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cdyssey · 1 year

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Barbara and Melissa (Pt. I)

Summary: When Barbara and Melissa discover that their husbands are cheating on them—and with each other, no less—their lives as they have known them are suddenly and dramatically upended. Grace and Frankie AU.

CW: Heavy Discussions/Mentions of Infidelity, Alcohol Use

AO3 Link

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It’s just another Saturday night for Barbara, Melissa, and their spouses. Rather than watch the Penn State game at one of their places, though, they’ve opted to go out to Stu’s, their favorite hole-in-the-wall bar that unfortunately looks like a derelict crack house from the outside. But the inside is cozy enough—if a little worn with wear—and the eponymous Stu is Melissa’s third cousin seven times removed or something ridiculous like that, but he gives them all family discounts anyway.

Anything for his cousin Mel.

Barbara and Melissa have already grabbed their usual high top table in the corner, waiting for their husbands to return with drinks (draft beers for the boys and Melissa, a neat cosmo for Barbara).

“Gerald said that he and Joe have something to tell us,” Barbara remarks, idly wiping down the table with a sanitizing wipe from her purse. She trusts Stu well enough to keep the bar generally clean… but who knows what kinds of germs accrue when he’s not looking? Some of his patrons aren’t exactly the most reputable for their hygiene.

“Bet they want us to go on a trip again,” Melissa rolls her eyes, one elbow on the table, her chin propped up on her fist. “Y’know they couldn’t get enough of the Smokey’s last time we went.”

“Hiking fools,” Barbara shakes her head with a small, reminiscent smile at their joint vacation last spring. While Melissa and Barbara spent most of their time in Gatlinburg proper shopping and seeing the sights, their husbands had hiked nearly everyday, only returning to the cabin when it was time to get dressed and go to dinner.

Not that any of them had particularly minded that arrangement, of course.

Sure, the four of them all get along swimmingly—such has been true from pretty much the beginning when Barbara and Melissa first became close friends at work and introduced their spouses to each other. It’s simply just that in their personal dynamics, the women pair off quite nicely and so do the men.

“All I’m sayin’ is that my dumbass husband better think twice before he pisses in the woods again,” Melissa huffs, now looking at the nearest television. The game’s about to kick off. (Barbara personally thinks that Penn State doesn’t stand a chance against Alabama, but Melissa and the boys are nothing if not delusional team loyalists, always believing that their alma mater can somehow take it home.) “Took forever to clear up the poison oak.”

“Mmmmm, girlfriend,” she scrunches her nose distastefully, splaying a raised hand in the other’s direction. “Too much information.”

It’s going to take her a full week to get that unsavory image out of her head.

Melissa only chuckles—perpetually delighted by her own crassness—as the boys finally arrive, drinks in tow. Gerald presses a light kiss against Barbara’s cheek, his mustache tickling her skin, as he hands her the cosmo, and she works to disguise her surprise at the unexpected gesture. It’s been awhile since he’s extended such a casual moment of affection towards her… in fact, she cannot quite remember the last one. The last little comfort or quiet intimacy. Sliding his arms around her waist. Lacing their hands together at the dinner table. Telling her that she looked nice in this blouse or that one. Calling her dear.

As he sits down next to Joseph on the other side of the table, she smiles at him so gratefully that she feels a little bit like a beggar, thanking him for his scraps.

He doesn’t catch it, though, his dark gaze averted.

And in the yellowish lighting of the bar, her husband almost seems a little wan, shadows turning circles beneath his eyes.

Barbara frowns gently. She hopes that he’s not getting sick. She keeps telling him that his boss is overworking him lately—thinks that this is the source of all their most recent marital strife even. He’s been home past ten more often than not for at least a year, his company’s latest welding contract demanding a lot out of his team.

Too much.

And without proper financial compensation either.

If they’ve had one disagreement over his inability to set work aside for a few days, then they’ve had two dozen of them, all of them ending with Barbara sleeping alone in their king-sized bed.

