This one is a fictionalized account of how my parents met, wed, and....well, you'll find out.
I still wonder why I changed my mother's name. (I have changed it back to her real name, the time for secrets is long over.)


INFIDELITY


Alma loved her husband Buddy more than anything in her world. The first time he came sweeping boldly up to the big porch at Mama’s house where she sat awaiting adventure, she was thirteen years old. Buddy was three years older.

“Hey, little girl, what’s your name?” he’d said.

She’d crossed her skinny ankles, dirty white socks drooping down towards her scuffed black Mary Jane shoes and pretended to be shy. It wasn’t easy for her to be so still and quiet with the shivers of excitement racing up and down her spine. She couldn’t look up because then she’d see his eyes. Was there anything in the world to match that blue?

She’d felt those eyes on her for weeks. Once while walking to the store, hand in hand with Mama, he’d been slouching against a palm tree, his feet out into the sidewalk so they’d had to walk around him. “Mornin’,” he’d said, pushing the brim of his hat back with his thumb. His soft southern accent drew the word out like an invitation. She’d looked up into his face, but it wasn’t his white teeth or the shock of blond hair on his forehead that had captured her. It was those eyes.

Since that day Alma had felt that a thin silk thread connected them. It grew thicker and stronger each time she peeked out from behind her long black hair at him. She could feel it from the playground, from behind the Eucalyptus tree in the front yard. She wanted what was in his eyes.

And three years later, they’d married. Mama was against it, she’d shouted that Alma was too young and Buddy was too old. But Alma turned to her Papa, letting her tears fall on his shirt and touching his hand, whispering to him, “Please Papa, I want him so much.” Papa clenched his pipe in his teeth and glanced at the young man waiting on the porch. He looked at Mama and said, “There are ten years between you and I Mama, the age will make no difference. They may wed.”

Alma and Buddy had a year of love and lust before the war took him away and left her pregnant. For two years she ached for him, her only solace her small daughter and the thin blue paper of his letters. When he returned from the war she clung to him, greedy for the feel of his body and the touch of his eyes, both of which he gave her until the baby would cry or dinner had to be cooked.

But it wasn’t the same.

She wanted to believe what the papers said, that time would heal the wounds of the war for everyone. She tried to believe it was the war that had changed them. But what she saw was this; her husbands eyes were no longer solely on her, they lingered too much on the child.

She pushed her jealousy down with both hands telling her self that it was only natural for a father to adore his beautiful girl.

And until that day that she opened the bathroom door and caught him she made herself believe it. Not only his eyes but his hands and mouth were on the child, their child. She stood in the doorway for an instant too long before she screamed in revulsion and lunged to snatch her daughter out of his arms. But in that instant of animal jealousy Alma made a selfish choice that would haunt them all their lives.

For no matter what he did, she knew that she would never leave him. Nothing could make her give him up.

No matter what.