Reading Between the Lines

I realize I am shaking as I do this.  The game is on the line. God only knows what I'll find and I am dreading that I will find a lot that I don't like.

I open the damn iPad and go onto Facebook.  I can not believe how easy this is. Our mothers had to wait for their men to take a shower and then go through their pants pockets and wallets looking for receipts for dinners that they had not been invited to or notes scribbled on hotel stationary or business cards with private numbers scrawled on the back in swirly girly writing.  Maybe a telltale earring in a pocket that had somehow remained on the seat of the car and had to be dealt with.  All I have to do is touch a screen. What a game changer.

So I look at each string of messages. Carefully. Thoroughly. Even the ones from the guys.  God knows when I will find some confessional note about two-timing me with the boss's daughter.

Most of it is only modestly troubling.

I could have lived without the sappy notes between the NFL chick.  Not really a threat because she lives on the other coast, but I can see that he reached out to her first.  And with a message intended to stir up so me warm memories. Very clever.

But the UPS chippy who looked like 10 miles of bad road was an interesting exchange. He'd friended her after having bumped into her on her delivery route making a delivery to a house where he was replacing sprinkler heads. (This crap doesn't happen to white collar people, ya know.) 

Not something I would have wanted to see but nothing too flirtatious. Until the second to the last entry, the last entry having been sent that morning. Evidently, (thank God these things are time and date stamped) while I was out with Scott the night before, having a beer and some appetizers and watching hockey while our kids attended a movie next door, he sent her a message.

Probably while he was again, in the loo. And again, while I thought he was having a perfectly nice time with me. He seemed to be. 

But he was off pretending to her that he was doing something else. Some dirt biking type activity. (God knows why she'd find that attractive.) But he was clearly pretending to a) be someone else and B) be with someone else.  WHY????

The intrusive nut he'd said he'd unfriended was still nutty but not necessarily trying to ensnare him in her little web of crazy.  She even asked about me.  She asked if we were married. 

And that is where it got nasty.  In his reply.

He said something along the lines of "What???? No effin' way!  Not a chance!"

Funny, since we'd already had that discussion and there was nothing "no effin' way" about the matter.

And way down at the bottom was the nail in the coffin of my trust. 

Scrolling, scrolling scrolling all the way back to the beginning I found a string of messages with a girl I'd been on the Drill Team with. 

And he'd again been the one to approach her.  And it was not pretty.