I was an Easy Target

I have been wondering what happened in Arleen’s life after she and her husband Jacob moved away from Patrick’s town, leaving their monthly sex sessions behind. If you read and enjoyed the first two installments of this story, you may enjoy this return visit. If you haven’t, this won’t make much sense to you, so you might want to go back and read Chapters 1 and 2. BTW – There’s no hot sex in this story.

*****

Patrick resumes his story:

After Connie got me curious about what had happened in Arleen’s life, and I had done a search for her on the Internet, we decided it might be fun to reach out and see if we could re-establish contact – after all, not only had I been servicing her, but Connie and Arleen had become friends. Using on-line White Pages app, I found an address for the woman I believed was my long-ago sex-starved neighbor. I sent a letter:

—

Dear Arleen,

I think you may be an old friend of mine from Mt. Holly. If you are, and if you are interested in reconnecting, please respond to this letter. I gather from tidbits I’ve found online that you remarried and have had children. Of course, if you are not my old friend, please ignore this and excuse the presumption.

Here’s hoping I have found the right person and that you’ll respond…

Patrick and Connie

1234 Memory Lane

Someplace, IL 600XX

—

I also included an e-mail address in case she had become computer-savvy in the years that had passed.

Six days later I received an e-mail from Arleen:

—

OMIGOD PATRICK AND CONNIE! How wonderful to hear from you. Yes, I’m your old friend. You should know that every night my last thought before sleep is how grateful I am for how you two helped me. Might it be possible for us to get together? I have much to tell you and many questions about how your lives have turned out. I also have a couple of kids (well, they’re grown now) that I would love for you to meet. Please let me know how we might meet.

Love, Arleen

She included photos of herself with a handsome man and two children – they looked like twins – and other pictures of them growing older through the years. The last photos with her kids did not include the man.

Connie and I were thrilled to learn that life appeared to have turned out well for Arleen. We had been talking about taking a vacation trip out west, and since Arleen lived in Colorado we decided we’d pack up the camper and go see her. Connie called our children, Max and Mary, and asked them if they would like to join us for a little vacation adventure, camping at Rocky Mountain National Park and also meeting an old friend. They were on board, so we all cleared our schedules and come June we headed west. Our motor home could sleep seven adults, so the kids brought their spouses and we figured the three grandkids could use sleeping bags on the floor. On nice nights we could put up a tent and some of the younger people could sleep under the stars. Connie and I had long since decided that our old joints didn’t need sleeping on the ground, so we claimed the big bed in the RV.

We had a great time making our way west. Michael and Janie, Max’s kids, were seven and eight – old enough to be a little self-sufficient but still young enough to enjoy a family trip. Mary’s son Pat was just four, so he needed a little more adult attention. At least all the kids traveled well.

Connie and I deflected questions about the old friend we’d be meeting. We had decided before we left that because of the unusual nature of our relationship, we should wait until we were all together to get into the details.

We stopped in St. Louis and went up in the Arch, and made other stops at historic or scenic spots along the way, so it took us four days to get to Arleen’s house in Boulder. We had decided that we’d have our visit with her before trekking off into the Rockies for camping.

Thanks to GPS we found her house with no trouble. It was on a quiet street in a modern subdivision of nice but modest homes. She must have been watching for us, because as soon as we pulled up in front of her house in our house-on-wheels, she was out the door and walking toward us. We opened the door and climbed out, and the hugs and laughs began at once as introductions were made. She led us into the house where she had a lunch prepared. She had beer and wine for the adults and fruit punch for the kids. As I looked around the house I saw many of the same photographs of her family framed on tables and walls as she had sent to us – as well as a photo of Jacob prominently displayed on a table. In the photo he had the young twins sitting on his lap – they must have been about three years old. All were smiling and happy, and you could feel the love they shared. His smile seemed a little bittersweet, I thought.

“Why don’t you relax and clean up and then we can have lunch at the picnic table out back,” Arleen suggested. Once we were refreshed from the long drive we went out back and she brought out sandwiches and potato salad and other picnic items. Talk around the table was about children, and the kids related stories of our trip so far.

