Chapter 6

Her cell phone rang half an hour later, while she was parked at a convenience store, trying to figure out where to go. It was Roger.

"What the hell is going on?" he yelled into the phone. "Tiffany is in tears and says you screamed at her and said you were leaving!"

"She did the screaming," said Jennifer. "But yes, I left."

"Why? I don't understand! What's going on?"

"Apparently she hasn't told you everything she said she was going to. She wanted me to approve letting her do something no sane mother would allow her fifteen-year-old daughter to do. I refused and she tried to blackmail me, Roger. I'm not going to live under the threat of blackmail. Maybe the two of you can discuss that. I'll call you in a few days." She hung up, and then turned her phone off for good measure.

She decided to go to the shelter, where she had volunteered dozens of times, working in the soup kitchen, until Roger had made her stop. She didn't think of herself as homeless, but she might be soon. Claudette was on duty. It was late enough that the doors were already locked, so she had to speak through a speaker system. Claudette unlocked the door, looking worried.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"I can't go home right now," said Jennifer, holding it all inside.

"No problem," said Claudette, hiding her surprise. She knew people came to the shelter from all walks of life.

"Can you log me onto the internet?" asked Jennifer.

"Why?"

"I need to make a donation to the shelter ... while I still can," she said.

"Don't do something stupid," said Claudette. "Sometimes these things blow over."

"This one isn't going to blow over, Claudette."

"That bad, huh."

"That bad."

Claudette took her to the office and put in the password for access to the internet. Jennifer tapped keys and asked Claudette for the information needed to do an electronic transfer to the shelter's account. She kept it to ten thousand dollars, because she was pretty sure Roger wouldn't notice a small amount like that until their CPA asked him about it.

"Good Lord, girl!" whispered Claudette, looking over her shoulder. "Are you insane?"

"You need the money, don't you?

"Well sure ... but ... Jennifer, honey ... that's burning a hell of a bridge."

"I don't know about community property laws in this state," said Jennifer. "I never needed to until now. But I figure I'll have a lot more than ten thousand dollars coming to me when it all shakes down. And I'm going to need a place to stay."

"Stay here as long as you want, honey!" said Claudette. "You pick any bed you want and it's yours for as long as you need. In fact, you want one of the private rooms?"

"Those are for families," said Jennifer.

"Well yes, but..."

"Those are for families, Claudette!"

"Yes, Ma'am. Do we need to call the cops?" She started looking Jennifer over.

"No. He didn't hit me. He doesn't even know he's going to divorce me," she said. She looked at her watch. "Well ... maybe he does by now."

Claudette had been called away, so Jennifer had made one other transfer of funds, another ten thousand, into a bank account she'd had when she got married, and had never closed. She expected Roger to cut her off, and she'd need something to survive on until the courts worked everything out.

She made one trip back to the house the next day, going at ten in the morning and hoping that without her there Tiffany had still gone to school. She took only clothing, enough to last her a couple of weeks. It had been a long time since she'd had to wash her clothes in a Laundromat, but she made sure to take things that would stand up to that kind of treatment.

He found her in five days by the simple expedient of reporting her as missing to the police. She suspected he knew detectives, and had called in favors. The patrolmen who located her car, and traced her to the shelter, though, wanted nothing to do with a domestic dispute, in which the wife denied physical abuse, and just said she was an adult and didn't have to go home if she didn't feel like it.

Roger arrived an hour later and demanded to see her. Rather than make a scene, she walked outside and leaned against the building.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" he asked, his voice harsh. "You can't live here. It's making me look like a fool!"

"You are a fool, Roger," she said.

"While you've been hiding here, the shit has hit the fan," he hissed. "I personally know of at least ten men who are filing for divorce."

"That's nice. I won't contest it when you file."

"Tiffany has gotten death threats, you stupid cow!"

"I told her there would be consequences if she decided to expose all this. She's never listened to me. She always ran to you and got whatever she wanted. You're a lawyer. File complaints against the wives who are threatening her."

"It isn't the fucking wives!" he yelled. "It's her friends at school!" He hit the wall with his hand, and winced. "She had to close down her Facebook page. I couldn't even let her go to school today!"

"And all this because she wanted to go see a concert and shack up with her friends on the way back," said Jennifer. "She just couldn't stand it that I told her no, and to spite me, she went to you. And you went to the rest of the husbands."

"Of course I went to the rest of the husbands!" he exploded. "Their wives were attending fucking orgies!"

"Well, just for the record," she said, "you're the only man who's ever had intercourse with me since we got married. I knew she wouldn't believe it, and I doubt you will either, but it's true. I was there at the party, but I didn't let any man fuck me." He started to yell but she put her finger on his lips. "And before you go all high and mighty on me, just remember this. The children in this community have known about what was going on up there for who knows how long. It was one of them who told your daughter I was there. They've been keeping it a secret too. Why? Why are they threatening Tiffany? You can bet it's because they were doing the same thing Tiffany tried to do... blackmail!"

She saw the look on his face, which was red now, and stepped away from him.

