Chapter 1

Ray and I have known each other all our lives. Our parents were best friends and next door neighbors so we didn’t have any choice but to try and get along. But for some reason, and I don’t know if either one of us could say what it was, we never liked each other. We maintained an uneasy truce and a less than friendly rivalry from the time we first started playing together at our parents’ insistence. Even back then, though, even at the ages of three or four we didn’t like each other. But we lived in a very small town so we had to learn to get along despite the way we felt. I don’t know the population of our town. It’s less than five thousand. I think it’s less than four thousand. We have one main street with about a dozen stores, a small bank and a Post Office. The town has one grocery store at either end and one gas station at either end. There is one café where all the old folks gather in the morning and there’s a local version of a Dairy Queen on the edge of town where the kids gather in the spring, summer and early fall when it’s open. It closes in the winter. The nearest mall and the nearest theater are both in the city, almost sixty miles away.

We have a high school and kids come from a half a dozen towns in the area to attend. We also have one grade school. They built a new one, a larger one, a few years ago and tore down the one we went to.

They have added on to the high school. The year I graduated there were sixty-seven kids in our graduating class. It isn’t that much bigger now, though. I think I read that the size of the graduating class this year will be ninety-two kids.

We graduated from high school and Ray and I both went away to college. Ray’s dad owned the town’s only hardware store out on the edge of town and was doing well. He put Ray through college and when he graduated Ray planned on coming back and going to work for his dad.

I had to drop out after one semester. My dad had worked all of his adult life at the town’s one industry, a small, locally owned plant making high quality wood furniture. They made good stuff and had an excellent reputation. But much of the work was done by skilled craftsmen and it was labor intensive. They reached a point that they couldn’t compete with mass produced Chinese imports and went bankrupt.

It was a shame for two reasons. That company had been making high quality furniture for almost two centuries. They had a great reputation but a small client list. They just couldn’t compete with cheap imports. But the worst reason is a little more personal. My dad lost his job and his pension and his whole idea of who he was. I lost my ability to afford to go to college.

I came home from college after one semester and started looking for work. I hated to do it, but the only job I could find was working for Ray’s father in the hardware store. It wasn’t that I hated working for Ray’s father. I loved him like a father. Mr. Nash and I were very close. I often got the impression he and I were closer than he was to his own son. It was just the idea that once he graduated it was understood Ray would be coming back to that store hanging over my head that made the otherwise great job uncomfortable. The thought of having to work for Ray gave me nightmares.

I worked hard and learned the business pretty fast. But I dreaded the day Ray would come home from college and go into the business. I still saw him when he came home to visit. We didn’t like each other any more now than we did when we were kids. We were civil, at least most of the time. But we still don’t like each other.

One problem we have is that we still have the same friends. So whenever Ray came home from college if there was a party or just a few guys getting together then more often than not both of us were there.

All through school we had competed in everything. We competed for grades. We competed in sports. We competed for girls. When we got cars we nearly killed ourselves racing on the back roads. Most of our friends thought it was amusing. They knew we competed in everything. But they thought it was a friendly rivalry. It wasn’t. We couldn’t stand each other.

Ray met a girl in college, Kathy. She was a beautiful blonde from upstate. She was smart and funny and personable. I never knew what she saw in him. But they got married right after they graduated from college. They came back to town and Ray’s dad helped him build a nice little house on an acre of land on a hill by the river just outside of town.

Ray came to work for his dad and it became my job to teach him the business. I was his teacher, but he was my boss. I tried not to let my resentment show. But we didn’t get along any better now than we did in the past.

The trouble was, I didn’t have any choice but to put up with his shit and suck it up. This wasn’t just the only decent job in town. It was the only decent job in this part of the state, at least for now. My only other options were to either leave the state to find work or to get a minimum wage job at one of the dairy farms outside of town milking cows and shoveling shit. I used to work on some of those farms during my summer vacations when I was in high school. It was actually pretty nice work. I enjoyed it. But it was hard work, the hours sucked, and the money was not quite enough to survive on. And there was no way of working your way up the food chain unless you could afford to by the farm.

So, I put up with Ray and kept my mouth shut. I don’t think Ray’s parents or mine had ever been aware of the true state of friction existing between us. I think that before very long though, Ray’s father, Mr. Nash, became aware of it. There were several instances at work when he intervened on my behalf when Ray was giving me a hard time about something.

