Chapter 1

The ship had docked and I was standing by the gangway with my luggage waiting to get off the ship. Where the fuck was Tina? It was my first cruise and it was my cruise from hell. Just then she walked up to me without her luggage.

“Where’s your luggage?” I asked.

“Tom, Wes and I are staying aboard ship and we are going back out for another cruise. Wes’s cabin was available for us to stay in. I will be back in a week,” she stated.

I gave her a pissed off look and just nodded my head. I handed her an envelope with two thousand dollars in it. “Here, this should cover my share of the cruise. You will have to cover all your own expenses,” I said.

I turned and walked down the gangway and off the ship. I hailed a cab and told the driver to take me to the airport.

I guess I should back up and start at the beginning and tell you how all this mess started.

Allow me to introduce myself, my name is Thomas Paris; but everyone called me Tom. I stand five feet-ten inches tall and weight one hundred and ninety pounds. I am sixty-five years old and I just recently retired after forty-four years of working. I worked as a heavy equipment operator. I still work sometimes when my old company is shorthanded and needed some help. Even at sixty-five I’m in very good shape compared to most guys my age. I work out at least three days a week at our local health club. Also, our high school has open pool three nights a week and I go there to swim.

I have been married twice. The first was to Dianne, she was my love during our high school years. After high school, I did some odd jobs for a year until I went to an Operating Engineering training school. I learned how to operate heavy equipment. I got a job in construction and worked for the same company until I retired. Dianne and I got married a couple years out of high school. Our marriage lasted a few years and then we seemed to just flame out for some sort of a reason and got divorced. My second marriage was to Jody. We were married for thirty-five years. She was married twice before and had four girls from the first and a boy from the second marriages. We had one son together. Our life together flourished and we were both very happy.

Eventually all good things must come to an end and it did when she got the dreaded news she had cancer. We fought it together for a while, until it became too difficult for her. Finally, she gave up and passed away. To say that I was devastated would be an understatement. I took it very hard and didn’t do much for the next six to eight months. Finally, one day I had a heart to heart talk with myself. I came to an understanding that Jody would want me to stop feeling sorry for myself and begin to make a new life.

So, I joined a couple of internet dating sites, where I proceed to date several different women for the next year, until I met Kelly Christina Bundy. She went by the nickname of Tina, she didn’t like being confused with the TV character in Married with Children. They say opposites are drawn to each other, like a moth to a flame: which must have been the case with Tina and myself. I liked to golf and bowl and watch sports on TV. She liked to shop and watch those damn reality shows on TV, which I hated. So, how did we manage to stay together? I don’t have a good answer, we just clicked.

After dating for almost six months, I moved into her condo with her in late June. I put my house up for sale, I was getting tired of taking care of the house anyway. It will be nice to have some else cut the grass and shovel the snow. Her condo was small with two bedrooms and it was a little over a thousand square feet of space. Not a lot of room for two people.