Chapter 3: Julie

† Wednesday, November 8, 2023 (one day before the explosion).

Julie is sweeping leaves from her back porch in the last hour of good light before sunset. She just finished bringing her more sensitive potted plants from the porch into her garage.

“There’s no reason to risk them if the forecast is right,” she thought.

While driving home from work, local radio warned her of the first freezing temperatures of the late autumn.

// “Tonight’s forecast calls for overnight lows in the high 20’s throughout northeastern Indiana and northwestern Ohio, with a 50% chance of light snow showers over the next 48 hours. Here in Fort Wayne, we should see no lower than 28° and a high of...” //

“At least I remembered to get my tires replaced before the roads got sloppy. One more thing that I still miss since being on my own—all those ordinary responsibilities that Nate used to handle. This evening, I’m so hungry and tired. I don’t even want to bother with dinner; I’ll just make myself a sandwich and get under the quilt with my Kindle.”

An hour later, Julie, a fast reader, is three chapters further into her novel. A small woman, she’s swallowed up inside a bulky leather recliner, furniture more suited to the massive man who had purchased it—her ex-husband Nate.

Along with a small electric heater, her favorite Amish quilt is tucked around her to stave off the chill of the huge and drafty “great room” of her home. It was far too much house for a single woman, but she received the property in the divorce.

She kept her thermostat set low because the furnace burned shocking amounts of fuel to heat rooms that she wasn’t even using. A floor lamp supplied a puddle of light just around the recliner, but the huge living room’s far corners remained dark.

Nate

† June 2016.

Nathaniel Kaiser was an executive for Apogee-Markham, a large industrial corporation in the area. Back when he completed college, he planned to be the same kind of executive as his father. He wanted the big corner office, the big luxury car, the big luxury house, the big-breasted secretary (we’ll come back to her later), and the stay-at-home trophy wife to raise his big family.

Nate was big himself, 260 lbs. and six and a half feet tall, blonde-haired and blue-eyed, all possibly reflections of his Germanic ancestry. He was already rising through the corporate ranks when (at age 30) he married the petite Julie Lehman, who was then just 24 years old. Their size difference was memorable; it seemed his nipples were about at her eye level when they stood side by side.

At their lavish wedding reception, the whole room fell abruptly silent when the elaborate cake was brought out. As is often seen on wedding cakes, there were two small figurines standing on the top tier’s frosting: a little white-gowned bride stood next to a tuxedo-clad groom.

On this cake, though, the bride was about two inches tall while the adjoining groom was five inches tall.

At first reaction, Julie’s face went scarlet. But then she exploded with laughter, needing to clutch at Nate’s arm to keep her balance. Relieved, their guests all laughed with them.

“I’ll get you for that, Lena!” (Julie’s maid of honor, whom she KNEW must have been responsible for the joke.)

† Wednesday, November 8, 2023.

On this cold November night, that wedding was 7-1/2 years back in now-divorced Julie’s past. Checking the time shown in the upper corner of the screen, she put her Kindle aside.

“Ten-thirty, time for bed.”

An hour later, her body made only a small lump in the middle of the huge mattress. Although she slept nude, a big pile of woolen blankets kept her sleeping warmly in the frigid master bedroom.

Hardwood Court

Julie’s house is the third of three adjacent properties developed on a tiny cul de sac in the outskirts (edges) of Fort Wayne. Many years earlier, a subdivision developer had purchased an abandoned cherry orchard on Sand Hill Road. From City Hall, he obtained new zoning and permits to build eight luxury homes on large lots arrayed around a new bulb-ended short street he named “Hardwood Court.” But only three of the eight lots (along the eastern side of the little street) were cleared off and built upon.

Turning from Sand Hill Rd., the first house on the right at 1 Hardwood Ct. is owned by Laurene and Elbert Plackett, who had retired to Florida and left their property in the hands of their dissolute adult son Stanley, age 38.

Number 3 was a rental, leased by Sylvie and Theo and their daughter. Cosette was enrolled in the local public primary school.

At the bulb end of the little street was Number 5, Julie Kaiser’s house.

All three of these luxury homes were far too large for the two single adults and the three Garniers, but that’s how these residents’ lives had unfolded.