“So, your parents.”
He nods. “My parents…like I said, it was chaotic at best.” Another long pause. “On top of the fighting, they were unfaithful to each other pretty consistently all my life. I remember cutting class and taking the bus downtown with my buddies as a kid, and seeing Dad on the street with another woman. He saw me, I saw him, and he just shooed me away. I asked him later, and he said I’d forget it if I knew what was good for me. A few weeks later I got sick at school so I came home early…and Mom was in bed with one of the neighbors. She told me to just keep my mouth shut. Same thing would happen regularly on both sides, and I realized eventually that they both knew the other was cheating, and they just…went along with it.”
He goes back to carving. “And it’s not like they didn’t sleep with each other—the house I grew up in had real thin walls, you know? So I heard them going at it a lot, drunk and sober. So, between the drinking and the verbal and physical abuse and the infidelity, I just grew up with this distorted view of marriage. I knew other families weren’t like that, but all my buddies growing up went through divorces with very few exceptions, and it just messed them up. So I was like, is it better or worse for them to get divorced? I wasn’t sure, you know? Like, having two parents was cool, but they were fuckin’ nuts. Mom fucked half the neighborhood, and most likely the mailman and a few contractors, and Dad had a little black book full of names with little marks next to each one, four lines in a row and then a fifth line across them, you know? Numbering how many times he’d slept with each. My dad was a busy man, lemme tell you. I happened to see that little black book once. I couldn’t get over it.”
“That’s sad,” I say. “And gross.”
He nods. “I know.” He sighs. “I guess I come by it honestly. Although I’ve never kept track, and I don’t cheat.”
“That doesn’t seem like you, Franco,” I said hazarding a guess. “So your parents’ example soured you on monogamy and marriage to begin with, and then…”
He stops carving, holds the piece up; it’s a little rabbit, about three inches tall, sitting on its hind legs, head twisted as it looks to one side. It looks so lifelike I almost expect it to dart away off his hand and hop across the workbench, but he’s not quite finished yet.
He glances at me. “Then everything with James and Renée happened. You heard it from Jesse, or at least part of it, and some from Nina, it sounds like. The little scamp can’t keep her mouth shut to save her life, God love her.”
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“Since you know the shape of it, I can tell you how it affected me. If you want more than that, you’ll have to ask James.”
“No thanks. He scares me a little.”
Franco chuckles. “He should. He is a little scary. You shoulda seen him fifteen, twenty years ago—you think he’s a beast now? He was all-state offensive lineman at Illinois, and even went through an NFL combine.”
“Like, to go pro?”
Franco nods. “Yep.”
“But he didn’t?
“Nope. It was a combination of reasons. He got in a car accident and hurt his knee pretty bad the year he did the combine, which he could have rehabbed. But Renée was against him going pro. While he was in the hospital, she asked him if he really loved football enough to want to do it every single day for the rest of his life until he got too old to play, or got hurt again. He thought about it, and thought some more, and realized he didn’t love it that much. He just enjoyed it. But he had other passions, other things he enjoyed doing—namely, building. He’d been working for a construction company through most of high school, and he really liked it. He’d gotten some pretty big promotions, even in high school, and he saw a viable path forward in the company, so yeah, he let football go and pursued construction.”
I shake my head in awe. “Wow. That’s…I don’t think many men who could have gone pro would have chosen not to.”
He nods. “That’s James. And honestly, that’s Renée, and the effect she had on him. He’d have gone through physical therapy and rehabilitation to get his knee back in playing condition, and then gone pro. I don’t think he ever questioned it until she flat out asked if he was sure that’s what he wanted. That’s how she was. Smart, thoughtful, practical. Always looking at things from a different angle.”
