I was served while waiting in line for my turn to access the company sponsored outplacement resources. I came home to find the locks changed, my clothes boxed and in the driveway with another copy of the restraining order placed neatly on top. My severance package should have lasted for months, but I was almost immediately forced to choose. Should I use my remaining funds to fight the divorce and for custody of my daughter or to live? I chose to fight, but I was simply outmatched.
Lawyers, psychologists, judges all came to the same conclusion. I was a mentally abusive, unfit parent. I was unemployed, and without means to care for a child. I was worthless. They said so in writing. All legal like.
The final blow came when I had my last harebrained idea. If I could just speak to April face to face, she would listen to me. At the time, she was nine. Old enough to tell them that she loved her daddy and that she wanted to see me and that we were like peas in a pod. And so I stood in the darkness, behind the bushes, hoping to see her. Staring at what used to be my house. That was the first time I saw them together. My wife, my daughter and the company vice president of operations. He was the son of my former company’s founder and a womanizer, an asshole and perhaps the worst business manager ever to hold an executive position. But his old man was respected and people were loyal and the only ruined life was mine. And I was a nobody. They had all said so.
He was a strange looking man, ten years my senior, with an expanding waistline, a large checkbook and my pre-made family. I would be the first one to admit that my description was biased by my hatred. He wasn’t deformed or anything, but all I could see was ugliness.
That was the night I took my first drink. Not my first ever, but the first one I took to mask my pain. It was a long drink. It lasted a year. It might have lasted forever but I saw her one more time. I was wandering the streets. Unkempt facial hair, unwashed clothes and a foul odor that announced my presence long before I arrived. I was a couple of weeks away from being homeless, if you could call my dilapidated studio apartment in the nearly condemned pre-war era building a home. She was coming out of one of the downtown boutiques, bags weighing down her arms, searching her designer purse for the keys to her luxury SUV. I think I frightened her. In fact, I know I did. She was momentarily at a loss for what to do next, shield her possessions or her body. The drunken haze that shielded me from the real world meant she was in no danger from me. It took me far too long to recognize her. The ‘Oh, my god’ and her hands covering her mouth in shock before she started her car and drove off finally registered several minutes later.
A few minutes after that, I stole the beer bottle from the convenience store. That was why I was searching for the bottle opener. I was too stupid to lift one with a twist off cap and Melanie had rearranged the kitchen utensils again, for no damn good reason. I couldn’t find the fucking bottle opener. After the bottle was smashed and the contents of all but one drawer were tossed on to the floor, I found it. There was no Melanie, it wasn’t our home, and the bottle opener was right where I left it. Right where it should have been. Everything had been in its place.
I stopped drinking that day and left my hometown the next with a backpack full of everything I owned and almost fifty dollars to my name. It wasn’t hard to stop. I wasn’t an alcoholic, I was a broken man trying to hide in a bottle. And failing.
***
“Is everything an inspirational quote with you now?”
“Not always. Not everything inspires someone. Sometimes things are just a reminder of where we have been.”
“What the fuck, Brayden?! What does that even mean?”
“I have no idea what it means to you but, frankly, I have no interest in explaining what anything means to me. Especially to you.”
***
I wandered for eighteen months that first time, walking, hitchhiking and taking the occasional bus. I worked odd jobs until I had enough cash to move on. Money was tight, but my eyes were open. I put up camp wherever I found myself. There was always someplace to lay my head, grab a shower, snag a meal. I indulged myself with the anything that looked interesting from any used book store I passed. I could grab a dozen books for the price of one movie. So I read.
I wrote down anything that I wanted to remember, and anything that I was feeling, in an old, worn spiral bound notebook. It was a diary of pain and discovery. I kept up on world events with newspapers that others had discarded. They were often out of date but the news that filled those pages didn’t really affect me anyway. And I talked to people. Well, listened mostly. People liked to talk and I was a good listener.
I splurged, once, on a well used digital camera from a pawn shop. I took pictures so that I could remember the locations I had been, people that I had met and, much later in my journey, things that had inspired me. About once a month, and for around five dollars, one of the chain drug stores would transfer all my pictures from my memory card to compact disc. After a year and a half, I settled in a dusty little town in the middle of the country. I worked my first, post divorce, full-time job in the warehouse of a fertilizer factory. During the day I slaved away, hauling shit, and at night I retired to my rented room above the local garage to read and write. I exchanged my notebook for a used laptop and spent my free days at the local library using their free internet to load my thoughts and picutres to a blog. People followed me, commented anonymously and, though I was writing as a cathartic alternative to therapy, I enjoyed knowing that people were interested in what I had to say. I enjoyed it a lot.
***
Melanie paused at the only picture that I had of my former family, a strip of photographs from a booth at an amusement park. April was four years old at the time. Her pony tail wrapped in pink ribbons and her newly pierced ears shimmered with the fake diamond studs. The overly bright flash couldn’t compete with the smiles on the faces of the three subjects. Each captured the moment. The first was surprised, the next silly, and then genuine laughter.
“I could help you get in touch with her. Help you reconnect.”
“Oh, so you’re close? Down with all the latest comings and goings of your daughter?”
I could see her try and search my gaze for information. It must have been hard for her not to have the upper hand, to not be a step ahead, to be wondering what I knew or didn’t know.