“My ex-wife, Becky, she’s in trouble. Bad trouble. I don’t know where to start. I think I should start by telling you about us. Me. Maybe I should tell you about me.
“One of the problems with growing up in a small town, some of us just don’t think big enough. My dad had a small ranch. I played football in high school and helped my dad and the idea of growing into that ranch worked for me. I had a serious crush on Becky, who was a year younger, but I was planning to go to college and we were going to get married after. But being the genius I am, I got her pregnant. My dad’s real old-fashioned, he told me to quit school, get a job or two, marry her and sleep in the bed I made.
“Getting married, even though we were way too young and it was way too hard, that wasn’t so bad. We lived in my folks’ basement for a year or so, then we rented part of a house from a widow and it was pretty awful so I fixed it up until it was pretty darn nice. By the time Jackson was a year old the folks had come around and my dad and brother helped me fix up the house. In fact, I bet they paid for as many materials as I did. So, life was okay—I worked a lot, but I had good jobs. I drove a trash truck for a few years—dirty job but damn, the county pays good and the benefits are great. Then I started driving the plow and that pays great.
“We had Nikki and were a real content little family just barely old enough to vote. Then, after that there were a couple of accidents—Brenda and Zach. I don’t know if it was me or four kids or just the natural order of things, but when Zach was about four, Becky had had enough. She wanted a life. Can’t say I blame her. Four kids and a husband who works all the time—not much of a life.”
“What about you?” Cal asked. “You had just as many kids. And you worked all the time.”
“Yeah, but I had the life I wanted,” he said with a shrug. “Still do. Pretty much.”
“So you’ve been divorced how long?” Cal asked.
“She left about eight years ago, we’ve been divorced about six years now. We did it ourselves. Becky’s never been far away. She moved to Aurora, worked and went to school, came back to Timberlake and stayed with us all the time. At one point she thought it’d be a good idea if the girls lived with her and the boys with me.” He snorted and shook his head. “We tried it, but it didn’t last long. But she shows up regularly. In fact, sometimes it’s just like we’re married, only nicer.”
Cal thought it might be impolite to ask, but it sounded like those were conjugal visits.
They sat in a booth in the back of the diner, ordered pie and coffee and Cal waited for Tom to get to the point. Instead he talked about his on-again-off-again relationship with his wife.
“And now Becky’s in jail,” he finally said. He hung his head.
“Ho, boy,” Cal said. “For?”
“Solicitation.” He shook his head. “I said it had to be a mistake, she wouldn’t do that. She said it was all a mistake. And it had been a mistake the first two times, too. It’s the third time. She said they’re going to make her go to jail. She needs help. She called me for help. What the hell am I gonna do? And if she’s in jail, the kids are gonna know something is terrible wrong.”
Cal’s mouth didn’t even hang open in awe, though he was a little surprised. Tom and his kids seemed so homespun, such simple rural folks without the kind of problems they have in the city. But given Cal’s experience as a defense attorney, he’d seen and heard just about everything.
“I never suspected anything like this, not in a million years. I thought she lived pretty good for an office worker. But she’s so beautiful, I thought she had boyfriends. Generous boyfriends. She didn’t talk about her love life, but I figured she had one even though I didn’t have one. But she could afford things. Nice things.”
“Did you pay support?” Cal asked.
“I didn’t really pay alimony,” he said. “We didn’t have an arrangement for that since I had the kids. But sometimes she ran short and I gave her money. I paid some child support for that little while when she had the girls. I wanted to be sure they were getting what they needed, you know?”
“Your original agreement is for joint custody?” Cal asked.
“We wrote it that way, yeah. The idea was to help each other out with the kids.”
“What about property?” Cal asked.
“What property?” he asked with a laugh.
“Furniture? Cars?”
He shrugged. “I told her to take anything she wanted, I didn’t want to fight. What I wanted was for her to stay.”
“Have you gotten over that now?”
“I guess it’s about time, isn’t it? I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to let the kids visit her now. And her coming to us?” He shook his head. “I can’t think about that right now. Zach and Brenda, twelve and fourteen, at the absolute worst time for teenagers, they don’t need this. But she loves her kids and they love her. I want to believe it’s a mistake, but three mistakes? Man, I’m so screwed.”