Chapter 1
“I love what you’ve done with the place Paul, I’m not sure how you could have done this place up any more perfectly for this,” said Teri.
“Yeah man, crazy that you built it all yourself too. Could’ve called for my help if you needed it. Not like I’ve been working on anything useful lately,” said Curtis with a smile as he turned back to his wife Teri, who promptly popped him in the back of the head.
“Thank y’all, and I was happy to do it. I’ve been big into any project I can get my hands on since, you know,” I said. Both Teri and Curtis had been two of my best friends since high school, and even though I had originally been friends with Curtis first; there was a natural transition as we welcomed Teri to our high school friend group. Teri was short with red hair, while Curtis is probably a little over 6 feet tall with pure blonde hair and blue eyes. Curtis was always the looker of my high school class, while Teri was the typical head cheerleader type.
“Nothing wrong with that. What happened was a big deal, so I say build away. Every man needs at least one good hobby,” said Curtis.
“May not always be the healthiest way to deal with a divorce but at least you’re doing something productive, might as well come by and build this at our house too,” said Teri jokingly as another one of my friends, Ronny Gonzalez, son did a cannonball straight into the pool dusting the three of us lightly with water.
“I’d be fine with that, as long as you’re good with all of this at your house too,” I replied as I motioned around at all that was going on around me.
It’s the 4th of July and I was throwing probably the largest party I ever had. I have a small two-bedroom bardominiuum style square house, but I just finished installing a huge wood deck that wrapped around the side of my above-ground pool. The deck took a solid three weeks to build, was 500 square feet and was about five feet off the ground, but it was worth it to provide the scene before me. There are a total of about 15 people here tonight, including about three couples of friends that I’ve known from either high school or church. Along with my parents and my sister, and a couple of guys that I knew from work.
Even more important though was the fact that today was the 6-month anniversary of my wife leaving me. It had been a dark, looming cloud over essentially everything I did or said since then. I loved and I suppose I still do love my wife, but I could have handled a divorce for lack of intimacy or just us growing apart. I could have even handled it if I found that she had been having an affair, but what did happen was what made it my worst nightmare. I came home from work and she was gone.
For the six years that we had been married she had nearly always been right at the door waiting for me with a smile and a kiss unless she was going to be somewhere in which she would have texted me and let me know but I didn’t see her car in the driveway. I opened the door to no one which I didn’t find absolutely crazy but as soon as I approached the refrigerator my heart sank into the floor with a feeling that I thought would kill me or at the very least make me want throw up in reaction.
It was a letter that was all of about three paragraphs long and in short said that we were through and she was leaving and never coming back. She didn’t say where she was going or who she would stay with, just that we’d never see each other again. It was a complete shock to my system. Of course, things had seemed stale between us, but I certainly never thought that that would happen.
What was even worse was that I didn’t chase after her. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her or even that I didn’t want to try to find her, but I wasn’t sure how to. I tried to text and to call her several times, but she had blocked me on everything. After a while, I wasn’t sure if it mattered. She had clearly moved on, and there wasn’t really anything that I could do about it. I had given up. After about a month of doing little more than surviving; I put our house up for sale and decided to move into this house, which we had been using as an Airbnb.
Life had finally begun to feel normal again, or at least as normal as it could be. Looking around from the grill, it was a perfect night with the sun within an hour of sunset, people sitting around talking, swimming in the pool, and a fresh round of hot dogs coming. I finally realized that I had what I needed. My love life was gone, but I’d find love again. For now, I’m surrounded by people that care about me. And in the moment, that’s all that matters.
“Thanks Paul, great party. With that pool we’re going to have to come over more often,” said Jennings Bryant who was my next-door neighbor at my old house but also was a member of my church at Creekside Baptist Church just down the road.
“Thanks man, sure y’all are more than welcome to come over whenever y’all can. Are Greg and them back with the fireworks?” I asked as I flipped over a couple more hot dogs on the grill.
“They should be coming back about now, I figure. They left about 20 minutes ago, it seems like,” replied Jennings as I nodded in reply as he walked back after taking a hot dog back to his spot next to the pool. There was a table to my right which had a spread of buns, burgers, and hot dogs with the typical array of slices of cheese, ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, and onions alongside a couple of pitchers of both lemonade and sweet tea. I might have overdone the food and the spectacle. I had overcooked the crowd of 15 and strung red, white, and blue lights and bunting all around the deck, house, and pool, but to me it was worth it. My ex-wife, of course, wasn’t around to see it, but I was having fun. Even if she couldn’t see it; I knew that I could, and that was really the only proof that I needed.
Just then a red Ford F150 truck pulled up through the driveway, which led to the front side of the house. This was where the rest of the 10 other vehicles were parked at the side of my driveway, which ran about a football field through a clearing that separated my house from the road. After a couple of minutes, Greg Sisons and George Nolan, both holding a couple of baskets of fireworks with everything from sparklers and bottle rockets to mortar shells.
“Hey y’all, bout’ to shoot them off?” I asked them as they walked by after I looked up to see that the sun was just about to set.
“We will in just a bit, is it okay if we drag around here that table from your front porch to shoot them off of?” asked Greg.
“Sure, be my guest, Brother Greg,” I replied with a smile as I continued to man the grill. Brother Greg and Brother George were respectively the preacher and music leader at Creekside Baptist Church just down the road where I went. It was very possible that, being as though those two were my preachers, they had tried to pay special attention to me. This was probably because what they had heard about my situation, like any good preacher would. Despite what might seem like pity from them, I had become good friends with both Greg and George’s families in the last six months. This was mostly the reason for them and their wives’ presence at the party tonight.
