"Is forty really old?" I asked myself while standing in front of the dresser mirror trying my best to suck in those extra two inches. Glancing at the hair, there was no grey, not even a hint and except for just the slightest, tiniest crow's feet coming out of the side of my eyes, there were no wrinkles. Twelve ounce curls and Charlie's Barbeque once a week were the excuse for the two inches. I guess good genes kept the hair color. My Dad didn't go grey until his sixties if that was any consolation.
Charlene's excuse was that she was tired of growing old, tired of having an old truck mechanic coming home reminding her of what she thought she could have had in another life. At least that is what she complained about more often than not. She got so tired of it that one day I came home and half of our household had been moved to destinations elsewhere. It didn't matter where. It just wasn't here.
The papers came the day after and I can't say they were brutal. I got half the equity in the house, an equal split on savings and she didn't touch my shop. The house was actually paid for and I ended up talking an equity loan to buy her share. Since she made about the same income working as a loan administrator at a local bank, alimony wasn't in question.
We had built the house years ago thinking there would be a big family to fill it however that never happened once we found out there was a plumbing issue with Charlene. She seemed to take it well and we never considered adopting kids so we ended up with a four bedroom, three bath house on a tree shaded corner lot that just grew in value. She would get $200K out of it and I'd get another mortgage to start paying at nearly 40 years of age.
After getting the papers I didn't see her until we sat across from each other in my attorney's office.
"You are looking well, Charlene."
"You are looking as usual, Mike." She replied with a deadpan expression.
She was dressed well. I suppose she could afford it at that point. Being tired of one man after 17 years didn't keep her from getting energized with another. Apparently she found that elusive other life with a real estate broker who catered to broken middle aged dreams and sad sack administrators. Unfortunately, she started her new life a couple months before informing me of it.
I don't know why she wanted the meeting since I was willing to sign the papers as soon as I received them. I sure didn't want the divorce but I knew Charlene too. Once she gets something in her head, absolutely nothing stops her from moving on whatever is motivating her. So, the divorce was a done deal once she had the papers served.
"Mike, do you know why I'm divorcing you?" She asked, again with that deadpan.
I looked at her carefully. It had been three months since she served me and I just wanted to get this over with.
"Nope."
I looked at my attorney and hers and told her I just wanted to put my John Hancock on three sets of them and go to the diner for a burger and a beer.
"Well, don't you want to know?" The deadpan look was gone and concern was mounting.
"Charlene, at this point I could care less. Let's just sign and move on. You look happy as shit and I'll be damned if I'm going to waste a minute wondering why you do the things you do. I'm done."
My attorney pushed the copies over to me and I signed all three but Charlene wasn't done.
"I'm not signing until you hear me out. So sit back down and take it like a man."
"Charlene, maybe your new man will take that shit from you but you should damn well know your old poor truck mechanic of a soon to be ex-husband isn't going to give a rat's ass what you have to say."
With that I stood up to leave and reached for the door.
"That's fine. You can move in that whore right now if you haven't already."
Well, that stopped me up short and against my better judgement, I looked right at her.
"What in hell are you talking about?"
She didn't skip a beat.
"I'm talking about you and Colleen Whitmore. You have been fucking that whore for a year now. Hell, half the town knows it. That's the real reason I left your sorry ass. You thought you were slick and I didn't know shit. Well, you were wrong. Yeah, I was tired and bored but we could have worked through that. Instead, you took up with that bitch."
She stopped talking at that point with an expression of anger and sorrow pasted on her face and to be honest, I didn't really know what to say at first. I didn't think she knew anything about Colleen. I looked Charlene right in the eye.
"Charlene, you don't know the first fucking thing you are talking about."
She interrupted me and pushed a printed photo across the table. While still standing, I picked it up.
It was a picture of a small dark haired woman, about my age, with her arms around the neck of a taller man who was leaning down and kissing her on the forehead. The woman was Colleen Whitmore and the man was Mike Donaldson. That was me in the picture with the Donaldson Truck Services work shirt on.
I looked up at Charlene and glared at her.
"Like I said, Charlene, you don't have a fucking clue what you are talking about."
