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VICTOR
“That’ll be all, sir?”
I snapped out of the daydream and tried to refocus on the man in front of me. He was tall and gangly. Yet, he looked thirty-five and sixteen at the same time, and I couldn’t tell which.
“Huh? Oh, yeah. Yeah, this is it. Oh, and sixty on pump number eight,” I said, stumbling over my words as I tried to regain control over my own mind.
“You okay, sir?” he asked, a note of squeak in his voice making me lean toward the sixteen scale.
“Yeah, fine,” I said. “Just a long drive.”
“Oh, where you headed?” he asked.
“Texas,” I said. “Little town called Murdock.”
“That’s a long way, mister,” he said. “Drive safe.”
“It’s why I got these,” I said, shaking the twelve pack of energy drinks.
He laughed, and I smiled as best I could manage and headed out of the door. I knew the energy drinks were bad for me, but for a couple of years, I had been banned from drinking them by my now ex-wife, who refused to believe that anything that wasn’t her own personal favorite items should be inside the house.
For the first several years, she had been quite amiable and even funny. We’d spent lots of time joking about how people took life far too seriously, even when we were, in fact, working like people who took life way too seriously. When we got married, we both seemed to think life would just follow a pattern, a script almost. Assuming that one day we would be rich and successful and have two kids and a white picket fence and a dog and live the life you saw in magazines.
This was not how it worked out.
Instead of a marriage full of laughter, it had been a laughable excuse for a marriage for quite some time. We both worked constantly, rarely ever seeing one another except at the office or in bed. And bed was just a place we slept. For almost a decade, the two of us, both investment bankers, competed for clients at a consulting firm that we’d started, egging each other on to drive our mutual incomes higher and higher.
At first, it was fun. We were young and making a lot of money and had no responsibilities to anyone but ourselves. We moved to Baltimore and bought a giant house and fancy cars and spent every day building a company that we thought we’d be able to retire from at fifty and be multi-millionaires, ready to see the world and vacation on pink sand beaches until we croaked.
But the competition never seemed to stop. Neither did the grind. And when the going got tough, well, it just got tougher. We fought, usually over stupid things that we wouldn’t have foughtabout if we’d spent more time together. We stopped enjoying things together, preferring to spend our time apart instead of being forced to be together. Then we started sleeping separately. Always blaming late night work, I slept on the couch while she took the bed. I rationalized it as a hiccup we would overcome.
Eventually, I started seeing signs that she might have found a lover on the side, but I didn’t have time to confront her before she sat me down and told me she was unhappy. That had been a long night. She’d told me there was no one else, but I knew that if there was no one particular person, there might have been a few that just weren’t regulars. God knew I had the opportunity myself, but I just never took advantage it.
Maybe she never did either. but the constant text messages and the way she would hide away all the time got me suspicious. I was tempted to breach the marital trust and go through her phone or her email, but by the time I felt like I should, I realized it didn’t matter. If I didn’t trust her enough to think she was cheating on me, the marriage was already done.
So, when she told me she was unhappy, I agreed. So was I. I just didn’t really internalize how unhappy I was until I got away from her. I volunteered to take the vacation house we had bought the year before and sleep there. It was in Ocean City, Maryland, a good distance away from Baltimore, but I was willing to travel back and forth.
I was also willing to work things out if she wanted to try.
However after a week, she claimed that she thought I was only staying in Ocean City, so I could have women there that she didn’t know about. I told her she could watch the surveillance footage on an app at any time, showing the cameras at both doors, but her mind was made up. She didn’t trust me, and shedidn’t think things were going to work out. Just a week of trying to live separate was enough to convince her that we should just end things.
There was a problem, though. We had done everything together. The business, the properties, the loans. Everything was in both of our names.
That led to a messy divorce which lasted for a year and left me giving almost everything up just so I could be done with it. My lawyer’s advice was to sell her the rest of my stake in the company, get the hell out of town, and forget she even existed, as if that was possible. The money I would make from the sale would ensure that I could do anything I wanted, and she would be happy to take it if it meant a quick and final end to the marriage.
I’d called my friends back home and solicited their advice before I made a decision. Then I called all the investors that had worked with me and told them that I was leaving the firm, and that their portfolios would be exclusively Sarah’s. They all seemed to know what that meant. Some of them seemed like they had even been expecting it. I hadn’t known it was that obvious.
I took my lawyer’s advice and sold everything I’d spent a decade building to Sarah, letting her take it all, including the house and most of the cars, while I took cold, hard cash and my pickup. She hated the pickup anyway. She often said that there was no reason for it, since we lived in Baltimore, and it was just me ‘cosplaying as a cowboy.’ There was no playing. I was a Texas boy through and through, no matter how long I’d lived in the Northeast suburbs.
She didn’t bother to go through the possessions I packed in the back and in the trailer attached to it, though. She knew Iwouldn’t take anything she wanted to keep. I was a minimalist in a lot of ways, and I had no desire to continue any fights with her, so I wouldn’t be tempted to take anything that she would argue with me about. Plus, she hated most of the things that were ‘my’ possessions anyway, calling them tacky or low-class.
At least I still had my friends in Texas. As a matter of fact, now I hadallmy friends in Texas. Camden never left, but in the last few years, Graham, Ryan, and Mark had moved back. Mark was the most recent to come back, ending up hooking up with Camden’s sister Carmela, which I thought was hilarious. She had been doe-eyed over him since she was in pigtails.
Ryan and Graham had found partners, too, leaving Camden and me as the only bachelors of the group now. I had no intention of changing my status for a while. After a decade of marriage, I was quite content to spend a little time answering to no one but myself.
On the rare occasions that I had gotten away from work over the years, I went back to Murdock to visit. Granted, the last time I had been down there was a bit ago, but with everything going on in my life, I figured at least a semi-permanent living arrangement in my old hometown might be just what the doctor ordered.
