Revenge12 min read
The Lobster, the Lock, and the Little Tin
ButterPicks15 views
My name is Indie Douglas. I tell this story in the first person, because I was in the center of it, and because I still hear the slap of the hotel plates and the click of that tiny tin of wedding favors in my head.
"It was supposed to be simple," I told Nathan when he held my hand in the hospital waiting room. "Just family, a few friends. Nothing dramatic."
Nathan Harris laughed and kissed my forehead. "Nothing dramatic has followed you yet. Give it time."
We both smiled then, because smiles were the easy thing. The hard thing was the truth: my father-in-law, Gunner Colombo, liked drama. He liked being needed. He liked showing he could buy his way into people’s loyalty.
The wedding was early spring. The hall smelled of lilies, and everything was ordered down to the napkins. I remember counting my breaths when the band started. I remember the weight of Nathan’s palm on my waist when the pastor said, "You may kiss the bride." I remember the string of people waiting to congratulate us. I did not remember the busloads.
"Who are those people?" I whispered to my maid of honor, Maxine Dawson, when the aisle filled with newcomers who pushed past the ushers.
Maxine blinked. "I think they came with Gunner."
Gunner sat near the back like a man who had done a good day's work. He wore his finest shirt and had the smug air of someone who had pulled a trick and then applauded himself.
"Indie," Nathan had warned me more than once about his father. "He means well in his mind."
"Well" and "means well" are two different things.
"They will take a seat," Gunner announced at our table. "These are the people who helped me once. They need joy today."
He rose and waved at his "guests." They clapped and bowed and crowded the tables. They ate and ate, and then—like crows when the kitchen door opens—they took more.
I was mid-sentence with my vows when I saw two platters of Australian lobster vanish under arms. I saw a whole bowl of braised abalone reduced to two spoons. I saw the small gift boxes—two hundred tiny tins we had bought for everyone—stacked on the counter and then dragged away in hands that never asked, never thanked.
"My wedding favors," I mouthed. My voice caught on the word like a rusted hinge.
Maxine gripped my elbow. "You don't have to say anything now," she whispered. "It's your moment."
"I have been so careful about this," I thought, but my chest burned. The bridesmaids fumbled to hand small bagged candies to friends. My new husband, Nathan, ran out and bought a dozen packets from a convenience store and came back red-faced, stuffing them into little hands.
"You gave my daughter the chairs, father?" my mother-in-law, Linda Duke, hissed at Gunner after the ceremony. "Why did you bring them?"
Gunner smiled like a man who had solved a puzzle. "I brought people who needed a good meal," he said. "A wedding should be shared."
"Shared," Linda said, and the word had the flatness of someone who had been cheated of a moment.
The humiliation lingered. Later, for a year, I didn’t speak to Gunner. We had moved cities, and Nathan withheld his money from his father. I told myself I would forget. I told myself the wound would close.
Then I got pregnant. The world narrowed to my belly, to the faint, constant kick like a small pulse, to the fear of losing what I carried. I quit my job and came home to the county hospital visits and to the small house where Linda lived. I thought being closer would be safe. I was wrong.
"Ow," Linda called from her bedroom one afternoon. "My belly—"
I rushed in. She was sweating and pale. She tried to call Gunner.
"Let me call for a taxi," I said. "We will go now."
"No." She clutched the phone like a talisman. "Call my husband."
When the number connected, I listened as Gunner's voice filled the line.
"Where are you?" Linda asked, breath rattling.
"I'm with the neighbor's boy," he said casually. "I am helping him register at the clinic."
"You're helping them? You're putting them first when I'm in pain?" my mother-in-law gasped.
He took his time explaining how someone needed company, how he couldn't leave. The voice that had pushed us into using extra tables at our wedding had no urgency now when Linda needed him.
"Do not come," I said into the phone. "We will take a taxi."
"No." She said the word like a child who distrusted trolleys. "Call him back."
I did, and a different conversation began—one that showed the real Gunner.
"He always does this," Linda cried when I led her to the car. "He will do anything for the whole village and nothing for us at home."
I sat with her in the ER while a nurse told us she had gallstones. The hospital smelled of antiseptic and cheap coffee. I sent Nathan a video message and watched him go pale.
"This is crazy," he said on the video. "I told you, this man is trouble."
