade of the twentieth century from a popular culture perspective; editor of Basketball in America: From the Playgrounds to Jordan’s Game and Beyond (Haworth Press, 2005); co-author of a study on the development of consumer culture and marketing: Kotex, Kleenex, Huggies: Kimberly-Clark and the Consumer Revolution in American Business (The Ohio State University Press, 2004), and co-author of The 1980s (Greenwood Press, 2006). His fiction has appeared in The Pebble Lake Review. Bob has published more than 500 articles and essays in magazines, Web sites, and reference works, including the Dictionary of American istory, Inside Business magazine, and The American Prospect Online. His essays have appeared in newspapers in California, Tennessee, and Delaware. Bob graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with degrees in history, philosophy, and political science. He received an MA in history from Kent State University. He has taught history and nonfiction writing at Cleveland State University and Neumann College. Visit him online at www.bobbatchelor.com.