As we were finishing up, Arleen’s twins arrived with their kids – each had a boy and a girl.

Again there were introductions all around, and then Arleen instructed her grandkids to take our grandkids in tow and show them around the neighborhood and go to the park down the street to play for a while, so the grownups could have some time to talk.

We went inside and dragged enough chairs into the living room for all of us to be able to sit and talk. Connie went first, telling Arleen about our lives – we had moved to Chicago soon after Arleen had moved, and I had had success with my writing career. “I know! I’ve read all of your books!” Arleen gushed. “They were wonderful stories.” Connie told of staying home with the kids when they were little, and then she had worked teaching journalism at a nearby junior college. The kids had grown up in suburban Chicago, but after they were done with college and embarked on their adult lives we had moved to a small town near Crystal Lake to enjoy retirement.

“Enough about us,” Connie finally said. “Our kids do not know about the unusual nature of our friendship, we saved that to talk about when we were all together.”

“My kids don’t know either, and I am afraid all of you are in for a surprise,” Connie said, looking just a little apprehensive. “I have kept secrets from them and now it is time for them to hear them – and no better way than with you dear friends here as well.”

There was a moment of questioning silence and Arleen then began her tale.

“Pat and Connie,” she said to her children, “I am sorry to have kept some information from you, but I did not know how to explain it all to you. Now the time has come. I grew up in an unpleasant household – my father was a drunk and a bully. All I wanted to do was get out of that house as soon as I could. So when I was 18 I married a boy I knew from high school. We were all from ‘the wrong side of the tracks,’ so I didn’t really have much in the way of expectations for my life, but at least he got me away from my asshole father.

“Tommy didn’t really have any job skills, and he liked to drink too, so he had a hard time getting and keeping jobs. We were hand-to-mouth for a few months after we got married – he was basically doing day labor type jobs. He ran with a pretty rough crowd. He liked sex and wanted it often – and I was young and liked it too. He even tried to get me to sleep with some of his friends, but I wouldn’t do it. I’m sure he had sex with some of the girls in the crowd. But that’s neither here nor there, and not part of the story.

“Eventually Tommy was arrested with another guy for a string of burglaries. He was sentenced to prison. I was left with nothing but the clothes on my back. I couldn’t pay rent on our little apartment, so I wound up homeless.”

The shocked look on his kids’ faces told us they’d had no idea of their mother’s rough early life.

“There was no way I was going to move back home with my parents, so I wound up taking refuge in a homeless shelter run by a church in town. They gave me food and a place to sleep while I tried to get a job and get back on my feet. I was a mess. I cried most of the time – I could not envision a way out of the hole I was in. But one of the volunteers at the shelter was an older man named Jacob. Jacob took pity on me, I guess, and started paying attention to me, offering me moral support and trying to give me some encouragement that things would get better. Of course his counseling included a lot of religious stuff, which I wasn’t really interested in, but he was so kind and so gentle and so unlike any other man I’d ever known up to that time, that I was sure to spend time with him whenever he came by for his volunteering duty.

“After a few weeks, he took me aside one day and said he had a proposition for me. He said that he needed somebody to help him – somebody to keep house and cook and be a companion. He told me right up front that he did not believe in having sex unless it was to get a baby – he though sex for pleasure was a sin. And he said he was too old to have kids. So, he said, he would like to marry me, taking me into his home, provide me with a settled and secure life, and live together as platonic friends.”

Connie and I already knew the story this far, but we could tell that for her children this was a revelation. They hung on every word. Our kids were also interested in this unusual tale, no doubt wondering where we would fit in.

“So that’s what we did – we got married and I became his housekeeper, cook, and companion. We got along together well, and I was so grateful to him for taking me in and rescuing me from my life of desperation, that I decided I could live without sex. And I did, for 15 years. But as I approached my mid-30s, my body’s hormones and natural inclinations began to really make it hard. To be blunt, I was horny.” Everybody laughed. But she was serious. “So horny that I couldn’t go on that way.

