Traffic (Complete two-hundred pages) (Moving to Kindle Vella in 30 Days! )

8

POLYAMORY

LATER THEY MADE THEIR WAY into the living room and kitchen.

"There's something special about Saturday mornings," Katelyn said.

I looked at the bitches in the living room. I added, "Even when your life is a vacation."

Katelyn laughed. She always laughed at my jokes. They weren't jokes. But how could Jack possibly hate her friends? she may ask. Jack should love everything she loved. It's only fair, because she loved everything Jack loved. But, Jack thought, that's only because Jack had a genuine love for only the most genuine of things. Not reality TV shows like Say Yes to the Dress. Although, unfortunately, the show did have a way of sucking you in. At least after you've been forced to watch the first hundred episodes because your wife lured in with the double package of sex on the carpet thrown in while the daughter was asleep upstairs. Yes, irresponsible is the word.

As Katelyn and Jack made burritos the women and my daughter and some of her friends were trying on party dresses from party city while Say Yes to the Dress blared on the wall-to-wall screen in the living room. The door kept ringing so we just left it open as swarms of family and friends and neighbors who were neither our family nor friends crawled in along with the rest of the neighborhood bugs. A wasp had to be lured out through the backyard.

The pool was filled to double its capacity within two hours and the cops came and stayed after they got the noise complaint and then Katelyn tipped them and invited them to stay, respectively. They were drunk within the hour and asked if they had any weed. No, they did not, Katelyn had trained Jack to say in case anyone were to ask.

The drugs were in the garage. Home remedies for a couple stranded in a community I which it did not belong. What would work better probably were some books and spiritual exercises: aka learning how to be alone and be content being alone. But being social has a way of degrading that necessary skill of loving oneself by oneself.

Eventually Pat arrived, fedora and all. The bow tie was a nice touch. "Where's my little angel," he yelped and Elise screamed at the top of her lungs and ran out of her group of friends to hug her "Uncle Pat!" He was not her uncle Pat. If she had any bit of his genes and intelligence she still wouldn't have learned how to walk.

He picked her up and swung her around and Jack nearly squeezed the burrito he was making to shreds with the thought Pat might drop Elise or fling her at the neighboring wall.

"You found your way back," Jack said, his expectations overcome.

"Yeah," said Pat. He was just as surprised as Jack was. Then he spotted Katelyn in her gorgeous but modest red dress and all cognition was lost. Jack could practically see Pat's frontal lobe fall off his forehead once Pat ran to Jack's wife and begged she give him "some sugar!" She squealed with both glee and fright but was an excellent sport about him kissing her back and forth on the cheeks until she simply had to push the bastard of herself. Katelyn looked to Jack as though wondering why he didn't pull out the family gun and kill this man. Or perhaps she was wondering if it was her fault she had let Pat make a fool out of all three of them.

Jack looked to his daughter Elise who seemed used to the outward polyamory by now and left with a joyous unhinged shrug to her friend group that galloped out to the pool in their summer bathing wear.