"Maybe," I said. "But he is family. I'm tired. I'm pregnant. Let's not burn bridges over old habits."
He was quieter than before. "Indie. If this keeps, I will do something. I promise."
Promises are light as tissue on a windy day.
Weeks passed. We planned to sell the house in the county and move to the city after I recovered. Nathan's work was steady now, and he wanted us to be safe. But small fires were smoldering. Gunner would leave the house to go "help" someone and come back smelling of strong liquor and cheap perfume. He would not answer the phone when his wife or son called. One day, a neighbor called to say he'd hit a car.
"Did he call you?" Linda asked, face white.
"No."
"Then do not pay for him," Nathan said over video. "He can solve his own mess."
When the car smashed, when the neighbor found a dent and a smashed mirror, and when the license plate led him back to our family car, it was Nathan who felt betrayed. He told me then, in a voice that trembled, about his childhood: how Gunner had once driven drunk and a boy had died, how the family had been tied to shame.
"I will not be like him," Nathan said. "I will not let our child grow up like that."
I believed him. I wanted to.
On an early new year, at a cousin's house, the wind bit sharp. I excused myself for the bathroom and found Gunner slipping out of a neighbor’s courtyard. He moved like a man with a secret. At the gate stood a woman whose makeup and scent were terrifyingly familiar—she wore the same shade of TF16 lipstick I owned. I looked at her and felt my stomach twist.
Cataleya Devine laughed at the sky and touched Gunner's arm. Their smiles told me they were not strangers. The next morning, a packet of my old cosmetics—my foundations, my lipsticks, my favorite perfume—appeared on a doorstep in the village. Things I had thrown away had been reclaimed and repackaged as gifts.
I told Maxine about this. "Check the neighbor," she said, pragmatic. "Find out who that woman is."
We learned quickly. Cataleya Devine had been the young widow in the village, quiet at first, then suddenly flashy. She had become friendly with Gunner, who gave and gave until his own pockets were empty. She had a man helping her—Forbes Butler—who seemed to host money like it was his own gullible produce.
One night, the bank froze Linda's account. "Twenty thousand," the clerk said when we stood there with her. "A three-party guarantee. Her husband was a guarantor. The primary debtor defaulted. We serve notice."
Gunner had signed as a guarantor—he had cosigned for a loan he had no right to, a loan that had been taken probably by Cataleya and Forbes. Linda's savings—the money she kept for medicines and small comforts—were gone. My hand shook.
"Find out who Cataleya and Forbes are," I told Maxine. "Get names. Get proof."
Maxine moved with the calm of someone who had kept a family together for years. Within days she had information. Cataleya had a man, Forbes. They had used my father-in-law as a trustworthy mark.
"Bring them to the police," Maxine said.
We did. The police were slow at first. Cataleya cried and told a story of grief and being pushed out by life. Forbes kept silent. Gunner sat there like a beaten dog, refusing to speak for himself.
"Why did you sign the paperwork?" asked the detective gently.
Gunner's shoulders tightened. "They are like family," he said. "I thought they needed help."
"Do you understand the law?" the detective asked.
He blinked, as if the law belonged to a different country.
The first punishment for the bad actors started quietly—inside the police station. Cataleya's parents had come back to town, enraged when they saw her with Forbes and the evidence of the forged paperwork. Neighbors had begun to whisper. The bank had already frozen accounts and sent legal notices. We pressed the case.
It came to a head one gray morning when the investigator asked us to come to the station. I thought it was only a questioning. I had no idea the crowd that would gather.
By nine, there were more people at the station than I had seen gathered outside for important announcements in years. A woman had posted on a village chat about the betrayal; others had shared it. A crowd is a living thing—hungry for news, for scandal, for verdict.
"Indie," Maxine said, gripping my hand as we stepped into the main room where clerks usually served paperwork. It felt like the center of a small storm.
Cataleya arrived with a stiff air, with a borrowed coat that smelled of expensive perfume. Forbes came in with a smooth face, one who thinks the world is a ledger to be balanced in his favor.
"Gunner," Forbes said when he saw him. "We didn't mean to—"
"You stole my wife's money," Linda shouted before I could form it into a sentence. Her voice was like a plank thrown into a calm pool: it splashed and everyone noticed.
