Dad blew all the money on his newfound swanky lifestyle, making ridiculously bad investments that bombed, spending lavishly on his mistress. And then the money was gone.
Mom was home, requiring extensive care, and Dad was without money to pay for a caregiver.
After the money was gone, Mom learned the truth. Dad confessed to her. She wasn’t the same after her stroke, but there was enough of her left for me to see how much it crushed her to know that her husband had strayed from her.
And I’ll never know this for certain, because my mother was far too proud a woman to ever say it, but I think she knew that I knew, too, and never told her. I can’t even fathom the humiliation she must have felt, the utter devastation.
My mother killed herself because she had nothing left of the life she thought she’d had. She was married to a man she no longer recognized, who no longer loved her.
And now . . . what am I doing?
I’m cheating on my wife.
I have become the man I despise.
28
Christian
I don’t need to know much about Vicky’s husband, Simon. I probably don’t need to know anything other than he’s loaded, and his wife is going to take his money and give it to me. But a little due diligence never hurts.
I didn’t expect this.
Born and raised in Grace Park. Check. Childhood, nothing of interest. Went to Hilltop Elementary, Grace Park Middle School, Grace Consolidated High School. Valedictorian, okay, and apparently quite the cross-country and track star. He finished second in state his junior year in cross-country and broke the school’s record for the two-mile in track. Good for Simon.
But this is more interesting. Simon graduated Grace Consolidated High School in May of 2003. But he didn’t graduate from the University of Chicago undergrad until May of 2010.
Seven years to graduate college, Simon, Mr. Valedictorian? Did you take some time off? What were you doing during that time?
Flag that and move on.
His father, Theodore Dobias, hits it big twenty years ago, in 2002, a thirty-million-dollar verdict in an electrical-injury case, which I assume means someone got electrocuted. Theodore was the guy’s lawyer, and they got a big pot of cash. Hooray for them.
In 2004, Glory Dobias—Simon’s mom, Theodore’s wife—a law professor at the University of Chicago, dies of a painkiller overdose. Suicide? The news reports and the U of C’s press release are vague. Seems she’d had health problems, a stroke, but nothing concrete.
Then Theodore leaves town. He leaves Grace Park and the Chicago area and moves to St. Louis. He works in a law firm in Alton, Illinois, near the Illinois-Missouri border, where he ends up banking serious dough doing asbestos-exposure cases. The bio from his law firm that I was able to drag up from a long time ago said he netted over two hundred million dollars in recoveries for his clients. That’s a lot of money for the lawyer, who gets a third of the recovery usually.
And that explains where Simon’s big-dollar trust fund comes from.
But the really interesting part is twelve years ago, in May 2010. Theodore Dobias, by now a mega-wealthy, well-established attorney in Alton and the St. Louis area, a leading advocate in asbestos litigation, ends up dead. Murdered, found dead in his swimming pool with a stab wound to the stomach. And guess who the police suspected?
They never arrested him, from what I can tell. They brought him in for questioning multiple times and confirmed to the press that a “person of interest” was being interviewed, which the media had no trouble figuring out meant his only child.
“Simon Peter Dobias,” I whisper to myself. “Did you murder your father?”
I remember what Vicky said to me. That insane trust language that kept Simon’s wife away from the trust money until ten years of marriage.
Simon’s father didn’t trust me, she said.
Ol’ Theodore thought you were a moneygrubbing whore, Vicky. And it seems like he was right. How’d that make you feel?
What were you doing, Mrs. Vicky Lanier Dobias, on the night Simon’s dad was murdered?
29
Simon
I leave the law school at a quarter after seven for my ten-mile round-trip run to Wicker Park—to the alley outside Viva Mediterránea—and back. I reach the alley in plenty of time, well before the appointed time of 8:00 p.m. for our text messages. I’m not near the times I used to post when I was younger, but I can run a six-minute mile in my sleep.
I stretch and listen to the partiers out on Viva’s patio. Look at the people in the condos across the alley, grilling out on their back porches or just having cocktails.
I never lived around here or in a neighborhood like this one. I never lived in the city. I never left Grace Park. My father took off not long after my mother died, when I made it clear that I no longer had a father. He moved down to St. Louis and joined up with a firm that handled asbestos litigation—suing any company that had any product that remotely used asbestos, representing people with alleged exposure to that asbestos who later developed mesothelioma. Madison County, Illinois, was a beacon for those “meso” cases, and it made the lawyers rich.
So Dad finally hit it big and had the validation he so dearly craved.
And I stayed in the house in Grace Park and commuted downtown to college. I guess I was unwilling to let the house go, its connection with Mom. So I never did what most young college or law students did, much less postgrad students, and live in the city.
In a neighborhood just like this one, in one of these condos.
Instead, I lived in a suburb, in a big house all by myself.
Not to mention those eighteen months at New Horizons. The nuthouse, if you want to be politically incorrect, a facility for struggling individuals, if you’re speaking in polite company.
It helped. Dr. McMorrow was a good therapist who listened more than she spoke. I was a basket case after my mother’s death, and I tried to continue my sophomore year of college but knew I couldn’t and checked myself in voluntarily. Dr. McMorrow—Anne; she wanted me to call her by her first name—challenged the guilt I felt, preached all those things that I now preach at Survivors of Suicide, about how we can’t control everything or everybody, and we have to acknowledge that fact.
But what really turned me around were these words, so simple and obvious: “Your mother wouldn’t want you to feel this way. She’d want you to go to college and have a good life. So what the hell are you waiting for?”
That’s when I realized it was time to go back to college. And then get a law degree. Anne was right. I was able to move on.
Not heal. But move on.
Move on but remember.
At eight, I put the SIM card into my green phone and power it up. I send this:
How is golf looking tomorrow?
Kind of an inside joke, pretending to be talking in code, when anyone who read through all our text messages would obviously see through the ruse. She replies promptly:
Anxious for it