Every time the phone rings, I jump.

After our surprisingly rational phone conversation last week, I was hesitant to believe that any logical behavior could possibly come out of an inherently illogical person. I hadn't heard from Ex since, so I thought I was correct in believing that he had probably regressed into his old patterns and might be lurking somewhere in the city with a Hubble-sized telescope trained on my every move.

I was wrong, though. Sort of. It turns out that Ex sent me 2 texts on Monday, which I didn't receive until today thanks to the fact that my Motorola Q is a piece of crap. No offense to crap, by the way. That phone is like the AMC Pacers of smartphones. (If you don't know what an AMC Pacer was, it was the kind of car that you had to stick your feet through the floor to make it move. Or if you were lucky enough to get one of the good ones, there were a few hamsters on wheels under the hood to give you an extra push.)

But back to the point, Ex sent me two generally cordial text messages and I can't figure out if he's genuinely trying to come to a resolution, manipulate me into giving him stuff, or a mix of both. I'll have to go with the latter on this one. At the end of the second text, he said something very nice about my father, whom he knows I adore, so that's what tips the scales in the direction of one of his heartstring-tugging machinations that he hopes will make me forgive or forget his lunacy.

Reading that one line about my Dad made me think of the last Christmas Eve we'd spent together as a married couple. I had really learned to cook at that point, so I'd made dinner for his family and mine, who had flown in the day before. I'd had enough experience with his family by that time to know that I had to make the call to his mother myself and ever so sweetly suggest that she need not bring an entire fish, head and all, to our home because I had taken care of everything.

Things began to get stressful when the outlaws (oops, typo. I meant inlaws.) were a half hour late and the phone rang. I heard Ex begin to get upset, and when he returned to the kitchen, I asked him what was wrong.

"Almost, my parents just had a car accident. They don't know if they can make it. The car is destroyed and they might go to the hospital."

I was genuinely concerned despite my dislike of them, but another half hour passed and they showed up at the front door. My family crowded around them as if Joseph and Mary themselves had arrived, asking if they were ok. As soon as I assessed that there were no broken bones, bloody stumps, or evidence of traumatic brain injury (aside from their normal nutjob behavior), I seated them, brought them drinks, and then clandestinely crept outside to look at their car.

I'm not even kidding when I tell you that there was a 2 inch scratch on the rear quarter panel. That was it. I actually doubled over in the driveway and as soon as I stopped the tears of laughter flowing down my cheeks, quietly stole back into the house.

I figured that Ex's mother was pretty pissed that she wasn't the star of the show since she wasn't cooking or hosting, so she had to pull some kind of stunt to get attention. I was sure they didn't plan this "massive accident," but I also knew that telling Ex that the car was destroyed and that they had to go to the hospital was a blatant plea for the spotlight.

Dinner progressed and, thanks to the bottle of Dom I'd already ingested, was not unbearable. Until I looked over at the sink as I was cleaning the kitchen. And saw globs of an unknown, but ungodly, substance flowing like lava from the cabinet beneath the garbage disposal. I quickly called Ex over, we opened the cabinet doors to a virtual detonation of goo, and the utter and total chaos that ensued was beyond hysteria.

My mother outlaw (damn, there goes my typing again.) was shrieking, "You shouldn't have put celery down the garbage disposal! Don't you know anything?" while Ex and my Dad attempted to stanch the flow of the putrid fluid quickly filling the kitchen floor. At one point, Ex pulled me aside and growled at me, "This is all your fault. Thanks a lot for ruining Christmas."

Long story short, Ex and my Dad went to work fixing the problem. After over an hour of toiling beneath the sink, they actually did a pretty good job in preventing any further explosions until we could get a plumber to ensure that the garbage disposal would no longer blow our house into the stratosphere.

So while Ex was clapping my Dad on the back and they were laughing about what a good job two executives were doing at something about which they should know nothing, Ex was periodically pulling me aside and cussing me out or generally blaming me for everything from the garbage disposal to global warming. At one point, he dragged me into the garage and made me cry when he said so many "F*ck you!!"s that I lost count at 12. All the while, building his camaraderie with my Dad.

Hence, my suspicions of manipulation here. I don't think that Ex is a necessarily a bad person, but I think he's probably a sick person. His parents, with their accident and desire for undeserved sympathy, are true masters in the art of manipulation. (One night, his parents were having a screaming match. They called Ex on their speakerphone in the middle of it and he, in turn, put our phone on speaker so I could hear them. For 45 minutes, they called each other unspeakable names and demanded that Ex take a side. For that, I have true sympathy for the manipulation to which Ex has been exposed over the years.) Maybe it's some chromosomal abnormality or maybe it's learned, but Ex inherited their expertise. I think on that Christmas Eve, he knew I wouldn't say anything to my Dad about the way he'd treated me because truth be told, my Dad had a great time fixing the plumbing and had a great time with Ex. They were BFFs by the end of the debacle. The only person who seemed to be miserable was me. Well, and my mom, who saw that I was in some sort of distress and helped me tremendously by entertaining Ex's mother, keeping her away from me, but subjecting herself to the verbal diarrhea inevitably spewing from that woman's piehole.

I suppose time will reveal his motives. When I responded to his texts today, he said that he'd call soon so that we could continue to work towards a resolution. But I'm not sure if I'll be facing someone rational or just another explosion of goo with a few "F*ck you"s thrown in for good measure.