THE QUARREL

At times she`d break like a little girl. That morning, from far away I could see her on her cellphone almost non stop from the beginning she appeared from the elevator as she walked towards my car.

Eventually she got in, still chattering but after a while I began to notice that it wasn`t an ordinary friendly chat like she normally does. It was a quarrel. Shouts and curses and dirty words. Very serious and was getting out of hand. She began to perspire heavily and her eyes started blinking rapidly.

"Calm down baby..." I said.

She kept on shouting angrily as though I didn`t even exist in my driving seat. She`d hung up once in a while and shouted her anger at me in clouded words. I didn`t catch a single word she was saying as I got lost over the whole scenario of her quarrel. I just nodded blankly while my mind tried to read her behaviour and reaction as I drove. I had never seen her that peculiar before.

She started again over her cellphone and soon the pieces of jigsaw puzzle began to rearrange inside my mind piece by piece.She had been staying with another man. In a blink of an eye I remembered what she once told me. She was then planning to fix a wealthy guy and siphon part of his wealth all the way to the bank if not all. That figured.

"Throw me some bones, don`t forget.." I used to joke.

"Sure pop! A Sony cellphone, a digital camera and what else.." while smooching me all over. I didn`t think she was serious. All the while I had been wondering where she got all the expensive stuffs.

Snapped out.

"Dammit!!" as I turned and stared fumingly at her.

"Stop! Stop! Here! Now!" She just shouted spontaneously. I pulled to the side of the road. She got down, opened the rear door, took her stuffs out.

"Where you goin` now?" I asked.

"I`ll take a cab!" she answered short. Before I could ask more, she was gone.

An hour later I got a call from one of her friends. She had jumped from the second floor of the house she had been living in all these while. I was stuck in the middle of a traffic jam.