The Wild Truth (23 page)

I thought about the past six years of my life and their place within all twenty-five. I wanted to learn something valuable from this experience. I wanted it to be worth it. I wanted to remember it all and understand why it was happening to me—again.

I did not feel close enough to my parents to share my feelings with them. I was embarrassed that the money they had invested in our wedding was all for nothing. I was so young and I already had two failed marriages, but I couldn’t let the fear of that failure make me stay. My mother had stayed. Once again, I determined I would not.

The supportive phone calls from Fish’s family had stopped. I had no family locally. My siblings all lived halfway across the country. I was very alone—but I felt more empowered than lonely—and I gained a further understanding of what Chris had experienced out in the wilderness.
It is a bad thing not to be able to stand solitude.
It is a wonderful thing to embrace it, and I was ready.

FISH
’
S BEHAVIOR AT THE SHOP
became erratic. One day he came flying through the waiting room on Rollerblades, maneuvering quickly from one side of the shop to the other, then back out to the parking lot. A clownish smile filled his face. “Hello!” he said in a bizarre tone as he entered the room. “Good-bye!” he said as he exited, in the same strange tenor. The customers sitting nearby got a chuckle out of the oddity. Cindy and I looked at each other, dumbfounded.

What the hell is he doing?

I walked outside to find him working inside a white Chevy G20 that neither Cindy nor I had on the schedule that day. As I opened the passenger side door, I saw him hunched over in the driver’s seat, his skates repeatedly sliding upward with a screech as he pushed against the floorboards, trying to pull the steering column from the dash.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I asked.

“What does it look like I’m doing, Carine?” he retorted. “I’m fixing the ignition on this van!”

“Like hell you are! Get out of it. Now!” I demanded. “You’re high!”

“You’re mean,” he complained as he came out of the van. Then he promptly declared a slogan from a bumper sticker he’d recently installed on his Jeep:
“Mean people suck!”

“Are you serious?” I scoffed back at him. “You can’t come to work acting like this! I don’t even want you around here anymore!”

“Fine!” he said, then stuck his tongue out. “That will just give me more time to spend with my new girlfriend,” he continued. “She hates you!”

“Oh, please,” I laughed. “You really think I care? She’s never even met me! And I doubt you’ve been honest with her about why we split.”

“She’s much cooler than you!” he shot back. “She’ll party with me!”

“Lovely,” I said as I walked back toward the shop. “Now get the hell out of here.”

“You’re just a hard-ass—Little Miss Can’t-Be-Wrong!” was his last jab as he got into his Jeep and took off.

I’d already known Fish had a girlfriend, and it didn’t bother me. I was still in love with him, but I had also moved on with someone else, possibly before he’d even met her. Although we were still married and sometimes still under the same roof, we had been living separately for a long time, and the distance between us was too destructive. I did what I’d done with Jimmy but this time with stronger ammunition to justify my disreputable decision. I moved forward because I knew it would keep me from stepping back. Intimacy with another had put me safely past the point of no return.

Fish was so far gone. One night, months before it had come to this, we’d had a heart-to-heart about whether there was any chance we could stay together. At one point Fish pointed out our extreme differences on the matter at hand. I was against any drug use, even the occasional pot smoking. He said that my standards were tough to live up to.

“But I don’t understand,” I said. “I haven’t changed. You’ve known I was that way since the day we met.
Why in the world
did you ask me to marry you?”

“I guess,” Fish said with a smile and a shrug, “I thought you would fix me.”

His words made me feel like I’d been cheated. I didn’t enter into our marriage with the intention of changing him and I hadn’t known he needed to be fixed. Besides, I already knew that change doesn’t come to someone who doesn’t really want it.

AS THE ZEN SAYING GOES
, “After enlightenment, the laundry.” And Fish and I had a lot of the latter. We had incorporated our business as C.A.R. Services before we were married, and since we had started the company as a joint effort, we’d split the corporate shares down the middle. I had to figure out how to keep him away from the shop even though he had just as much legal right to be there as I did. Since I controlled the finances, I struck a deal with him that he would continue to receive his full salary and any profit sharing
only
on the condition that he did not show up for work.

I hired an attorney to begin divorce proceedings. Fish finished moving out of our house completely. He stayed away from the shop, and communication between us returned to being nonexplosive. We even consulted an attorney together to decide what to do about the business, which was still small but strong. Given the circumstances, it was impossible for us to manage it jointly. Our attorney advised that either we sell the company or one of us would have to buy out the other. We agreed to meet again the following month. I continued to run the shop, but I began to look for other employment options.

Before our next appointment with the corporate attorney, Fish called a meeting at the shop after hours to speak with me and all our employees collectively. Apprehensive, we all took seats on the couches and chairs in the waiting room. Fish proceeded to explain how he was going to force me out of the company and take over. Apparently he had not paid much attention to what it meant to be incorporated as equal shareholders—he couldn’t just force me out.

Everyone, including me, just sat there for a few minutes listening to him. Then Greg stood up, took a measured breath, and said, “I’m not going to stay here and watch you run this place into the ground. I’m following Carine. I’m going wherever she goes. We asked her to make some changes around here and be present, and she did that. She’s made it a good shop to work in again. I simply don’t trust you anymore. I trust her.”

One by one, the employees announced their faith in me and asserted their disappointment in my business partner. Fish sat there listening, flabbergasted. My jaw gaped even more than his.

Finally Fish stood up, called them all fools, and walked out.