He apologizes every time, an effortless gentleman, her Ger.

But somehow, he never seems to learn from this one mistake.

He never touches her anymore.

Barely even looks her way.

“Something wrong, honey?” She asks, reaching across the table and placing a hand on his wrist, right above the watch that she’d given him last year for Christmas.

“Oh, no—nothing,” Gerald smiles at her quickly, gently shrugging away from the touch. Stung, she widens her smile to avoid ever showing it. “Just a long day at work…”

There’s still something in his eyes that makes Barbara suspect that she’s being lied to, but she doesn’t want to press the issue in front of their friends, doesn’t want to argue, so she nods thinly and lets it go. She’ll talk to him on the ride home…

The game starts, and by the end of the first quarter, Alabama is already twenty-one points up with no intention of stopping.

“Fuck!” Melissa swears when the Penn State quarterback nearly throws another interception, slamming her fist on the table. “C’mon, dude. You nearly lobbed it right into his hands.”

“I’m not sure why you’re so surprised,” Barbara laughs, always faintly amused at her friend’s team fervor. “Our boys haven't had it together in years now.”

“We just need a better offense,” Melissa insists, shaking her head at the replay of the near screw up.

“And throw in a new defense too while you’re at it,” Stu grunts playfully as he drops off yet another round of drinks. “Ain’t that right, Joe?”

He elbows Melissa’s husband, who, for some unknown reason, violently bucks at the touch, nearly sending Gerald flying off his barstool in the process. But her own spouse thinks quickly and catches himself on the edge of the table in time, and the only casualty is the little bit of Corona that sloshes over the top of Melissa’s glass and onto her shirt when the table shakes.

“Shit, Lissa,” Joe flushes, grabbing a bunch of napkins from the dispenser at random and chucking them at his wife with characteristic recklessness, causing Barbara to purse her lips. She doesn’t say anything, though. It isn’t her place.

(As Melissa has emphatically let her know time and time again.)

“I’m sorry. I was just lost in thought—“

“I’d say so,” Melissa scowls indignantly, toweling off the stain as much as she can. Barbara thanks Stu when he returns with a dry rag, and she cleans up the rest of the spillage on the table, trying her best not to eavesdrop. It’s hard, though, when they’re at such a tiny table… and, well—God bless and forgive her—she’s unfortunately rather nosy.

“What the hell’s gotten into you tonight, Joe?” Melissa goes on, exasperation in her voice, clear concern. "Why are ya acting like someone’s shot your cat?”

Now that she mentions it, Joe—like Barbara’s own husband, has been a little off-color this evening as well. Usually, he’s knee-deep in the trenches with his wife, yelling pointlessly at the TV about the young men in navy uniforms, but he’s been strangely quiet throughout the game, only offering commentary when Melissa has sent some teasing remark his way.

“Long day,” Joe blusters, clutching his beer glass with reddened knuckles.

“Don’t just steal Gerald’s answer,” Melissa snorts, tilting her head towards Gerald, who has been staring up at some speck on the dirty ceiling for the past minute or so—since almost falling over.

He’s always been non-confrontational, her dear partner—perhaps even to a genuine fault.

They never exactly fight, the Howards.

They just trade words with slightly raised voices in the kitchen.

“Goddamn, Lissa. More than one person can have a long day.”

As Melissa angrily opens her mouth to respond, a foul word almost surely forming on her lips, Barbara, resisting the urge to roll her eyes at her useless husband, decides it’s high time to step in before the couple really hits their stride. She knows they love each other, but dear Lord, the two of them can brawl like recent divorcees.

“Enough,” she says sharply, affecting her best teacher voice as she looks between them. “Let’s just return to watching the game, shall we? Joe?"

She levels him the same glare that she gives her kindergarteners when she catches them picking their noses.

“Fine by me,” He grunts inelegantly, picking his beer up again.