"You need some help, Miss Jenny?" asked a hulking black man named Clarence, who appeared as if by magic. Jennifer knew Clarence wouldn't hurt a fly ... but Roger didn't.

"No, thank you, Clarence," said Jennifer. "This is my husband, and he just got some bad news, that's all."

"I won't be your husband for long," growled Roger, his voice low. "You bitch!"

"Hey, dude," said Clarence, his voice casual. "You might want to move on out of here. This is a bad part of town. People wearin' suits like that been known to get roughed up around here. People have accidents, you know, man? And I don't know if that's your Beamer around the corner or not, but if you want anything left of it to drive home, you prolly ought to get back to it. I mean if it's still there and all."

What had top priority in Roger's life at that point in time was made quite clear in the next few seconds.

And it wasn't Jennifer.

It was a sometimes resident of the shelter who handed Jennifer the paper as she stood, ladling out food. The old woman, known only as Bessy, grinned a toothless smile and said "I seen your name in there and figgered you'd want ter see it."

It turned out to be the society pages of the Sunday Times. One page listed all the divorces that had been filed for, and there was story after story on the other pages, where women or men had been interviewed about what had been dubbed "The Silver Lake Scandal." She was surprised to see that Roger had agreed to an interview, since he spent so much of his time telling his own clients to shut up. She understood, when she read how devastated he'd been, and that he'd had to enter therapy, and that their daughter was also in therapy. All he was doing was setting things up so he could leave with her nothing, if at all possible. When she read the part where he said he tried to get her to come back home and save the marriage, only to be chased away from the soup kitchen she was eating at, she tossed the paper and went back to serving food to people who needed it.

Two days later Barney Fisk, general manager of the Goodwill store in town, came by with his weekly truckload of clothing, which people in the shelter could go through and take things from. While that was going on, he wandered over to where Jennifer was supervising six small children's use of paper and crayons.

"You might want to come by the store," he said, giving her a hug. "I have a whole bunch of stuff that might fit you."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. Came in the other day. Big donation from a single source. Angry man. Said his wife had taken off, and obviously didn't want the stuff any more. Suggested we give it to people who frequent this shelter."

Her eyes widened. "My clothes?"

He smiled. "I'll hold onto them for a while, at least until you can come by and take a look."

She nodded. "Thanks, Barney," she said. "I'll come by and pick out some things. The rest can go to whoever needs it."

She went the next day, and got some of her favorite things. It was good she did, because she ended up filling up the back seat of the car, and she had just unloaded it all when a man showed up with the title of the car, which Roger had signed over to him. The sale price was listed as one hundred dollars. The man was very nervous, his eyes darting this way and that. He kept saying he didn't want any trouble, but a deal was a deal, and that he'd go get a cop if he had to. Jennifer told him to cool his jets, cleaned her stuff out of the car and then tossed him the keys.

It was two days later when a nervous looking woman, dressed much too well to be in the shelter, came through the line. There were two children with her, but none of them had a tray.

"Are you Jennifer Windham?" she asked.

Jennifer blinked, and was suddenly wary. Very few people at the shelter knew her last name.

"Yes," she said, carefully.

The woman just looked at her for a few seconds.

"I'm Susan," she said. "Roger said he was divorced when we met. So I didn't know he was married to you when I accepted his proposal. We've been married ten years." She blinked and then turned to the boy and girl with her. "This is Timothy and Deborah. They're his children." She turned back to Jennifer. "Now he says there was never a marriage license ... that he made it all up. We got married in a park, and now he says he just hired a man to play the part of a preacher. He swears he wanted to marry me for real ... except he was already married to you."

Jennifer had thought that Susan's reason for coming to the shelter with Roger's ... other ... children, was to rub it in her nose. That would have been horrifying enough. But there was more. When Roger confessed his lies to Susan, he also told her that Jennifer had betrayed her friends and started the whole scandal, which was why he was finally divorcing her. The problem was, as he said it, that he could no longer afford to support two households, because Jennifer was fighting the divorce and costing him tens of thousands of dollars in attorney fees. The house was in Susan's name. She was going to lose it. And Roger had stopped taking her calls.

She asked Jennifer to stop fighting the divorce and let him go, so he could be happy ... so she could be happy. She told Jennifer it was "the right thing to do."

And that was what drove Jennifer Windham back to Christy's Puppet Palace.

The first thing she noticed when she got there was the extra security. And it wasn't dancers who were doubling as bouncers. These were hard-faced men who blocked the door and wanted to see a photo ID.

"Surely you aren't saying I look like I'm under twenty-one," she laughed. "I haven't been carded in decades!"

"You got an ID or not, ma'am?" asked the one wearing sunglasses.

"No. I brought money, but not my purse. It's only a bother when I come here."

"What's your name?" asked the other one, lifting a clipboard that had what looked like a list of names on it.

It never occurred to her that her name might be on that list.

"Jennifer Windham," she said.

His finger ran down the list and then the clipboard dropped.

"You got to leave," he said. "You can't come in here."

"What? Why not?" She was upset, both because she wanted to see Josh, and because she didn't like anyone telling her what she could and could not do. This was America, after all.