“There was a handsome young bachelor living in the house next door to the house Jacob and I rented.” She looked at me and smiled. “I would see through the window as he’d come out of his house dressed nicely and get into his car and drive off to work. Sometimes I’d be out front so I could greet him as he came and went. And, you probably guessed it, I fell for the guy – even though I hadn’t up to that point even properly met him.

“I tried to resist, I really did, but finally I decided that this guy was going to have to scratch my itch. I simply couldn’t go on living like a nun. So I set a trap for him with a ‘misdelivered’ package on his front door that he’d have to bring over to me. He did, and without going into detail, I will simply say that I managed to seduce him. He was reluctant at first, because he was a decent man and he didn’t want to get into the middle of a married couple. But I explained to him that either he would have sex with me once in a while so I could continue my life with Jacob, or I would have to get an annulment and go find somebody to satisfy my needs.”

Everybody looked at me. And then they looked at Connie, wondering if she had known anything about this. Then back at me. Then back at Arleen, as she went on, “We settled into a routine where the last Thursday of the month, when Jacob would be volunteering, I would go over to Patrick’s house in the afternoon, clean and dust, do laundry, and cook him dinner. When he came in from work we would screw each other’s brains out until it was time for Jacob to be coming home, then I’d shower and scamper back next door to greet him when he came in.”

Now the kids, hers and ours, were really getting nervous. Her Connie, said, “Mom, this might be TMI – too much information.”

“You ain’t heard nothing yet, kid,” Arleen retorted with a smirk.

“After a while on one of our Thursday dates Patrick told me that he had met a young lady and they had feelings for each other and he thought she might be ‘The One.’ He didn’t know just where they were headed, but it might come to be a problem with our arrangement. Then he proceeded to service me with enthusiasm and skill.

“A month later he told me that Connie would be moving in. He said he had explained about our unusual relationship, and asked if she thought we could keep it up, for my sake. He said she was taken aback, but he suggested that she should come over and meet me and talk things over. So she did. I told her my story over a cup of coffee, and lo and behold, we became friends. And Connie agreed to be out of the house on our date nights. She even loaned me “The Joy of Sex,” so I could learn some moves.

“Then Jacob found out. He came over while Patrick and I were in bed and asked me to come home. He wasn’t angry, but he was upset. I explained the situation to him. He was a gentle man, and he took the information and processed it. He said he would pray for us, because in his mind, I had not only been breaking my vows, but we had been sinning against God. I should tell you that I never shared that belief with him, but to him it was a real thing.

“Our lease on that house was up two days later, so Jacob packed us up and moved us to the next town down the road. I only had time to return Connie’s book before we left. He let me send a post card with no return address telling them that I was okay. We’ve had no contact with each other since that day until now.”

Connie and I had been listening quietly, and observed that while her children went through a rash of emotions, our kids just looked astonished to have learned this new somewhat kinky information about their parents.

Arleen stopped and went in to the kitchen. “I need a glass of wine. Anybody else? The men refreshed their beers and the ladies had their wine glasses topped off, and Arleen resumed her story.

“Things were very quiet between Jacob and me after we moved. There was never a fight, no harsh words, just a kind of disappointed silence. Jacob continued to drive back to his job, and continued his volunteer work. And I think he realized that I needed more in life than what he had been providing. He suggested that I take some courses at the junior college in town and maybe learn some skills to be able to work part-time out of the house. I was grateful, and I got signed up for classes, but then everything turned on its head. A month after we had moved I missed my period. I was panicked. I went to the doctor and sure enough, I was pregnant.

Realization began to move like a spirit around the room.

“That baby sure as heck wasn’t Jacob’s,” she said, laughing. “I didn’t know what I would do. I didn’t know if Jacob would throw me out on my ear, because he had always made clear that he didn’t want kids. And I could not imagine him wanting to raise somebody else’s kids. Oh, I was a mess. I cried for hours when Jacob wasn’t home, but put on a brave face for him when he came in.

