Bottomless Coffee

So… Divorce Care is not an easy place to do any catching up. You work hard there! Watching training videos and discussing the topics takes up all the available time. Since email is also a slow way in which to do any gossip, Werner and I made a coffee date.


Second Cup – makes good coffee, and has the added advantage of having a bottomless cup of coffee. Not my fault if they are “business sense challenged”! That day was not to be a profitable day for them!

As opposed to my previous date, where I had carefully picked up my friend in my car and dropped him back home on my terms, when Werner offered to pick me up, it somehow felt ok.

He arrived on time, opened and closed the car door for me and before you laugh at this chivalry – he does so till this day. I politely keep thanking him and we keep smiling in a secret, unspoken agreement which says – you open, I thank – we’ll carry on with this!

We lost count of the number of cups of coffee we had that day. We talked and talked and talked. Much of it went along the lines of… did you know that they….. or , hey – they actually went to Cape Town together…. Interspersed with exclamations on NO – did they really?

We must have been hilarious to watch from the outside looking in. We were not a dating couple, we were not old friends having coffee… who would have guessed that we were comparative strangers from opposite sides of affairs - busy hearing the other side of the story for the first time.

It took us many months to piece the story together. Not that we actively tried to do so, but many realizations only came much later. Puzzle pieces kept falling into place.

It was through Werner, that I realized that time the Prof drove off through the night – to Bronkhorstspruit – he actually went to Witbank, where Cream Puff spent weekends on her mother’s farm. Only recently did I hear, that her family on the farm, all thought the Prof was a divorced man. So that night did not seem so strange to them, I guess. One wonders what their excuses were for Cream Puff – whom they knew was married. In fact, I suspect that one of Werner’s greatest feelings of betrayal – aside from that of Cream Puff, was the silence of his in-laws on this matter. Those folks were more than his family, they were his friends. But – his mother-in-law was gravely ill at the time, and one can only wonder at the quandary her daughter’s affair put her into.

Eventually, regretfully, we had to leave. Werner dropped me at home, and wonder above wonders , consented to having yet another cup of coffee at home.

We were sitting on the stoep, drinking this cup of coffee when the Prof arrived to drop the children at home…. Oh dear!