Another long pause, as Franco examines his carving, which seems mostly complete. “James and Renée were just meant for each other. She balanced him out, challenged him, kept him guessing and thinking when he can be kind of a plodder, straight ahead, no stopping for anything kind of guy, and she needed him to keep her grounded. They were together all through high school, got married a year and a half later…and then they just did life. They spent a few years just being married, working, taking vacations, having fun. Then they wanted to start a family, but they had trouble with it.” He pauses again. “That’s part of James’s story, though. Point is, they ended up with Nina and then Ella, and they were just deliriously happy. Quintessential family with a nice house and some land, two sweet kids, enough money to be content…and then Renée got pregnant again and they were even happier. It was all normal and fine, and she went in to have the baby, and…something happened. I’m not really sure what, but something went wrong and she died, and so did the baby.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah.” He’s quiet again for a minute, sanding the figure he’d carved. “It was hell. He fell apart. All three of us quit our jobs and moved back to town to help him. All four of us lived with him and the girls for the first year and a half, until he was in a place where he could function without us. He’d barely been functioning, on any level, when we got there. Not bathing, not eating, not sleeping, not going to work. He was the general manager of the company then, second only to the owner, who had also lost his wife some years earlier, and he understood where James was at. So he gave him all the time he needed to get his shit together. We forced James to get back to normal, and then we hired a sitter and created a tag-team so the sitter and James’s parents and in-laws could watch the kids for a few days, while we took him out on a three-day bender. Got him hammered, took him to a hotel, and got him to cry it out.”
Franco is silent again.
“Eventually, he was able to deal with being alone with the girls, and we all figured our own shit out. We’d sort of…put our lives on hold, in a way. James needed us, you know? So, we were there. That’s when James started Dad Bod. The owner of the company James had worked for, like, half his life at that point, wanted to retire, so he sold the whole thing to James for a steal.”
He eyes me. “Yeah, I know—where does this tie into my earlier reaction? What happened to James after Renée died really fucked with my head. Like, I already felt like marriage was bullshit, and love was stupid and fake, and then after Renée died and James just completely fell apart, I was like, why the hell would I want to put myself through that, even if love was real? I mean, they had it all, the real deal…and look what happened to James.” He shrugs. “I developed the four-fuck rule not long after that.”
I frowned at him. “You skipped something kind of important, I think.”
He sighs. “Maria.”
“Your ex.”
He nods. “Yeah. Maria.”
“You were hoping I wouldn’t notice you’d glossed over that?”
He laughs quietly. “A little, yeah. I don’t like talking about it.” Another long pause; he seems finished with the rabbit, and he sets it on the counter, twisting it this way and that, examining it again. “So, Maria and I got married six months after we met.”
“A little fast.”
He growls. “Yeah, no shit. Everyone warned me. James flat out didn’t like her, Ryder thought she was hot but didn’t trust her, and Jesse told me I was dumbass for taking it beyond a little fun with her.”
“Ouch. But you didn’t listen?”
“Nope. I was in loooove.” He turns the word into a mocking, whining drawl. “Infatuated was more like it. Th
e truth, unpalatable as it may be, was that she was hot as fuck, but it was surface hot, you know? Like, she had no depth. I see that now, after twenty years, but I was clueless then.”
“Twenty-one and blinded by the titties, huh?” I ask, laughing.
He frowns. “Yeah, pretty much.” A pause. “She was just…glamorous, I guess. A little shy, but a tiger once you got to know her. Loved the fast life, shiny things. She liked me because I was a middle finger in the air to her very traditional Columbian parents, who wanted her to marry a good Columbian boy. I mean, I was Catholic so I had that going for me, but I was white, and they hated that. Plus, she was maybe just as blind and infatuated as I was.”
“Cock-blindness is real, Franco.”