"Melissa?" She asks—much more kindly—sensitive to the hurt in the younger woman's eyes. Joseph can be so careless with his profanities sometimes...

“Whatever.” Melissa crosses her arms over her chest—always made uncomfortable by her own vulnerability—before violently turning away.

Granted, it isn't so much of a game as it is an utterly pathetic affair.

Alabama steamrolls Penn State forty-nine to zero, and the four of them watch the last quarter in near total silence, the tension between them thick and unpleasant. Barbara, throughout it all, doesn’t know who to attend to—her husband, who keeps getting paler with each second that ticks down on the game clock, her best friend, who is too angry to even finish her buffalo wings, or Joseph, who keeps knocking back beer after beer until the table is littered with empty glasses. She ends up doing her best with Melissa, briefly squeezing her knee beneath the table, consoling her through touch alone.

They can talk about it later.

“Well,” she smiles tightly when the display mercifully flashes the final score, “that was fun.”

“Pfft,” Melissa only mutters beneath her breath, still determinedly looking anywhere but her husband. “Yeah.”

Barbara glances at her own spouse meaningfully, tilting her head towards the door.

Let’s get out of here.

But Joe, who’s been absently nursing his sixth Corona for the last few minutes or so, suddenly stops Gerald from standing up by throwing one of his muscled arms across his chest.

“Wait,” he intones in his deep voice, his cheeks blotchy with drink. “Not yet… there’s somethin’ we gotta tell you two.”

“Joe, no,” Gerald shakes his head vigorously, his face bloodless. Horrified. He makes a weak attempt at shoving the other man’s forearm away. “Not tonight. It’s hardly the time.”

“And when will it ever be, Ger?” The firefighter shoots back. “Another ten years from now? Twenty? How long do we gotta make fucking assholes outta ourselves, huh?”

Barbara can’t make sense of what’s going on between the two men, the tension in their eyes, the familiarity of this incomprehensible conversation—like it’s one that has been had many times before.

Over and over and over again.

All she knows is that they’re damn well not about to ask to go on another vacation.

“What the fuck are you two yabbering on about?” Melissa asks, never one for social niceties, cutting straight to the point, and the bluntly phrased question finally seems to bring their husbands back to the awareness that there is such a thing as other people in the room. When Joe in particular finally breaks his gaze to look at his wife, his expression immediately softens—becomes pained even, full of utter sorrow.

“I’m sorry, Lissa,” he starts, reaching across the table, weaving between the labyrinth of beers, to place a hand on Melissa’s where it’s now resting on the table. “I didn’t mean t’pick a fight with you… I just wanted us to all to have one last good time together.”

“What’s all this horseshit?” Melissa rasps, eyes only for her husband, but she jerks her hand away from his as though stung. “What’s going on?”

Barbara’s stomach turns as she stares between the two of them—unable to look away from the devastation that’s unfolding before her—but then, out of the corner of her eye, she sees that her own husband is covering his face with both of his tall hands.

And it only hits her then that he isn’t wearing his wedding band.

That there’s an imprint on his fourth finger where it used to be.

Where it has unfailingly been.

For thirty-seven years.

Joe had said there was something they needed to tell both of them.

“Gerald Samuel Howard,” she breathes, cutting across whatever drunk and idiotic reply that Joe had surely been stringing together in his lump of coal for a brain. “Where in God’s almighty name is your wedding ring?”

She can feel the other couple’s eyes snap towards them, and the weight of their scrutiny makes Barbara want to calmly lean back, take a deep breath, and smile as though for an invisible camera, but something inside her breaks and refuses to instantaneously mend itself when Gerald, without uncovering his eyes, silently shakes his head.

Coward.

Always.

“And where the hell is yours, huh?” Melissa snaps from somewhere next to her, the sound less angry than it is terrified, perhaps desperate for an explanation other than the one that is starting to form right before their eyes.