For the next 15 minutes the sun continued to go down. It was cascading orange sunset across my yard and shining through the trees, drifting across the field that separated the road from my house. During this time, both the ministers moved my square red picnic table that sat on my front porch over to about 40 yards off to the right of where I was at, while everybody continued to take turns swimming and swopping by grabbing food.
“Everybody ready!?” yelled Brother Greg towards the rest of the crowd as he, George, and Jennings had successfully strung together the fuses of a couple of fireworks. Which I hoped would end up being a sort of redneck genius way to successfully launch a whole set of fireworks at one time and not be a sort of redneck nightmare with a slew of blown-off fingers and burning grass.
Brother Greg’s request was greeted with the entire pool party crowd giving an enthusiastic ‘Yeah!’ along with a couple of ‘Hell Yeahs!’ which caused a brief disapproving glance back at the crowd from Brother Greg. Immediately George lit the fuse on the far right of the table holding fireworks, which was followed by George and Greg running away from the table as I could hear that all too familiar sound of the fuse sizzling before the fireworks shot off.
The way they had set up the mortar shells to go off, they had set up five canisters next to each other so one would shoot up and then the next one two seconds later until all five had gone up. Then Greg and George went up and refilled the canisters, along with firing off other types of fireworks every once in a while.
The fireworks shot up into the air with the familiar whiz of the shell flying up above us, followed by the shell blowing up in the air and puffing out a beautiful circle of red, green, blue, and white. I was so far very impressed with the show that the two ministers were able to pull off, thinking that they must have had a lot of experience with fireworks. I’m sure they probably did, given that they both had kids and were probably used to administering their own personal fireworks shows at their houses every 4th of July and New Year’s Eve. Watching the fireworks fly and Greg and George scrambling to reload the fireworks, it made me briefly think again about my ex. We hadn’t talked much about having children, but we were in our mid-30s, so we easily could have had them, I suppose. After taking a brief glance around at the couple of other families that were here, it gave me a sudden sense of regret and guilt. I was happy at this moment, but I had no one to share it with, and times like this were what made being a family most fulfilling.
Suddenly, as I was looking up at the sky at the fireworks; I saw something I didn’t recognize. It looked like a microscopic streak of lightning, but from my vantage point, it was exactly in the middle of the circle of white sparks of fireworks from the recently launched mortar shell. The streak of lightning didn’t last long. I probably only saw it for half a second, but it was off-putting to me because there was something that seemed unnatural about it. It didn’t exactly look like lightning. It looked so small in the sky, and there didn’t seem to be a cloud in the sky, much less a thunderstorm.
I looked around and it didn’t seem like anybody else had noticed this lightning streak across the sky. At least if they had, they hadn’t seemed to have the same sense of confusion that I had about it. This made me think that what I had seen was probably just some form of heat lightning, which was common in the summer, but it still didn’t quite make sense to me why the lightning was so small.
The fireworks continued for about ten more minutes when the firework loot that the two ministers had acquired had all run out. I was more than fine with this because I love fireworks just as much as the next guy, but they get boring after about ten minutes or so of seeing the same thing shoot into the air.
“Great time tonight, Paul, thanks for having us all over,” said Jennings as he walked by me and patted me on the back. This was followed by most of the group getting up and either leaving or starting the process of leaving with the exception of a couple of people. I didn’t mind since most of these people had been here for hours and I was starting to miss my alone time. After another 15 minutes, everybody had left but my parents and sister, and it was getting close to 10 pm.
“Great time son, I must say that I’m really happy for you. It’s been six months you know,” said dad as I walked over to the three of them that were still sitting in chairs that were on the deck right next to the pool. My sister still had her swimsuit on with a towel wrapped around her, even though I’m pretty sure she was in the pool for only a couple of minutes all night.
“Thanks dad and thank y’all for coming. It means a lot to me,” I replied.
“You know it’s still not too soon to start thinking about meeting someone, them grandbabies don’t make themselves,” said mom with a smile as both her and dad along with my sister stood up off the pool deck to make their way out.
“I don’t know about that mom, y’all may be waiting a while. I’m pretty sure Megan’s going to be working on that faster me,” I said looking towards my little sister who was recently engaged a couple of months ago although they hadn’t nailed down the marriage date quite yet.
“Come on now, I got at least 3 more years,” said Megan as she held up three fingers before giving me a hug goodbye.
“It better be at least three years, or we’re all going to have some problems,” said Dad as they had all started walking through the back door to go back through the house.
“Y’all go easy on her now; I’ll see all y’all on Sunday. Probably going to just hang around the house and clean up stuff tomorrow,” I said as I waved them goodbye. They had walked through the kitchen and living room of the house to make it out the front door and to my dad’s truck. They lived only about five minutes from here and had come over earlier in the day.
They waved goodbye and drove off to go back home. My sister lives in Birmingham, but she had come down during the 4th of July holiday and stayed with my parents while her fiancé had to stay home and work the weekend. They had been at my house for something like 9 hours, along with everybody else being at my house for at least three or four hours, so I was ready for the night to be over for the most part. However, there was a part of me that knew I would miss the company just like I had missed the company every day for the past six months, but it was all part of the healing process. I couldn’t continue to rely on being around people to fill the void; I had to learn how to be on my own.