I threw the picture across the table at her.
"Charlene 'Whatever your name is gonna be', you are the only one in this marriage that fucked somebody else. You are the only one that lit it up for some strange. When you get home tonight and your new stud man is nailing your whoring ass, you remember that. You're the cheating fuck, not me.
In the meantime, you make sure you stay to hell away from Ms. Whitmore. She deserves a hell of a lot more respect than I'm getting. With that said, I'm out of here."
I looked over at my attorney who was a bit confused himself and I told him I'd call him in a bit. Charlene looked like a doe in the headlights as I opened the door and left the office. It was a quick walk to the diner and since it was close to lunch, I had that burger and beer.
I grabbed a window booth and watched Charlene and her lawyer leave the office across the street. They both hugged and Charlene stepped into a new Chrysler 300 and pulled out of the parking lot waiting for a break in traffic. She looked up through her windshield and right into my eyes in the diner. I don't know what I saw in her face but I didn't blink as she turned into traffic and headed down the street.
The Chrysler 300 belonged to Dickey Johnson, one of our esteemed sleazy Real Estate agents in town. He had a history with a couple married women before Charlene but that didn't seem to slow her down. Because she arranged the appraisals for many of the real estate sales in the area, Dickey was a familiar face at the bank and to Charlene. I always considered the little cheese dick a shady bitch of a man.
After 17 years it was done. In 90 days, I'd be officially divorced. After lunch I walked over to my old bank, Charlene didn't work here, and had my old friend Bill Peterson draw up papers for an appraisal and an equity loan for 25% of the value. I'd cover the balance out of what was left of my savings. Charlene had agreed to let Bill make the appraisal. He was an honest layman pastor in addition to being a banker and we both knew and trusted him from way back. In 90 days, Charlene would get her $200K. I called my attorney on the cell and explained what was going on with the Colleen issue and he basically told me what I already knew. Wait the three months and it would be all over.
Divorce is an odd thing because it affects so many people in so many different ways. I can't count the number of people I know in town who have been divorced, some two and three times. I guess I never expected it of my marriage because I thought most of the marriage was pretty good. That said, I can't say I was much surprised when Charlene left. We had been pretty downhill for the past couple of years. I don't mean rock bottom but slowly drifting off in other directions I guess.
That afternoon, the shop was slow so I headed back to the house and mulled about thinking over the earlier events. Charlene really didn't know what in hell she was talking about. Colleen was about the oldest friend I had. We were first introduced on the school bus while traveling to third grade a long time ago. All through school we were the best of friends and by the time hormones started kicking in we began drifting away from each other. Boyfriends or girlfriends interfered with our time together until we finally ended up going in different directions.
I met Charlene while I was going to Diesel School in Nashville and we hit it off right away. She was almost the complete opposite of Colleen in that she was brash, opinionated; mule headed and set in her ways when her mind was made up. But, for some reason I liked that in her. It meant I didn't need to waste time fighting to get my way. I knew better. We ended up getting married and settling back in the town I grew up in.
Colleen had gone to college and taken a teaching job on the other side of the state and eventually married some fellow she worked with. We would run into each other every couple years or so but even that fell off about ten years ago and I had never introduced Charlene to her, I guess because I never had the opportunity.
One day about a year ago, a Dodge Ram 2500 Diesel Quad Cab pulled into my shop lot and I watched this little tiny woman crawl out of the cab of that truck. She was wearing jeans tucked into a pair of cowboy boots with sunglasses on her face. I had never seen her before on the lot and when she walked into the customer service area she walked up to me at the counter and lifted the glasses off her face and our eyes met.
"Sweet Jesus ... Mike, it's you" was all she said.
"Charlene, you are looking real good. How are you doing?" I said in reply as I came around the counter to give her a big hug.
I brought her around to my office and got her a cup of coffee as we caught up on the lost years. She had moved back into her mom's old house up past the high school but hadn't settled in yet. Between wrapping up her job back in Knoxville and getting things moved over here, life had not allowed her to slow down.
"So, what brought you back to Cordova, Colleen?"
