THE WEDDING PLANNING was moving along.
Tonya told friends she was envisioning a large affair, more than three hundred guests, the party of the year, since neither she nor Charlie had ever been married before. They had decided the reception would be at Shuckers, the place of their meeting, courtship, and engagement. “Announcement will be in paper in January,” they posted in October on their shared Facebook page, but they encouraged interested guests to RSVP right away, via e-mail. They needed to be able to estimate food and drink costs, plus, “security will be tight,” they warned. Some folks were surprised that they would even have three hundred people to invite. In the 2010 census, the entire population of Tasley was three hundred people.
Word also got around that the wedding would have a theme: “November Rain,” like the 1991 Guns N’ Roses power ballad, and that Tonya would be wearing a dress like model Stephanie Seymour had worn in the music video, short in the front but with a long train in the back. This, too, seemed a little odd—in the video, Seymour is an unhappy bride who dies at the end—but it was a first marriage for both of them, so they could be excused for being a little full of it. Still, security at a wedding? Who did Charlie and Tonya think they were?
Jeff Beall heard Charlie was scrounging around for extra jobs, so he could afford the dress Tonya had in mind. Charlie told him it would run in the thousands. Beall had always tried to throw auto-repair work Charlie’s way, but he was horrified by the expense of the wedding. He tried to make his feelings known: he didn’t like Tonya. Something seemed weird about her. Something seemed weird about the whole situation. Charlie was upset at the suggestion that the wedding was an extravagantly delusional fantasy. The men’s friendship dissolved.
WHEN THINGS FALL APART, it sometimes happens quickly, and it sometimes happens slowly, and it sometimes happens so that you find yourself in the middle of a big pile of shit that is so deep and all-encompassing that you don’t even realize you’re in it.
The first thing that started to go wrong, Charlie thought later, when he would look back on it, had to do with Tonya’s older son. Charlie had fallen hard for those boys, just like he had for their mother. But it was apparent to him that the older boy, now thirteen, was troubled. He was acting out at school, he was acting out at home. He took a swing at Charlie once, with the sharp edge of a skateboard; it sliced Charlie’s back from shoulder to waist. He jumped out of their moving car one afternoon when he was being taken somewhere he didn’t want to go. Tonya was sick about it, and Charlie was sick about her, and neither one of them knew the best way to deal with the behavior. Out of desperation, Charlie tried calling his old friend with the state police, Glenn Neal. “Can you come over and scare the shit out of him?” he asked, “because this kid is acting up in school.”
“I’m not going to do that—I don’t want him to be afraid of the police,” Neal said. “But I will come over and talk to him with you.” Neal went over and sat in the living room and tried to have a heart-to-heart with Tonya’s oldest boy. Neal told him to listen to the teachers, and if he didn’t agree with them, to come home and talk to Tonya so she could fight his battle for him. He thought the kid seemed a little more troubled than a typical kid, but hoped that it was still probably nothing he wouldn’t grow out of. “Don’t put your mama through this,” he finished. “She’s trying as hard as she can.”
Doctors threw a storm of diagnoses at them, but nobody really knew for sure what was going on. The boy was a good kid, sick and apologetic about his own behavior. But it wore on them. When he acted out at school, Tonya or Charlie would be called to pick him up, and after they’d both missed too many shifts, they decided it would be better for Tonya to quit her job and dedicate herself full time to his care. After the problems got worse, they decided to remove him from school entirely and start a homeschooling program. That was the unspoken reason why they decided Tonya should open up her clothing shop. Working her own hours was the only way to guarantee that she’d be able to be around for her kids.
Charlie’s relationship with his own daughter was disintegrating in a different way. Her once frequent visits to the house had slowed and then stopped; Charlie told himself it was because she was getting older and would rather hang out with her friends than her dad, but later he heard that the girl’s mother didn’t trust him, didn’t trust Tonya, and thought they were both on drugs.
All of this might have been bearable except that in May of 2012, Charlie’s mother died. It was the same cancer that had already taken her sister and brother, Charlie’s favorite uncle. The blow was staggering. Charlie’s mother had not only been his unfailing supporter, but also the string that bound him to the rest of the family, his stepfather and half-siblings. Without them, Tonya was his only family. And because Tonya’s own mother had died, and her sister was estranged, he was hers.
And all of this might have been bearable, or even solvable, if they’d had any money to put toward fixing it. But Tonya had quit her nursing job so she could be more available for her kids, and the clothing store wasn’t making any profits. The payments on the furniture sets they’d purchased in optimism were due now, and they didn’t have the money. Charlie was picking up the jobs he could, but Accomack’s perpetual recession left other people’s wallets thin, too, and there were only so many cars he could repaint. Charlie knew the deli counter guy at Food Lion. He sometimes passed Charlie recently expired meat, which Charlie used to feed their animals. The meat was perfectly fine, the guy had told Charlie—it was just government regulations that forced him to throw the food out. One night Charlie found himself picking through the dumpsters behind Food Lion looking for perfectly fine meat, not for the pets, but for his family.
Even the house seemed to be turning against them. Tonya had always been fanatical about keeping up with cleaning—she’d holler if the forks were put in the knife tray or vice versa; she said her dad had been that way, too, which was one of the few things Charlie had ever heard her say about her father. But they’d acquired a Chihuahua that kept pooping on the floor, and it made the house stink, and the very space seemed like it was collapsing in on them.