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Mary
I stroll through the hardware store wondering if it would be easier, or less messy anyway, to revert to my original plan. While the idea of using a blunt instrument seems more satisfying, he’s made me watch enough of those stupid criminal investigation shows for me to know that they’ll come looking at me first. Even as a tiny, 5’2 woman, I’ll be suspect. It won’t help that Hudson has a record years and years long of flirting and likely sleeping with other women. While I’ve never overly caught him, he isn’t exactly discreet. Neither is Barbara, his secretary. The bitch couldn’t lie her way out of bubble wrap. Mistress Death could do us all a favor and come for her first.
I consider calling her, just to put him on edge. While he’s probably off having the time of his life with his mistress, Katherine Big Tits, I know him well enough to know he won’t be able to get it up if he thinks I’m on to him. Most times, when I’m sure he’s with her, I blow Barbara up with one emergency after another. I’ve lost count of the pipes I’ve broken or the myriad of other things ‘I need him to fix now’ since his relationship with that twat picked up. That was then. This is now. I’m over it. Today, I need to focus. Wasting my time fighting a battle in a war I’ll inevitably win isn’t worth it. Mistress Death can let him and his shit secretary out of her grips for the afternoon. I have work to do. In the end? She’ll be off of our marriage and calling for him, or, better, his bitch.
I stop in the aisle with long-handled tools. Meant for yardwork or splitting wood, I run my hand along the wooden and sometimes fiberglass or steel handles of one ax upon the next. Settling on a medium-sized one, I reach for it and am surprised by its weight. It’s lighter than I’d think it would be and could do the trick. I don’t want anything too heavy. Unlike my husband’s mistress, who appears to have an extreme case of IBS and could lay off the cupcakes she’s always posting on Instagram, I’m not a big woman. While my arms are strong and legs have proven to carry me through marathons, I also know my limits.
Standing in the middle of the aisle with an ax in my hand, I close my eyes and visualize bringing it down three times in swift cuts of air to my husband’s skull. In three whacks—for present, future and past—all of this could be over. But I don’t exactly own a wood chipper and trying to get Hudson to believe I was finally up for a camping trip wouldn’t be easy. It would just be too messy. What would Ingrid do? I don’t exactly have a time machine.
Sighing, I put the ax back and decide to head over to the paint section. From what I’ve read on the internet, epoxies can be quite toxic. God, how I don’t want to settle for a chemical death. But, in the end, I remind myself, I’ll still have the opportunity to dispose of him. That alone will be fulfilling... It was the best part for Ingrid.
Three hours later
‘Kate’ apparently prefers to go by ‘Kat,’ at least to her family and friends. It is not lost on me that Hudson isn’t on her friends list under his real name. Rivers. What an idiot. With every one of her social media pages bookmarked on a browser Hudson would never think to check, it isn’t like this is the first time I’ve checked up on her. Only, in times before, I haven’t allowed myself to look too close. But now, with nothing to lose and a pretty good idea of how I’ll help Mistress Death destroy Hudson, I allow curiosity to get the best of me. Even Ingrid would approve.
She’s younger than me by a lot. This, of course, comes as no shock. What might have dropped my jaw was if my husband had been more original. Instead, he’d gone ahead and picked himself the quintessential blue-eyed blonde. Zooming in, I do my best to see signs of age. Yet, even without filters on, I can’t see much more than a make-up line that tells me Kate’s too into bronzer. She can’t be a day over twenty-five. Shaking my head, I move through her pictures, looking for any trace of him. There’s nothing.
From a reunion with her state college sorority—no date given—to what appears to be a year or two on a roller derby team where her name was ‘Killer Kat,’ the only men on her pages seem to be her brother and father. Sighing, I click out of Facebook and head to Instagram. Christ, the next thing I know, I’ll be building myself a Snapchat account to catch a glimpse of him in the act. But Hudson, for as careless as he is, is not dumb either. It’s not just me he has to worry about. It’s the partners too. They wouldn’t look fondly on their top financial advisor messing around; too straight-laced. Brown would kill him before I got to.
I laugh, remembering the time his company’s owner, Brown, tried to convert Husdon to Mormonism. Hudson had spent three months trying to debate Bible verse against The Book of Mormon before Brown finally let it go; but only after informing my husband his soul was damned to hell. He’d been afraid to ask for a raise for six months after that and had been turned down when he finally got the balls. Now, it was funny – a taste of the karma that was coming his way.
Six photos deep into ‘Kat’s’ Instagram account, everything changes. What began as a routine but general information-seeking quest becomes the final nail in the pine box Hudson might be lucky enough to soon call a coffin if I don’t throw him in the Hudson River myself. There, in a baby blue blouse with her hands pressed against her stomach—fingers in the shape of a heart—she is. She’s pregnant. It’s not IBS. She isn’t even fat. And while the man standing next to her is cropped out, his hand isn’t.
No ring.
I’d recognize it anywhere. I was the one who got the call the day Hudson got in the accident that nearly took his thumb off. It had been me who’d fought with the occupational and physical therapists to extend his rehab to restore full function. I’d know that scar anywhere – I had it committed to memory. Unable to zoom, I take a screen shot of the picture that will now, for sure, be the catapult to what sends my husband to his early grave. From my photos, I am able to zoom in. Sure enough, it’s most definitely the scar I have memorized. She’s pregnant. By my husband.
I throw the phone across the room, watching it skitter along the plush carpet Hudson insisted upon when I preferred hardwood. Any day, he’d come to tell me he wanted a divorce. In under nine months—it might take that long because Hudson was a coward—he’d serve me with paperwork. A baby would be enough to give him temporary balls.
He’d begged for a child for years. Since meeting him, he’d talk here and there about wanting a big family. I’d been honest with him. I’d told him I wasn’t cut out for it. From a broken home with no full blood siblings, I had no interest in the types of inconveniences that came along with children and family events. He knew that when he married me. Yet, he’d nagged anyway – likely hoping to change my mind. The idea that ‘Kat’ would give it to him made my blood hot and, for a second, considering the idea of throwing my pills out. But I’m not that desperate, I tell myself, moving to the kitchen junk drawer for a pad of paper.
While my husband and his apparent past, present and future whore spent the afternoon playing house, I needed to get on with business of my own. I begin taking notes. A list of options will help me figure this out. While I could call a lawyer, it would serve as part of a paper trail that would put suspicion on me. Instead, in big, black letters, I write the words ‘Renew Our Vows.’ That will get him. When he goes missing, instead of being the bitter soon-to-be divorcee, I’ll be the forlorn widow.