But no, it can’t be.

Joe and Gerald, they’re not—

They can’t possibly be—

It’s absurd to even—

“We’ve done both of you so wrong,” Gerald croaks, the sentence muffled behind his hands. “I’m so sorry.”

Tears glistening down the worn crevices of his face, Joe makes a vague noise, seemingly about to elaborate, but Barbara, just as she had playfully done to Melissa earlier, raises her hand.

But there is nothing of laughter in this gesture.

She feels ancient, like she hasn’t laughed in a hundred thousand years.

Like she will never do so again.

“No,” she says coldly, the syllable wrenched from some ugly place deep within her soul. “I want to hear it from him.”

“Hear what?” Melissa demands frustratedly, apparently still in denial. Her friend is so alert about most things in this life, shrewd and street smart, hypervigilant even to the point of always needing to sit facing the door, but she’s always had a blind spot when it comes to Joe.

Has always excused the most ridiculous of his antics with a shrug.

Gerald, with the deliberation she has come to expect from him—that she shares in common with him even—slowly peels his fingers away from his face, and then his calloused palms, until he’s staring at Barbara from the depths of sunken eyes.

“Go on then,” she hisses, digging her fingernails into her thighs beneath the table. “Say it.”

And she watches, with her own two eyes, as Joseph Lombardo places a comforting hand on the small of her husband’s back, supporting him as though there’s a lifetime in the infinitesimal action.

A long-established and carefully nurtured intimacy.

“Oh, Jesus.” Melissa has finally arrived at the midnight hour alongside her. “Oh, my fucking God.”

“We’ve been cheatin' on you,” Joe says it in the end, lobbing the horrible words on the table between them like a lit fuse. “With each other. I’m sorry.”

It was at once both thoroughly important and agonizingly unnecessary that he added with each other. She’d gotten the gist from their barren fourth fingers and Joe’s hand on Gerald, but she wouldn't have been able to fully believe it until she heard it articulated aloud.

And among the thousands of others of pains and questions and horrors seizing through her system in simultaneous succession, it’s somehow the fact that Gerald couldn’t do it himself that simply excavates her.

She finds that she cannot bear to look at him.

She equally discovers that she cannot look away.

“How long?” Barbara asks incisively, harshly swiping at the traitorous tears that are threatening to form at the corners of her eyes. Half of the bar is looking at them now. Stu’s glaring daggers at the men from behind the bar, looking vaguely murderous. She can’t cry in front of all these people, can’t dissolve under their finely-trained microscope.

She spares a glance at Melissa and sees that she’s been stunned into silence, her red mouth a gaping maw.

“A year?” She presses, holding her stomach, as all of Gerald’s late nights suddenly come into perspective. He hasn’t been working overtime.

Oh, God.

He’s been with Joseph.

“Ten,” Joe offers meekly, his hand falling away from Gerald’s back in such a way as though he’s finally realized that it was a thoroughly inappropriate gesture to begin with. “Since our trip to Vegas.”

Ten years.

The days, the weeks, the endless months upon months cascade through her head like a vicious assault of rain. She tries to do the math in her head and finds that the numbers are untenable.

Unbearable.

They do not compute.

She cannot hold them within her without wanting to scream.

So she decides not to believe him.

It is her last available defense against total dissolution.

“You’re joking,” she retorts, her voice barely audible, choked upwards from the constricted column of her throat.

But Joe wordlessly shakes his head in place of an answer, staring at her with wide, watery eyes, and she can see the veracity plainly etched in his face.

The man might be many things—drunkard, potty-mouth, serial gambler—but he’s never been a liar.

Barbara racks her brain for the now hazy memories of that joint vacation. They’d gone for Melissa’s fiftieth birthday, even though the four of them could barely afford it with their abysmal salaries, but Lord, how she, Joseph, and Gerald had all insisted anyway—their beloved Sicilian fireball deserved it. And they’d had such a good time, shopping during the day, casino hopping at night, and eating some damn fine meals in-between. They’d even helicoptered out to the Grand Canyon at some point and cried at God’s glorious majesty sprawled out before them in vast configurations of clay and stone.

