LITTLE ROCK — The papers came the day before Thanksgiving.
It wasn’t like Ronnie wasn’t expecting them. She’d told him what she intended to do, and even though she’d said that before there was a finality in her voice he hadn’t heard before. There was no heat in it, and he figured the anger had froze up and there was nothing he could do but leave it be. And hope she’d change her mind, though he’d never known hoping to do much good.
But when they arrived he didn’t open them. He just let them lay on the table for awhile, and imagined how crisp and expensive the vanilla-colored paper was likely to be. He imagined there would be an embossed legal seal, maybe with gold foil like in those Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes mailings they used to send out before Ed McMahon died. “You may already be a winner!” they’d say, and Ronnie always thought that was misleading. “You are almost certainly a loser!” would have been more like it.
Anyway he picked up the envelope and weighed it in his hand, and then set it aside. It didn’t matter if he read it or not. He’d seen in the movies where people avoided process servers; they made it seem like some game of legal tag, like that if a person couldn’t be tricked into taking the papers then maybe it didn’t count somehow. But it counted, it was like a come-due bill and ignoring it wasn’t going to help. There was no wishing it away.
Ronnie guessed he understood.It was all about his failure.
His failure to provide her with a real house, for one-though he didn’t really understand that. A manufactured house could be just as good, and it stood out in the midst of acres and acres that he was buying, alongside the bought-and-paid-for barn. He was up on his loan, ahead even, and they had a satellite dish. It wasn’t his fault that the cell phone service was spotty, and besides they had a land line. He thought their setup was better than any little house in any little town.
But he knew what he thought didn’t really count anymore.
And he knew that the trailer wasn’t the prime failure anyway.
Ronnie thought that maybe there was something wrong with him that he’d go off and cheat on her the way he had. He wasn’t the sort to cheat on anything else, he’d always paid what he’d owed and given his best effort at whatever job someone was paying him to do. He always liked things simple that way, he did what he was supposed to do and if he could muster it a little more. And maybe that didn’t make him good exactly, but it made him better than some he knew.
So he didn’t understand why it was different in the other situation. Maybe it was because he had been so serious as a young man and that he’d never really had much experience with girls. Ronnie’d never had much experience because he hadn’t had much opportunity, though it seemed to him that there were a lot of guys who had a lot less going for them who hadn’t had any problem finding women to keep them company.
He was nearly 40 years old when he married her. And her first husband had done her dirty, in more than one sense. Tried to cut her out of some money, tried to work things around before he served her withpapers-he felt a little guilty at the little hop his heart took when he thought about how that day must have felt-while in the meantime he’d all but set up house in Texas with this other woman.
Her ex tried to beat her out of child support.(Her ex wasn’t good about calling his daughter on her birthday, either. Her ex was, if anyone wanted to know the truth, pretty sorry-but Ronnie’d never say so in front of the little girl. Whatever else he was, the man was after all still her father no matter what.)
Ronnie wasn’t like her ex. He didn’t cheat that way. That wasn’t him.
But he’d be the first to admit he’d been foolish.
And, at first, he thought that there was something to it, that maybe his life had swung around in some wonderful way he never would’ve predicted for himself. For a few weeks he felt nervously happy, jumpy and silly, like a shook-up bottle of Coca-Cola. It was a different kind of feeling for him, and he had some trouble keeping it to himself.
And so he didn’t. After a day or two of grinning like an idiot and feeling antsy around the house, he sat her down and told her it wasn’t anybody’s fault but that he’d met someone. And he understood that it was hard news but he thought he owed it to her to tell her straight up. It was the way a man did business. With his head up and his eyes clear.
That was when he heard the hot words. He didn’t blame her for what she called him, but he figured he was only doing what was best for both of them. She told him to go if he was going, and so he went.
A week later, Ronnie realized his mistake. He was too old to live out of a suitcase, and his new friend wasn’t at all sure she was ready for exclusivity. He didn’t really like to hear her talk either, about things she didn’t really know about.
And he was homesick, missing the life he’d so bravely jettisoned. He missed that little girl. He missed his wife and all the domestic irritations that piled up during the day.
He did what he had to do. He called up and begged to come home. And she let him, though she told himshe didn’t know if she could ever get over it. He told her he understood that.
And so he moved back in, and kept his head down and tried to make it up to her in a thousand different little ways while at the same time trying not to seem to be trying. And she’d just look at him with her face less dour than blank and he’d feel so small thinking about the hurt he caused.
The last months hadn’t been easy. He felt her eyes on him but he didn’t have any words that didn’t seem to make thing worse so he swallowed anything he might have thought he had to say and trudged out to the barn to work, or rode out into the woods on his Kawasaki Mule to get away from the crushing lonesomeness he felt watching the two of them.
And then he came home and found them gone. They left his trailer on his land, beside his barn. Where they were he didn’t exactly know, which served him right, he guessed, though he didn’t know exactly how he could have done things different, given how dumb he was about some things. He couldn’t blame her, but he really couldn’t blame himself either, knowing what he knew.
He was a long way from perfect. He wasn’t pretty or bright, or even especially interesting. He was, as Tammy Wynette sang, “just a man.”
And winter was coming on.
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Perspective, Pages 82 on 11/28/2010