Laura laughed at his joke.
Eight months later, she stood in our kitchen with a suitcase beside the door.
“I’m in love with Brent.”
I remember holding a dish towel.
The boys were asleep upstairs.
I couldn’t move.
“Laura, we have two children.”
“I know.”
Then she said Brent could give them things I never could.
A house on the lake.
Private schools.
Real vacations.
Not some inexpensive cabin without air conditioning.
“They like the cabin.”
“They’re children, Craig. They don’t know any better.”
Then she looked at me with something worse than anger.
Pity.
“You’re going nowhere in life.”
She told me I would spend the next twenty years repairing other people’s cars for ordinary wages.
That I would never make real money.
Never become anyone important.
Then she picked up her suitcase.
“I deserve more.”
She left.
I sat on the kitchen floor until sunrise.
The divorce took almost a year.
Laura had Brent’s lawyers.
I had an inexpensive attorney who occasionally forgot my sons’ names.
Laura got primary custody.
I got every other weekend and Wednesday dinners.
Then I lost my job.
Brent’s father owned the dealership.
Six weeks after Laura moved into the lake house, my manager called me into the office and announced a “restructuring.”
They suddenly didn’t need me anymore.
Eleven years of work.
Never late.
No complaints.
Gone.
I knew why.
I ended up in a tiny apartment above a pizza place thinking about what Laura had said.
Maybe she was right.
Maybe I really was going nowhere.
Then I thought about Rick and Noah.
And I decided they would never watch me prove her right.
I took everything I had left.
My share from the sale of our house.
Retirement savings.
A little inheritance from my uncle.
And I rented an old two-bay garage on Linden Avenue.
It sat between a laundromat and an abandoned video store.
The roof leaked.
