Fiction Friday

I can't remember the exact day my life turned to shit. Which makes sense because I don't believe there really was a precise moment, some tangible turning point when I woke up and realized that my former life was over. No, for me it was more like a hazy dream that unfolded over many months. A foggy interval of discovery. An era of learning more and more awful truths, often times via the morning edition of the Arizona Republic, each one more damning than the last. It was as though I couldn't process the current bad news until something more awful surfaced.

But how could someone really grasp in one moment, or month, or season how quickly family bonds can unravel? How many fucked-up things the man you're married to is capable of?

But now that the pieces lay where they do, that is to say in a pile of dust on the floor of the 5 bedroom 4 bathroom house that used to be my home, I have to ask myself how distant and clueless was I? Were there no signs at all? Or did I just choose to ignore them?

Could Bo's job alone really have afforded us the luxury in which we lived? Were boarding the horses and winter getaways to Switzerland really wthin a regional fleet manager's means? Even if his region was the entire southwest?

My father always told me Bo was slick. And he meant slick like the slime that coats ham slices that have been left in the fridge too long, not slick like the sunny, yellow rain coat Janine stomps through puddles in.

And dad was right, dead center on. He always was a fierce dart player, hitting the bulls eye more often than not. Why he had to go and die and leave me to face this shit storm by myself is something I plan to take up with my maker, if I ever meet her.