The meeting was over.

I muttered out a “Thanks, guys” as the staff dispersed. Still in shock, I went back to my office and collapsed into my chair to collect my thoughts. Maybe I didn’t have to leave. Could I actually buy Fish out of the business instead? It hadn’t seriously occurred to me to own the shop by myself. I had just been trying to maintain everyone’s jobs and keep things operational until the attorney told us what to do next. But as I sat, staring at the idle papers on my desk, which may as well have been blank, it occurred to me that this was my decision to make. I’d already been running the shop on my own, and I’d loved it.

Then Fish walked in—a ghost of the man I’d stood with at the altar, just a shadow of the man who’d stood up for me in South Dakota. He looked at me with utter disdain. “My customers will never stay with you,” he said. “This is a man’s business. You can never run it by yourself. You’re just a
woman
.”

I knew my employees could easily fill out a W-4 form at another shop down the road, put on a new uniform, and count on a paycheck—and they knew it, too. And I could easily do the same. But the way Fish said the word “woman” motivated me—I heard echoes of the way my dad had talked to my mom.
Billie, you’re nothing without me.

I wasn’t eager to bust my way into a male-dominated industry as a solo female owner. But I wanted to see if I
could
do it. I thought about my big brother and what advice he would have given. The risks were great. But I was prepared and would proceed cautiously. I figured Chris would have said
Easy is boring,
and I went for it.

M
ONEY WAS NEVER JUST MONEY
in my family. Money was power, it was loyalty, it was leverage. It was a truism that Chris understood early. When he was home one summer from college, working at Domino’s Pizza—more to stay out of the house than anything else—Shelly came to stay with us for a few days. Despite her tumultuous history with my parents, she had a good reason for the visit: she wanted to go to college, desperately, but couldn’t afford it, and our mom and dad had offered to pay.

“Don’t take the money,” Chris warned her. “There are strings attached—there are always strings attached. If you take the money, you will feel obligated to them for the rest of your life, because they’ll
make
you feel obligated to them for the rest of your life. Is that what you want? Go to school, but find another way to do it.”

Shelly listened to what Chris had to say—he was so adamant and she couldn’t deny his logic. But she didn’t have an inheritance from Ewie like we did. She couldn’t do it without Mom and Dad’s help. So, she accepted the money. In the end, Chris was right. Their demands proved to be too daunting and Shelly didn’t finish college.

Still, she accepted a gift of a trip to France years later, as did I, as did Shawna and Stacy. “Please come,” Dad had said when he invited me. “You and your sisters. Your mom and I want to treat you to this trip—it will be good for all of us.”

My sisters and I discussed it. Was there a catch? Should we go? Was this really a bid for familial connection, for closeness? If so, how could we say no to such a generous offer? Why had I spent so much energy protecting them if not to take any opportunity to preserve and improve our relationship?

In the end, we all accepted the invitation. We had a wonderful time together touring the French Riviera, enjoying cultural delicacies and historical architecture. We lazed in the sun on beaches overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. We strolled through villages and their quaint shops, which offered fine cheeses and beautiful works of art. The conversation remained lighthearted and safe. It was the kind of time spent with Mom and Dad that convinced us that a deep bond still existed that could withstand any solvent.

But soon after we returned stateside, the old dynamics were back in place. Dad called his daughters separately and told us that it was looking like he had no choice but to leave my mom. His reasons alternated from the insensitive to the ridiculous, including his own diagnosis of her state of mind being enough evidence to prove that she was bipolar—and that he couldn’t be expected to stay in such a difficult relationship. He reported negative things she was saying about each of us and reminded us of hurtful things she had done in the past. He was trying to pit us against Billie, and while my sisters didn’t have a good relationship with my mom, we all thought his treatment of her was unfair. We recognized he was laying the groundwork to discredit her, which probably meant that she was threatening to expose something he’d done. It reminded me of when my parents had said my older siblings were doing drugs:
Don’t believe them—they’re high and demented.
Any construction of a hopeful future was eroding again.

I knew the dangers of taking my parents at face value as well as Shelly and Chris did, but I still struggled with accepting more than just their financial advice. My parents were proud of my accomplishments, and they constantly boasted about them. Dad wore C.A.R. Services T-shirts around town almost every day. I needed help to buy Fish out of the business, and I had been wary yet still receptive when my mom called one day with a plan. She suggested that she and my dad loan me the money. I could pay them back with profits from the shop, the sale of the house with Fish, and my share of the royalties Jon had agreed to pay our family for the right to publish excerpts from the letters, diaries, and other documents Chris had written during his journeys. I accepted the offer and was able to pay them back quickly.

It wasn’t long, however, before the same tragically comedic scene started to unfold at work at least once a week:

“Here they come again!” whoever spotted them first would warn when Walt and Billie’s Cadillac sped into our parking lot. Immediately after the car jerked to a stop, both front doors would fly open as my parents tried to beat each other inside. They looked like little kids scrambling to be the first to tattle on the other, and I was the judge.

The opening line was always the same, gender interchangeable depending on who’d won the race to find me first. “Carine! Do you know what your mother/father just did?” . . . and it would go on and on in the same way it had for more than twenty years.

“How many times do I have to repeat myself?” I would scold. “You guys absolutely cannot do this here. This is a place of business—
my
place of business.”

“Oh, really? Is that so? You think you got here on your own? After all we’ve done for you, now you won’t help us in return?”