The Vixen Amber Halloway by Carol LaHines

Author:Carol LaHines
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Published: 2024-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

38

The door clacks. You (she) disappear down the path, never to be heard from again.

It was not enough that you had broken your marriage vows. You had to divest me of my sofa, my breakfast table, my crockery. You had to empty the drawers and pillage the cabinets and lay claim to any and every household item, even the silver-plated candelabra.

I had no sofa to sleep or binge eat on. Only several uncomfortable, straight-back chairs on which it was impossible to slump or to achieve any approximation of comfort. There were scuff marks on the floor where my Oriental carpet had been cruelly ripped up. The china cabinet had been emptied of stemware and plates and the crystal punch bowl, our only wedding gift of note.

Left without an espresso/cappuccino maker, I had to make do with Sanka and a can of Reddi-wip. Viennese Pleasures a poor substitute to the Caribou blend I used to make in my premium Nespresso. I might have made waffles, but the waffle iron was gone, along with the anodized cookware and skillet and any vestige of myself qua wife, qua loving spouse, qua human being.

My life had been depopulated, my house stripped: there was nothing left, nothing that hadn’t been pried apart, ransacked, or mined.

In the pantry, I happened upon one, long-expired can of baked beans. The electric opener gone, I had to pry it open with a rusty manual one. I ate my dinner on a tray you had been kind enough to leave me with, having made off with the kitchen table. I had purchased a screw top vintage at the wine store, or I’d be faced with opening wine without the benefit of a corkscrew. You’d helped himself to that item as well.

Lacking stemware, I decided to swig directly from the bottle. A halfway respectable vintage from the Finger Lakes region. A place where we had also vacationed, looking for antiques and items to populate the house. The house in which I now sat, rigidly upright, watching the television (you had seen fit to leave the flat screen, lacking the patience to unbolt it from the wall).

I watched Snapped. Stories of jilted wives and cuckolded husbands, spouses who had taken the law into their own hands. The particulars were lurid and riveting. The girlfriends young and tawdry. The reenactments crude and poorly acted. Hearing that her husband had taken up with his assistant, an ivory-complected twenty-two-year-old, Mary could no longer go on. She surprised them at the office one day, brandishing a pearl-handled .22. Her husband tried to disarm her, but the bullet went off…

Ophelia was happily married to Andrew. She fell asleep in his arms every night, and every morning made him toast, charred ever so slightly and cut on the diagonal. She waved goodbye when he went on “business trips.” Ever so trusting, ever so in love, she assumed that he was going on sales calls, attending medical conferences. When she attempted to reach him, receiving the message the cellular

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