Ray had been pretty wild before he went away to college. He went through girlfriends like a hot knife through butter. I doubt if he ever went with a girl for longer than two weeks. I heard some disturbing stories about him later, about some of the things he tried to make the girls do. I don’t know if they were true or not but I believed them.

He also started drinking pretty heavily. We all drank a little from time to time. But from an early age Ray was more than a social drinker. The plain truth is he had a drinking problem. He’d get a few too many in him and come up with some crazy idea to do something dangerous, destructive or hateful. It wasn’t even a rare event to see a couple of his friends holding him back in order to keep him from doing some pretty stupid things when he had been drinking. He didn’t even have to drink that much to get like that, either. A few beers would be all it would take sometimes to inspire him to get a little crazy.

When Ray came back to the hardware store after he graduated he seemed to have settled down a little. I met his wife and I saw her now and then. She seemed real nice and I thought maybe she’d be able to settle Ray down a little. And at first she seemed to.

It even seemed like Ray and I were tolerating each other a little better at first. But that didn’t last long. It wasn’t six months before Kathy left him. He went after her and made all kinds of promises and she came back after a few weeks. For a while it looked like things were getting back to normal, like they were going to make a go of it.

It didn’t last, though. It was only about three months later that she left, for good this time. They got divorced and there were some rumors around town about the things Ray had done, or tried to get Kathy to do. But I don’t know who was spreading them or if they were true.

Ray started acting more like his old self after the divorce. I couldn’t do anything but take it, though. Some days I went home from work so mad I couldn’t talk to anyone for hours.

Luckily when I got home I didn’t have to talk to anyone. I lived alone in half of the old Putnam house. When old man Putnam died his son had the house made into two apartments. I had the second floor and half of the garage. It was just perfect for me.

I didn’t date a lot. There aren’t that many single girls my age in town. A lot of the kids I went to school with had gotten married in the first year after high school, mostly to their high school sweethearts. My high school sweetheart had gone away to college and married someone she met there. She now lives in another state. I see her every now and then when she comes back to visit her folks. She seems happy and we’re just friends now. When she went off to college we kept in touch for a while but we were never more than sweethearts. We dated and we enjoyed each other’s company. We harbored no burning love for each other. We never talked about a future together. We didn’t have any hard feelings when we drifted apart.

Anyway, I wasn’t dating, but I wasn’t a hermit. I had a lot of friends and we got together regularly. I would have liked to have had a little love in my life. But I was still young and I wasn’t desperate. I figured it would come eventually.

It turned out that I wasn’t the only one who was of the opinion I needed some love in my life. I got a call one Friday morning from Sharon. Sharon and I were classmates and old friends. She had married Roger, another close friend and I saw the two of them often.

She invited me to dinner that evening. There was nothing unusual about that and I accepted gladly. I wasn’t getting to enjoy a lot of good homemade meals at the time. When I showed up I was introduced to Roger’s cousin, Erin. Erin had just lost her job at a drug store in a small town on the other side of the state when Wal-Mart came to town and drove them out of business.

She and I hit it off immediately. She was smart and funny and pretty and damn she was hot! She was staying with Roger and Sharon and was hoping to get a job at the local drug store.

We ended up going for a walk after dinner, a walk that lasted for more than three hours. We didn’t go anywhere and we didn’t do anything. We just walked around town and talked. By the time I dropped her off at Roger and Sharon’s house just before eleven that night I was in love. I was pretty sure she was falling for me too.

The hardware store was open on Saturday and I had to work every other Saturday. As luck would have it, I was off that Saturday so I invited Erin to go for a ride in the morning. She accepted immediately. I drove home that night with my head in the clouds.

Erin never did get the job in the drug store. But we were married six months later. It was a simple, civil ceremony held in her parent’s home. My parents were there and a dozen of my closest friends. Ray’s parents were invited so we felt that we had to invite Ray as well. I was very disappointed when he came.

I wasn’t worried about Erin and all of the attention she received from Ray on our wedding day. I knew she could hold her own with him. But I felt he was spending entirely too much time with her and I resented it. It was obvious, in fact it was too obvious that he was infatuated with her. People noticed and I think even his parents were embarrassed.

