My wife called me that Friday morning asking in a panic for me to come home, so I left the family business that my father had left for me and my brother to run home because I felt something was up. Beth Tait was a stay at home mother that had never worked a day in our married life. She would never bother me at work unless it was something important. So, I knew it was serious.
I was wondering if something had happened to one of our teenage daughters at school. I was just hoping it was not as serious as she had made it sound. Both our daughters were very athletic so I was wondering if it might be a sports injury. My daughters were my life. Both were developing into becoming very beautiful women just like their mother.
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We were the biggest electrical company in this part of the state. I handled the commercial end my brother did the residential. Since we had taken over, we had more than tripled our volume each year for the last six years. My mother was very proud of both her sons for keeping her husband's lifelong dream alive.
Last year the company had made five million net after all the taxes were paid for the first time in its over fifty-year history. In the nine years since our father's death, we had made it into a very successful business. I estimated the current value of our father's business to be worth about twenty million.
Since John was the oldest, he was made the President by our mother after our father's death. She was still the major shareholder and controlled fifty-two percent. My brother and I each owned twenty-four percent. My dad had set it up that way to make sure our mother had security for the rest of her natural life.
When our father died my mother insisted that I assume the responsibility of looking after her personal investments Using her trusted investment broker, I had gone from the conservative approach to the aggressive. It had turned out very well for her.
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I came home to find the furniture and household movers there packing up the stuff my wife wanted taken out of our house. Beth was standing at the side of the road beside her recently obtained two thousand and twenty model car which I had bought for her, for cash.
Beth was leaving me for good and our daughters had already been relocated to their new living location without my knowledge or permission. She had kept them out of school today so that they could all make the move together, thus giving them the avoidance from the drama of seeing us break up. I realized very quickly she had done it this way deliberately so I could not talk to our two daughters about the situation.
"I'm sorry James, but I've fallen out of love with you and I'm in love with someone else," She said as she handed me the divorce petition papers. "You don't need to know who he is, because it really doesn't matter since I have already filed for divorce. I knew there was no easy way for me to do this, so my lover and I decided that it was best for all concerned to make our last contact as husband and wife brief as possible."
With that said she got into her car and drove off. As she drove away, I witnessed the end of our seventeen-year-old marriage. No real explanation, it was over and that was it. She had done it so coldly that I didn't even have a chance to find out what my daughter's view was on the whole situation.
The first thing that crossed my mind was that she had developed a relationship with someone she had met online, but then the girls would have told me if their mother was spending too much time chatting via the internet. That would have required a bit of distance and since it was not yet noon that was ruled out. Wherever she was moving to it was local.
I stood there for a second as two men moved another piece of our daughters' furniture out of the house. Then I realized that they would have to know where they were delivering the furniture to. I asked the driver and he gladly showed me the delivery address. I was in total shock because it was one that I knew all too well. I pulled out three twenties' out of my wallet and told him to put it towards a nice dinner with his wife.
I thanked him and asked him to lock up the doors when they were done. I drove back towards our family business making one stop on the way to verify that what he had shown me was true.
What I saw from making that one-stop at the side of the road tore my life as I knew apart for good. Not only was it devastating that she had walked out on me. It was made worse because of who she was doing it for.
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Beth was the girl that always seemed to tag along with her brother and me wherever we went. Until her early teens, the three of us were inseparable. Her brother was still a good friend, but he was now a lifer in the marines. He had taken the morals, principals, and standards he had been raised with, in his walk of life and applied them to a career that supported them. I was proud of my brother in law and had a deep respect for him.
The three of us started developing different interests in life as we went through the rest of our teens and had grown apart because of the normal things that happen in life. With my father's business booming most of my spare time was spent helping out in his growing business. At times I would be receiving stock for the next job he had to complete.
I had asked my father why he hadn't used his own name when he started the family business, He replied, "Tait and sons or variations of it have been used to much and most don't last. I want this business to go on long after I am gone. Parrish is your mother's maiden name and gives spirituality to it."
My older brother John, who is three years older than me, would take me with him when he was delivering stuff needed at various job sites. Because of his age, he got a wage, I didn't, but I used that time to learn as much as I could.
When I finished the tenth grade, I went into an apprenticeship program to earn my electrical license and at the same time continued my education online. I graduated the twelfth grade before I finished my apprenticeship and started getting a university degree in Business Management. It was using that skill, and basic knowledge as I was learning it, that helped my father to expand and grow his business.
John, on the other hand, worked his way up the latter the hard way. Learning every aspect of the family business by working and learning the best way of doing things with those he worked with. He also picked up quite a few of their bad habits along the way.
What separated my brother and I was that I started bidding and winning small commercial contracts that we brought in under budget, and at saving for our customers. It was an avenue that my father and brother knew very little about. The kind of word of mouth created by our approach to it gave us more growth than we could have wished for.
Our father always said I was the brain of the company; John was the brawn and it took the two to make our business successful. I was twenty years old living on my own when my brother called me one night because he was to damn drunk to drive home. He was at a wild private party in the middle of nowhere and didn't want to get busted by the cops, so I had gone out to save his worthless ass once again.
After loading his drunk ass into the back seat of the car I driving, a voice behind me said, "James can I get a ride home with you? My date is passed out somewhere and if I don't get home my dad will kill me."
Beth's father was a die-hard, old Christian conservative with a liberal point of view, as long as it did not conflict with his belief or his interpretation of what the bible said.