They couldn’t actually afford to spend the night at any of the casinos, so they had booked rooms at a La Quinta within taxi-distance of the strip. Barbara, emphatically not a gambler, never stayed out too awfully late, and Melissa often accompanied her back to the hotel, more circumspect than her husband when it came to the slots.

But Joe and Gerald, they lingered behind.

At the bars.

And the casinos.

In the dance clubs.

Telling their wives they’d taxi home later.

So there had been time enough for something to happen—stretches of unaccounted-for moments. She sees it very clearly now, that one night when Gerald stumbled into their hotel room at three in the morning, already sober, but he had inexplicably showered for two hours nonetheless before slumping into their shared bed. He didn’t touch her that night, even when she attempted to curl into him for his warmth.

She now understands that he absolutely couldn’t.

“And you didn’t think there was any time between then and—oh, I don’t fucking know—the last ten years to tell us this?” Melissa seems to have found her voice again, and it’s raw and visceral, another knife wound in Barbara’s side necessitating an outpouring of blood. “Any particular reason you wanna shoot your shot now?”

“We love each other,” Joe immediately replies, glancing at Gerald, who looks like he’s about to wretch, with worried eyes. “We wanna get married.”

“Married?!” Barbara didn’t know her vocal cords could form such a shrill sound. Somehow, even though she had been quick to process that her husband is cheating on her with one of their best friends, it has slipped her grasp that the only logical conclusion to this revelation is that it goes somewhere beyond an initial confession.

Separation can only follow.

Divorce.

She’s sixty-six years old—so close to her twilight years if she hasn’t reached the beginning of them already—and she’s going to be alone.

Oh, God—he’s going to leave her, and he’s just sitting there, like a monolith, like a log, not saying anything. And how can he not say anything? How can he let their nearly forty-year marriage go out with a whimper as his boyfriend or partner or whatever the hell he calls Joe says all of these unconscionable things with a bang?

“Do you have anything to say for yourself?” She demands, and she hates how it sounds more like a plea. “Or are you just going to let Joseph do all the talking for you?”

“Don’t have a go at him!” Joe growls protectively, placing his arm around Gerald again, and it makes Barbara utterly sick.

“Bastard! Stronzo!” Melissa snarls, abruptly standing up, knocking over a half-empty beer glass in the process. The amber liquid diffuses across the table, drenching all of them with its bitter tang. “What do y’mean don’t have a go at him? You two have cheated on us for ten years. Humiliated us. Hurt us.”

“Lissa—“ Joe’s feral expression softens again. “I’m s—“

“You complete”—Melissa picks up one of her uneaten wings—“chickenshit of a”—and she chucks it at her husband— “coglione! Figlio di puttana!”

“Melissa, goddammit! Don’t throw—”

But she’s already grabbed another and thrown it at him too, while Barbara hasn’t taken her eyes off Gerald, tears openly leaking down her own face now. She forgets to swipe at them, a stranger in her body, non-operator of any of her frozen limbs.

“I’m a coward,” he finally utters, the three words nearly lost beneath the sound of Melissa and Joseph now apparently cursing at each other in Italian.

“Barbara…” He cradles his head in his hands, his voice breaking on every syllable of her name. “I’m a coward.”

Barbara doesn’t know what to say to this, barely remembers how to breathe, her ribcage a shattered temple.

Ruined and ruinous deep within her body.

The pillars eroding.

This immaculate sanctuary of herself undone.

She opens her mouth, but everything refuses to come out.

#work wives #melissa schemmenti #barbara howard #s: abbott elementary #reginianwrites #this is the most hioshoihfosihdfoifd #i don't know how to describe it #brainrotted thing i have ever written

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