I had been living well within my means over the last four years. I wasn’t making a lot of money by big city standards. But I was doing alright. I had managed to save a pretty good bit of money. So we could have afforded a nice honeymoon.

We decided not to, though. It would have been nice. But we decided to save the money instead and start watching for a good buy on a nice house. Meanwhile my duplex in the Putnam house is a little small, but it’s cozy and we were happy there while we kept putting money in savings. We didn’t go anywhere for our honeymoon, but we had one at home.

We were perfect together. Neither of us had much experience with sex. We weren’t virgins but neither one of us had much experience in that area. But we both loved our sex life. We were somewhat adventurous and we were both open minded. There was more than enough lust in our lives, especially those first few months.

Eventually things settled down in our lives. Erin managed to get a few part time jobs every now and then. But there just wasn’t much work in our little town. We were doing alright, though. All our entertainment was free or almost free. We got together with friends. We had cookouts and swimming parties at the river. Maybe once a month we would drive into the city for a meal at a restaurant. It’s a different lifestyle than people in the city are used to. But for us, growing up and living in a very small town, it’s what we were used to. It was what we were comfortable with. It was what we enjoyed.

For the first few months after we got married Erin would come to the hardware store and bring me lunch. We would eat together out on a picnic table under a tree in back of the store. Ray started to be a problem, though. He constantly hung around and flirted with her. He would almost hit on her. It didn’t seem to bother him at all that I was sitting right there watching him. He was careful not to cross the line. But he leaned over it often enough that it made us uncomfortable. So we started meeting in the town square in the center of town at lunch time and eating on a park bench or in the bandstand or when the weather wasn’t so nice I’d go home for lunch.

That fall there were a string of tragedies in our lives that really shook us. My father was killed in an accident on his way home from the job he had found in a city with a commute of sixty miles of country roads each way. Within a couple of months my mother suffered a stroke and she died two months after that. Their house had been paid for. It’s a good thing or they never would have gotten through the hard times they faced when the furniture plant closed down. But medical bills drained the estate and then some.

While my mother was in the hospital dying, Erin’s father, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, suddenly got much worse and had to be institutionalized. Her father’s health and the medical bills were a terrible strain on her mother and her health began to fail too. It didn’t seem possible but by the end of the year we had lost all four of our parents. Needless to say, we did not have a merry Christmas that year.

We weathered those tragedies and I suppose we felt closer and stronger for having survived them as well as we did. We started that spring with an unstated but mutual resolve to put all that behind us and get on with our lives. We were still grieving for our lost parents of course. We had both been close to our families. But we were determined to get past it.

That spring we got a good deal on a house. We knew we weren’t really ready but it was too good a deal to pass up. You need to realize that in a small town like ours, the real estate business isn’t the same as it is in larger towns and cities. People in towns like ours live in their homes for generations. Their kids grow up and if they’re able to find work and stay in town they stay in the family home or they build homes nearby and stay in them. People don’t move in and out of houses. So finding a suitable home for sale can be very difficult. We would have liked to have been able to buy my parents house but to avoid liability for my parent’s medical bills which remained unpaid after the estate was settled we were advised not to.

When the River’s were moved into an assisted living home by their son who had moved to Connecticut they put their home up for sale. A good friend let us know about it before it was even advertised and we jumped at it. The house was a little large for our needs. But we were planning on starting a family in a few more years so we didn’t think the extra rooms would go to waste. It took every cent we had in the bank and the payment was higher than we would have liked. But we loved the house and buying it seemed like a way to put the tragedies of this past winter behind us and start anew.

Just as things in our lives started to be getting back on track, Ray’s father decided to retire. That left Ray in complete charge of the store. I really liked Mr. Nash and I was going to miss him. But beyond than that, I dreaded what life was going to be like with Ray in charge of the store.

I had never stopped keeping an eye out for an opportunity to get into another line of work, or the same type of work in a different business. I had known from the beginning that one day Ray would be in charge and I dreaded it. But unless we wanted to leave the area I was going to have to stay where I was and count myself fortunate to have that job so I did the best job I could do and I put up with Ray’s crap and I kept reminding myself I’m lucky to have a job.