“Well, I knew that sometimes women miscarried or something, so I held off on telling Jacob about it until the third month. I realized I couldn’t keep it to myself any longer, so I broke the news to him.”

“Wait a minute, Mom,” Connie said. “Do you mean we have an older sibling you never told us about? How could you keep that a secret?”

“No, dear, there isn’t another child. When the time came for the baby to be born, Jacob took me to the hospital. He had helped me to outfit a nursery in the third bedroom – we had never slept together in the same room – and he joined the other expectant dads in the waiting room while I went to the birthing room and delivered a baby boy. And then a baby girl.”

Jaws dropped around the room. Connie and I looked at each other, and at our younger namesakes, and fell back in our chairs. “You mean, Jacob isn’t our dad?” Pat asked puzzled.

“Damn, Pat, how dense are you?” asked his sister, who clearly had grasped the situation more quickly than her brother. She pointed at me. “That’s your dad. And mine.” He still looked confused.

“Jacob was wonderful,” Arleen went on. “He put his name on the birth certificate so my babies would be legal, and for three years he helped me to manage the two of you. You called him ‘Daddy’ and he loved you to pieces. But there was always an undercurrent between us that this situation just wasn’t right. He knew I needed more than he could give me, emotionally and physically. And despite his gallant acceptance of the situation, he still felt the betrayal. And not only that, but once I recovered from pregnancy and delivering twins, I was horny again, and he knew it.

“So after three years we decided to separate. We agreed to a no-fault divorce, since by putting his name on the birth certificate the annulment option was no longer available. He provided me with enough money to get an apartment and get started in my new life. I had met a guy at college and we seemed to be hitting it off. A year after Jacob and I divorced, Bill Jackson and I got married. He adopted these two great kids and he was a devoted and dedicated step-father. They had memories of Jacob, and I always led them to believe he had been their father. They have always treasured that photograph,” and she pointed to the picture I had seen of Jacob with the twins on his lap. “That picture was taken the day the kids and I moved out. They are all smiling in the photo, but in truth it was a hard day, especially for Jacob. We were moving on to an exciting new chapter in our lives. He was losing his family. I will always be grateful to Jacob for the way he saved me, protected me, encouraged me, and then sent me and the kids on our way. I doubt there are many men on earth who would have done the same with the sort of kindness and love he showed.”

“What became of Jacob?” Connie asked.

“Well, he resumed his life as a bachelor. He continued working and volunteering and worshipping and praying. We stayed in touch, but I was always vague to the kids about it, because he and I did not want the kids to be confused as they built their relationship with Bill. And of course he was 15 years older than I was. When he hit the age to qualify he started getting meals on wheels. He wound up moving into an assisted living facility run by the church when he got too old to fend for himself, and he died in 2001. I have a little cry on his birthday every year.”

There was a wave of emotions in the room at that point, nobody really quite sure what do do next. Connie finished her story:

“You know, I named the kids after you two because I was so grateful to you for what you had done for me. I was a damaged and shy person, afraid to do anything that Jacob did not ask me to do. You made me realize, each of you, that I could do things for myself, that I could make decisions for myself, and that I was worthy. I never imagined that this day would come, that we’d be all together,” and she looked around the room and spread her arms, “and I never told them about you because when they were kids it would have been confusing and when they were bigger there was really no reason I could see why they needed to know. But when you reached out to me I realized that they had a right to know who their biological father is – you know, they never questioned that they don’t look much like Jacob.

“So, anyway, with the encouragement I had had from you two and with Jacob’s help I got my Associates Degree, and with Bill’s help with the kids I got a job working as a bookkeeper at a business in town, and Bill and I settled into a normal family life – the first time I had ever experienced such a thing. The kids and Bill loved each other, and life moved on. Bill got a job here in Boulder so we moved here. But he had a heart attack at work when he was 55 and died in the hospital two days later. He had life insurance and that paid for the twins’ college education and gave me a little security for my old age. I made enough at work to get along, and now I’m retired.”