I got a postcard recently from Trademasters - a heating/cooling contractor who works in the DC area - including Northern Virginia and Maryland.
Yes, I’m making sure I include a lot of search-engine fodder in this post.
Anyway, the postcard (from “Ashley and Angela”) suggests that it’s time to have my system checked before summer.
I don’t think so. At least, not by Trademasters.
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Barbara is my ex-wife. At some point, she decided our life together was not moving forward quickly enough to suit her. Whatever the hell that means. She wanted more of a commitment. Marriage is a commitment, I told her. When the time came for Barbara and me to settle up the inventory we had acquired in twelve years of marriage, guilt played heavily in my decision to be the one who moved out. I did not fight over the good-sized home, the big car, or much of the furniture. I did, however, retain the interest in a rental property Wesley and I had invested in. The top half of the rental duplex is where I now live. I also kept the boat – a 30-footer, bought used, that had seen better days.
She took it all, but the truth is that Barbara didn’t really want anything from me except the divorce. Seems she’d been seeing the owner of the real estate firm where she worked. After the smoke cleared, several of my friends told me they’d known for some time. One or two told me that Barbara had confided in them about the affair. Last to know, and all that. I didn’t see much of my “friends” after that.
In the month after the divorce was final, I spent a lot of time cleaning my half of the duplex. I mean the entire house. I cleaned out the little brown stains from the corners with a toothbrush. I scrubbed the tile floors of the kitchen and the utility room on my hands and knees with a brush, and then waxed the floors to a brilliant shine anyone who watches daytime television would be proud of.
I could see myself.
I shampooed the carpets, bought new curtains for the bedroom, and a new bedspread. I painted the trim, re-treated the deck, and cleaned up around the scrub that grows here. I replaced the refrigerator in the kitchen with a big, stainless commercial model, and I scrubbed as much of the corrosion as I could from my little boat.
I picked up an old Mustang for next to nothing, bumped a dent out of it, and painted it red.
I’m not sure exactly what caused my sudden interest in cleanliness, other than some Freudian reaction to one of my father’s favorite admonitions about “getting one’s house in order.”
I also cleaned out my desk at the television station where I worked. That wasn’t my choice, either. Sometimes, major life choices are forced upon you. The station had to break my contract to fire me. It wasn’t cheap for them – I wasn’t in any immediate danger of being broke. But it wasn’t retirement money, either. Continue reading »
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I found myself asking where I was when it must have happened, exactly what I was doing when she decided to step off the merry-go-round. I knew Maggie Whitehurst about as well as I knew anybody. I couldn’t imagine her committing suicide.
What I could imagine was that wherever she was, she’d be just a little bit frightened to be so far from home now.
Home is Virginia Beach, Virginia.
And one thing I really hadn’t imagined at all was that I would be fishing with her husband that night.