He laughs. “Oh, I know.” He nudges the rabbit toward me, and I pick it up, looking at it; it’s a beautiful piece, a true work of art…and he did it just as something to do with his hands while he talked. “It was great for the first six months to a year. We got a nice little place downtown, I had a job at a condo remodeling company specializing in high-end units, and I got paid like a boss. But things started to go downhill fast after the first year. She wanted a new car, and then she wanted a bigger ring barely two years in. And then she wanted us to go out more, even though I was working eighty hours a week to afford the pricey apartment with views of the lake that she had to have. She would stay out after work and not tell me where she was or what she was doing. I wanted to trust her, to be confident in what we had, but it was hard, you know? Because, deep down, I didn’t really trust her, or myself, or our marriage. I think deep down, I knew we were playing house, you know? Two dumb kids playing at marriage. It wasn’t real for either of us.”
“That sucks.”
He laughs bitterly. “Yeah, tell me about it.” He sighs. “That was just the beginning.”
“Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes. Three years in, and things were terrible. She was never home, always out with her friends, shopping, spending money. She had a job, but it was fluff, paid shit and nowhere near enough to cover her spending habit. But it was the being gone all the time that got me, though, you know? Like, I’d come home to an empty condo, make my own dinner, eat alone, go to bed alone, and she’d come home at whatever time stinking of alcohol. I’d go out with her after work every once in a while, but I had to get up early for work so it was hard, and I just didn’t like her friends or the whole crowd she hung out with. They were all vapid, shallow, and selfish—kinda like her, I guess. Then, one day I was at work and my boss was sick as a dog. It was early, like barely seven—I’d gone in to finish something, and Maria hadn’t even come home from the night before. That happened a lot, so whatever, but that morning I had a niggling feeling in my gut, but I ignored it.”
“This doesn’t sound good.”
“Yeah. So my boss sent me to the pharmacy to get some Dayquil and shit. Well, this pharmacy was near the jobsite, but far from our condo. Nowhere near where any of our friends lived, and nowhere near where they partied either. So, I’m in the pharmacy, looking for the medicine for Rob. And I hear a voice up by the pharmacist’s counter. A familiar female voice. Asking for Plan B.”
“Shit.”
He just sucks in a breath, holds it, stares at the counter, and then lets it out slowly. “I froze in place for a minute. Like, no way. What? Why would she need Plan B? We always used a condom and she hadn’t even been home the night before.” He shakes his head. “Then it sank in. She needed Plan B because she had just had sex—unprotected sex—with some other dude.”
“Ouch. That fucking sucks.”
“So I got my shit together and went to stand behind her as she was waiting for the pharmacist to complete the order. She had a drink in her hand, an iced coffee, I think. She was done up, made up, looking prim and proper as ever. She even had an overnight bag, which I guess she kept in her car and I just never realized it. So, yeah, she opened the box right there and took the pill in the store, and then turned around and literally bumped into me.”
“What did she say?”
He laughs, once again with vicious bitterness. “She was shaken, because she knew she’d been caught red-handed, and that there was no point in even trying to deny it. So she didn’t. I didn’t know what to say, so I just turned around and left. Went back to work, went home. She was there, and we got in this huge fight. She accused me of working too much, never being home, so she was lonely, what was she supposed to do, blah-blah-fucking-blah.”
“So she had the nerve to try to blame you?”
“Oh yeah. But out of fear, because her parents were even more Catholic than mine, if you know what I mean. Divorce wasn’t an option for either of us. Like, just no. Her parents would disown her if she got a divorce, and mine would stop talking to me for who knows how long.”
“So what’d you do?”
“I stayed with her.” He sets his carving knife back in its place and scoops the shavings into his palm and discards them in a nearby trashcan. “For another two, almost three years.”
“Three years? Why?”
“Divorce wasn’t an option. I don’t know how to explain it if you didn’t grow up like we did.” He shrugs. “It was three years of hell. I hated her. I got myself tested for STDs, and then refused to touch her. I worked, and I went home, slept in a different bed. Avoided her. She tried her damnedest to get me back, made all sorts of promises, tried to seduce me, every trick in the book. But I just…I couldn’t do it. I’d grown up seeing my parents hooking up with different people, and I hated that as a kid. My wife, cheating on me? Oh, fuck no. More proof that marriage was bullshit.”
“And you did that for three years?”
“Yep.”
