Would you rent a car for this man? part 5

More drama Wednesday night, but it doesn't matter. (In fact I tried to post it by texting from my phone, but the messages seem to have gone off into space somewhere. Maybe they'll show up here all in a jumble two weeks from now.) Thursday, Wife saw Counselor, who naturally had a much sounder suggestion. He advised she should just walk away. Consider the $200 and the jewelry as irretrievably lost and abandon all contact with Pop. Block his calls from your phone, don't text him ... as far as he is concerned you should just drop off the face of the earth. Sure, it means losing the money and the stuff, but it also means you don't risk him doing you damage. Call it a fair trade.

OK, fine. But of course it's not that easy. Next, Wife spent the afternoon with her friend Leia, who insisted "No, you have to get the police to stop him so he doesn't prey on others." By the time she got home she was all confused. I asked what was she going to do, and she said "Well I guess tomorrow I'll go to the police," but without much conviction in her voice.

"What do you want to do?"

"I don't know."

"Really? Because I think I know what you want to do pretty well at this point."

"Maybe you know me better than I know myself."

"Well think about it. We've been talking about the police for a couple of days now, and every time you have said you'll contact them later. If you wanted to call them, you'd have done it by now. So you don't want to call the police. Fair enough, but that means taking Counselor's advice and having no contact with him. In fact, you'd have to do that part either way, because part of calling the police is putting out a restraining order. And once that is in place you can't contact him either."

I spent a while trying to convince her that contacting him again was a bad idea, because she really wanted her stuff back. But she seemed to acquiesce. Then after dinner she said she was antsy and wanted to go for a walk.

Now, Wife never "goes for a walk." Even when she gets on a rant about how she needs more exercise and "tomorrow" she's going to start walking regularly, she never does it. If she has to get somewhere that is too close to drive, she'll put it off rather than walk over there. So I arched an eyebrow inquiringly. She then said, "Or maybe I'll just go to bed," and slunk back into the bedroom.

I gave her about five minutes and then came back. Not surprisingly, she was keying in some text message on her phone.

"Who are you texting?"

"My friend Kevin." [Another guy she met on OKCupid.]

"Let me see."

"No! You can't read my private text messages!"

"I don't want to read your messages, and I couldn't care less what you are saying. Show me the header where it says the name of whoever you are texting to."

"No! Get away! This is private!"

"Show me the name."

And after I stood there stock still for a minute or so, she relented and showed me the name. Of course it was Pop.

"Delete the message."

With much grumbling, she did.

Then I exploded, "What were you thinking? The whole idea is that you drop off the face of the earth to him! You can't do that if you keep contacting him!"

"I was going to tell him that his absolute last chance to give me my stuff back was to meet me tomorrow at 10:00 at the Starbucks near ---. And then if he didn't, it's 'tin-star time.' "

As an aside, how many "last chances" has she given him so far? Never mind. What I said was, "Are you out of your mind? Why would you tell him that?"

"I really want my stuff back."

"But he'll never give it back. Understand that your stuff is lost permanently. And you can't afford to contact him, because every time you communicate with him in any way you lose and he wins. And on top of all that, you don't threaten him. What kind of person do you think he is?"

"I think he is a criminal."

"Right! And that means the last thing you do is threaten him with the police. Especially if you are really going to them, you can't tip your hand. And don't you see that threatening him would endanger you far more?"

"No ... that's why I wanted to meet in a public place, like a Starbucks."

"And then what? Then he doesn't show up, and after a while you get disgusted and leave; and as you are walking across the parking lot to your car, you're accidentally side-swiped by a crazy but unidentifiable driver in a car with no license plates, and you end up in the hospital or the morgue. Is that what you want?" [I admit this is an extreme scenario, but I wanted to get her attention. And you may have noticed that can be hard to do when Wife gets an idea stuck in her head.]

Silence.

"Of all types of crime, which one is the least often solved?"

"Murder. I know that."

"And???"

Long silence. Then, ... "OK, I won't contact him."

I have no way to know if she'll stick to that, and no way to enforce it. Needless to say, her word is worthless. But I hope I scared her enough that she'll back away from doing something stupid. If only she weren't so damned possessive about getting "her stuff" back. But of course she is.

I can hope.