“That’s a good way to think of me, as a friend of Brittney,” the boy responded vaguely. “I’m here to tell you that Brittney and her mother are gone, and they’re not coming back. I found them a new home, in another town, and set them up with enough to make a fresh start. They don’t need you any more, and you don’t deserve them.”
“Who the hell do you think you are, you little shit? Come into my house and tell me my wife and my daughter are gone? You’re no part of this family.”
“Well, once you sign these, neither are you, Earl.” He held out a clipboard; on it was a small stack of documents in legalese. “They’re divorce papers. In this state, she could’ve taken half what you owned, but all she wants is a separation. If you look around, you’ll find all they took were things of sentimental value, and her own clothes and such.”
His eyes fell on one of their wedding pictures, its frame still sitting on the hutch in the dining room. Evidently it lacked sentimental value for her. “I’m not signing those. She’s my wife—you tell her this is over when I say it’s over, and I’m never saying that. Understand?”
The young man nodded patiently. “I figured you’d say something like that. Now, let’s clarify a couple things.” He shoved Earl hard in the chest, and taken aback by the sudden aggression, he stumbled back and fell onto the couch. If any other man had done that, Earl would be up and clobbering, but… well, he was a friend of Brittney’s after all.
“First, this is not my idea. I wanted to swing by, give you a nice scar and maybe a broken bone or two, let you know that if you ever touch them again, you’ll regret it. Put the fucking fear of God back into that shriveled black heart of yours.”
“In your dreams, you little pussy.”
The kid rolled his eyes, looked around the room and settled on a mechanical pencil sitting on the end table. He gave it a few clicks until the lead was nice and long, then leaned down towards Earl and slowly maneuvered the point right towards his eye. “You wouldn’t mind if I drove this into your eyeball, would you Earl? You got a spare, after all. Might look dashing with an eye patch.”
Earl froze. He decidedly was not OK with that, yet… somehow, he couldn’t bring himself to resist. Fighting back would be insane—this kid was just a force of nature, something that was happening and couldn’t be stopped. He froze in place, bracing himself for the impending pain. He closed his one eye—the one the pencil wouldn’t go into; closing the other would be rude—and clenched his jaw in anticipation.
Then he pulled the pencil back, snapped the lead off and tossed it away. “Yeah, I thought as much. Now while you consider how that could have gone, please remember it was Brittney and Heather who stopped me there. Not you. So let’s sign the papers—don’t worry, I’m a notary public now—and knock off the unpleasantness.”
With a shaking hand, Earl took the clipboard with the divorce papers and signed and dated each of the places he was told. “That’s good,” the kid said when he was done. “Now that we’re done with business, let’s look forward. Of course, you could challenge these documents in court, say they were coerced, try to have them nullified.”
“Damn straight I can. Those cunts can’t get away with this.”
“Yes yes, because you have money and you could hunt them down and force your way back into their lives. Now first, believe me when I say I spared no expense in security—surveillance, alarms, the works. Even got a trained guard dog, big German Shepherd named Mauler. They call her Molly though, so as not to scare guests.”
The kid paused to let that sink in, then went on. “Now that all being said, Earl… I want you to think for a moment, just sit back and think on all the things you’ve ever done to those two women. All the times you lost your temper and hit them. How you forced yourself on a twelve-year-old girl, over and over and over again, so she grew up in your shadow in constant terror of drawing your attention, yet still did took it when she could sacrifice herself to protect her mother from you. A mother who let you abuse the hell out of her because she thought it would give her daughter a better life.
“Those are some pretty remarkable women you hurt. Yet, in spite of all that, all the wrong you’ve done and all the justice they deserve, all they want is a fresh start. They didn’t try to take your house or your cars or half your business. Didn’t make a scandal and publicly embarrass you by letting the world know you’re a rapist, a child-abuser and a wife-beater. Didn’t even let me come in here and get out some male aggression by working you over. All they wanted was a clean start.”
Earl shuddered. Not in fear of the threat. In revulsion from hearing his deeds put to words.
The kid sat down beside him, like they were friends or something, and went on in a soft voice. “Believe it or not, I know a little bit of what you’re going through. I’ve hurt people, too, see, innocent people who’d never done anything to deserve it. I know what it’s like to let getting what I want overwhelm doing what’s right. Hell, maybe that’s why you drink so much, to help keep you from having to think about it. But me… I was lucky enough to be given an opportunity like this. So I want you to think of this as a clean start for you, too.”
“Clean start—you’re trying to tear apart my family!”
“A marriage you held together with fear and violence. They didn’t love you, Earl. They tolerated you, because they had no choice.”
“Sure they did,” he grumbled.
The kid ignored him and went on. “Now you can take this chance and start fresh, do some soul-searching, sober up and become the kind of man who can be proud of how he lives his life. Maybe someday start a new family, treat them right.”
The kid shrugged. “Or maybe you won’t, and you’ll keep being the man you’ve been, move on to terrorize someone new. I hope not. This is a great opportunity you’re getting, and I only offer it once. We’ve done wrong, both of us, and we can’t unbreak what’s been broken. Other people are going to do what they will—plot revenge, run and hide, forgive and forget. That’s up to them. You only get a say in how one person handles his mistakes, Earl.
“In the end, the only one you have to be able to tolerate is yourself.”
As tears began rolling down the older man’s cheeks, the kid patted Earl on the shoulder, took the clipboard, and walked away. Near the door, he paused and turned around.
“Oh, and me.”
Epilogue
Morgan Lazlo took a deep breath as she heard the car pull up in the driveway. Her step-son was home for his winter break from school. Three weeks with DJ in the house.
There had been a time when she’d found the boy tedious, an irksome reminder of her husband’s passing. The two had seemed so unlike one another. DJ had always been meek, timid, a disturbingly unabashed nerd. Socially hopeless and seemingly with no ambition to be otherwise. She could hardly remember him talking about girls, much less bringing any home. She’d always suspected that even if she hadn’t set any rules for him, he wouldn’t have gotten into trouble.
His father… Well, suffice to say the apple seemed to have fallen pretty far from that tree. Sean had been a tour de force, wild and unrestrained and persuasive beyond what she’d ever seen in another man. She remembered when they’d first met at a single’s bar, how he’d just walked up to her and grabbed two handfuls of her tits right there, then pulled her out to his car and fucked her right there in the parking lot. How she’d just felt so overwhelmed, unable to resist.
It had always been like that with Sean. If he wanted something, he took it. Objects, women—hell, their first house together hadn’t even been for sale and he’d talked the owner into selling it for peanuts. It was a thrill a minute with him—they’d been proper swingers. (Sometimes she almost wished she could have him all to herself, but she didn’t want to be one of those wives, always nagging her husband to stop screwing other women or bringing her places where she’d wind up fucking other men.)