"Not stolen," Cataleya said. She spread her hands. "We borrowed. He trusted us."
"Did you go to the bank?" a woman in the corner asked. "Did you tell anyone your husband was not making the decision?"
An old man spat and called them thieves. A teenage boy took out his phone and started to record. The murmurs rose like wind through reeds.
The scene turned into a public punishment in the way small towns deliver justice: the truth laid bare, the witnesses milling like chorus members.
"Why did you do this?" I demanded, louder than I planned. "Why spend what was not yours? Why make my mother-in-law pay for a debt she did not know existed?"
Cataleya looked at me with eyes that were suddenly exhausted. "We... needed to leave," she said. "We were trapped. Forbes said he had a plan."
The crowd's reaction changed. Half the room hissed. The teenage boy who had been filming shouted, "You used his kindness! You used him like a bank!"
Forbes tried to step forward. "People, please, none of this is the full story. We had to survive—"
"Survive on other people's savings?" an aunt cried. "On an old woman's medical fund? Shame!"
Cataleya's face went through a visible sequence: a mask of dignity, then a flicker of fear, then anger, then a flash of pleading.
"I didn't know," she tried to say. "I didn't know the whole thing would—"
"You're a liar!" a shopkeeper barked. "You planned this. You used him."
Gunner's face changed more slowly. First he was defiant—like a man who believed his own generosity was heroic. Then he realized how many eyes were cutting him like knives. He looked small. He started to argue with the police. He said he had only wanted to help. He said he had been lonely. He said, finally, "Forgive me."
"Forgive you?" Linda spat, and walked to the center. She held up a folded paper, the bank notice, like a banner. "This is your gift," she told him. "Look at it. You made us paupers."
People began to chant quiet, sharp things. They called him a fool. They called him a weak man who loved being loved. Someone even clapped. The sound was not celebratory. It was the sound of neighbors agreeing they had been lied to too.
Cataleya tried to escape. She ran from one of the doors to another and bumped into a passerby who had come into the station to pay a fine. "How can you do this?" he yelled. He called her unclean and called for her to leave.
Forbes, seeing the crowd swell like a tide, paled. He tried to pull out a wad of cash to pay some of what they had taken in paltry amounts. The bank had frozen the cards. He showed money anyway, like someone in a theater brandishing a prop.
"What is this?" an old woman asked. "A few banknotes when the whole fund is gone?"
"This is not the end," the detective announced. "There will be legal consequences."
The public humiliation was not just words. It was the way neighbors who had once nodded to Gunner in the road now turned away. It was the way the teenager tweeted video clips until they went viral in our county group. It was the way Cataleya could not go to the market without someone whispering "thief's lover" or "con artist" at her back.
I watched Gunner shrink under the pile of accusations. He tried to answer, tried to hold his head high, but his speech faltered. He moved from anger to confusion to a weak plea—"I was trying to help"—to a final, small collapse. He sat, hand over face, as if the weight of his deeds had become heavier than any bottle or any shame could bear.
When the crowd thinned, Linda and I walked outside. People stared. Some nodded like they had been vindicated. Others shook their heads with sorrow. Maxine squeezed my hand.
"Is this enough?" I asked her.
"It is a start," she said. "People need to see. They need to say the words aloud."
The next punishment came in court. The divorce was public in a different way. Gunner appeared rusty and ashamed. He had to stand beside the woman he had used as security, the bank papers a louder, colder thing than the shouts of a room full of neighbors.
"Why are you doing this?" I had asked him in a private moment when the judge was making us wait. He mumbled something about belonging, about being a man who could give. He said, "I thought I was being needed."
"You were being used," the judge said then. It was not a sentence of law—only truth.
In front of the courthouse steps, a small crowd gathered. Some brought banners the size of newspapers: "No more leeches." They read out lists of debts and demands. Someone handed out flyers about financial fraud. Someone else took the donated two thousand and returned it to Linda.
Gunner watched the assembly like a man in fog. He tried to stand erect, to argue, to claim his right to dignity even while his lack of prudence had stripped him of it. His face went through all the stages: smugness, denial, anger, then a look I will never forget—empty, like a house with no furniture. He begged, finally, "Please. I will do anything. Give me another chance."