I blink hard, thinking. “You didn’t touch her?”
“Nope.”
“At all, for three years?”
“Nope.”
“And you never cheated?”
“Fuck no. I’d have been justified, some would say, but that’s not me. So no, I didn’t touch her and I didn’t cheat.”
“So you were celibate for three years?”
“I got real acquainted with my own hand, let me tell you.” He sighs. “If you really want all the gory details, there was one time, near the end, that I let her touch me. I was lonely as fuck, and it was a weekend. She was gone, as usual, because after it became clear I wasn’t giving in, she went back to her old ways. So, Friday night, I got wasted at home alone. It was awful, and only made me feel shittier. So I went to bed. Woke up to a hell of a dream—my wife loved me again; she’d never been unfaithful. She was in my bed, sucking my cock, and it felt amazing. It was only afterward that I realized I wasn’t dreaming, that she really was in my bed. She’d gotten drunk, come home, saw me in bed and got horny or something, decided to try one more time to get me back. That, apparently, was just her way of doing it. I kicked her out, and I wasn’t nice about it either. I was…well, I was pretty awful, actually. Said some really nasty shit to her. I was still drunk, but it doesn’t excuse it. I just…I felt nasty, slimy, and just…dirty, for having let her do that to me. I just wanted nothing to do with her.”
“Oh god, Franco. That is so terrible. I don’t even know what to say.”
He nods. “I know. I’m over that. I’m just explaining how I felt then.” He pauses for a minute. “Actually, that was kind of the tipping point for me, now that I think about it. I was talking to James about it on the phone—he’d never understood why I wouldn’t just divorce her cheating skank ass, and I never had a good explanation beyond the Catholic guilt thing, and my parents.” He pauses again. “And then James was like, dude, the approval of your parents means nothing to you. You’re not a practicing Catholic anymore. You’re ten times the man your old man is, and you deserve to be happy. If not happy, then at least free. And who gives a flying rat fuck how it makes Maria feel? She’s the one who brought this all on herself.”
“Hooray for James!”
He laughs. “Yeah, hooray for James. He still ha
d Renée then, and he was pretty optimistic about life.
“So I went and got papers drawn up that same day. Took them to her, lied to her face and told her I had proof she was cheating, and that if she signed the papers now I’d make sure she got her share of what I had, which was a decent chunk, back then, or she could fight it and get nothing.”
“She fought?”
“Oh no, nothing that simple. She bargained. Bartered. Nickel-and-dimed me for every last penny I had. She knew I was desperate to get clear of her, and she used that to fuck me over. And I let her. Gave her the condo overlooking Lake Michigan, the fancy new car I’d bought her right before I found out she was cheating, plus some investments I’d made.”
“Damn,” I say, whistling. “She fucked you hard.”
“I wanted out. It was just stuff, just money, what did it matter? I was truly desperate. Once I realized I could be free of her, that I didn’t have to stay with her out of some misplaced obligation or religious guilt or something, I was crazy to get free, so I just agreed to everything.” He shrugs. “I left that marriage at age twenty-seven, flat broke and angry as hell at the world. I got a one-room basement apartment in one of the most dangerous areas of Chicago, worked my ass off to rebuild my savings. Spent the next ten years or so working my way up at the company, got to the point that I was on the verge of making the leap up into high-level management. And then, the very day I was supposed to sit for an interview for a management position at the company I’d been working for, I got the call from James that Renée had died in childbirth.”
“Jesus, Franco.”
“Yeah. I’d been coming down here every weekend to hang out with them for years at that point—I’d just seen Renée the weekend before. I’d felt the baby kick.” He’s quiet, wrought with memory. “Then bam, gone. Dead. No warning, no goodbye—one of my best friends and my best friend’s wife, gone. So I quit my job that day with zero notice, broke my lease, packed up, and came down here. Lived with James and the girls until he was on his feet, and then moved in with Grandma and Grandpa until they moved into the home, at which point I bought this place.”
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