"Chance?" Maxine asked, and people laughed in the cold morning. "You had chance after chance. You used it to help others and not your own."
Forbes had a different fate. He was not merely scolded. The evidence against him—bank records, SMS messages, witness statements—showed a plan. He had used Cataleya to find a man who would sign as guarantor. He had manipulated Gunner's kindness. The judge fined him and placed him under community supervision. He lost face, lost business, and was barred from many types of transactions in the county.
Cataleya's punishment was quieter but social and very sharp. Her in-laws condemned her. Her neighbors refused to let her into their shops. Pictures of her smiling with Gunner became proof of betrayal. Her parents' shop lost customers. She tried to cry and say she was sorry, but sorrow cannot pay back a bank.
The scene I remember most is not in court but in the market the next week. Cataleya walked between the stalls and someone—an old woman whose account Gunner had helped—spat and said, "You took our hope and sold it for lipstick." People fell silent. Silence is a kind of punishment, too. She left the market that day and never returned to the shop she once ran.
Gunner's punishment was complicated. He had not stolen money for himself, not directly. He had given. But giving without boundaries had ruined his family. Public humiliation followed him. Neighbors who once called him friend now avoided him. He came to our doorway one cold night and pounded on the new lock we had put in.
"I want my home back," he shouted. "I want to see my son's child. Why are you so cruel?"
"Because you chose this," Linda said from the bedroom window. Her voice was low but steady. "You chose them over your family."
He fell to his knees on the concrete, the only time I saw his posture truly small. Nearby, a neighbor filmed him. A child called to his mother, "Is that the man who took Nana's money?" The crowd that had once cheered him now watched him as a spectacle.
"The worst punishment," I told Maxine later, "is not a court fine. It's being watched and not being helped."
"Some people need to be watched," she answered. "So they learn the price of their mistakes."
By the time the divorce was final, Gunner had apologised more than once. He tried to beg forgiveness from neighbors and failed. He worked odd jobs; he slept in a guest room at my brother's place for a while. He tried to win back a small part of dignity by taking responsibility. The ugliness continued to shape him.
Some punishments changed form. The bank names and numbers and the gossip meant that Gunner's social standing was gone. He tried to rebuild in quiet. He took a job moving crates. He had to learn to be ordinary. That, too, is punishment—the slow moving thing that shows you your limitations.
I will not pretend the end was clean. It was messy and layered. We sold the county house. We used the money to buy a city apartment where Nathan and I would raise our son. We cut Gunner off. We changed locks, hid keys, and made small rules into large boundaries. We found joy in small things: the baby's first cry, Nathan cooking rice, Maxine bringing soup.
There were moments that surprised me—his humiliation did not turn him into a monster who repaid with cruelty. Once, at a distance, I saw Gunner sitting on a bench feeding pigeons. A woman walked by and scolded him for his mistakes. He listened and did not argue. Later he left a small packet of old coins at a shrine for Linda. I know it is not the same as paying back everything, but sometimes remorse is a kind of work.
People in the market continued to point at Cataleya and call her names for months. Forbes moved to another town and started small. Gunner lived modestly. Linda got her card back after a long legal fuss. She broke down once and told me, "If I had not listened to you, I might have kept him."
"Maybe," I said, and did not add that sometimes people need to break to be remade.
There are little keepsakes I could burn. One of them is the tiny tin of wedding favors we bought—the one the neighbors stole. I kept one. It sits in my drawer, three years later, dented where someone dropped it. Inside is a paper note Nathan wrote and a crumb of candy.
"Remember," Nathan had written, "the lobster and the tin."
That note is odd to me; it's small, absurd, and perfectly ours.
"The town still talks," Maxine told me over tea the afternoon I took out the tin. "But you are safe."
"Safe?" I smiled and put the tin back.
"I put a new lock on the drawer tonight," Nathan said, as if that were a joke and a vow.
We laugh about the lobster sometimes in the quiet hours—about how something meant to be elegant became a lesson. We laugh because the baby now sleeps through the night and because the past is a long road behind us.
When I close the drawer, the tin make a soft, familiar sound—a little click that is a promise of ordinary life.
And every time the metal taps the wood I hear one more thing: the sound of a lock turning on a small house where we learned to choose each other, and to guard what mattered.
The End
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