It was wonderful. Helen had, for the first time in – god knows how long – been at peace. Nothing could ever make her forget the concussions, the black eyes and broken ribs of days gone by. Matthias and June remembered too. Nearly a decade of therapy, police phone calls, and restraining orders had etched sorrowful yesterdays quite sharply into everyone’s uneasy psyches. Helen had married infidelity, gonorrhea, drunken languor, and stupidity with ready-to-pound fists of terrible iron, and though she would like to have blamed him for being the Hitler in the home, she could never escape that the meth made her an audience to the horror show, a complicit enabler in the harm perpetrated upon her person and her defenseless children.
When he beat her, she stood by him. When he cheated on her with street whores, she stood by him. When he took a 2X4 to her back, she rationalized the act as some sick form of justice. He paid the bills. The kids had school supplies and plenty of macaroni and cheese to eat. It was more than her own father had done. Her own father fucked her. A lot. This man didn’t rape his children. He provided for them. He provided for her. She didn’t have to work at all. If the house was clean and food was on the table when he got home from construction, he gave her what she needed … more meth. If things weren’t clean enough, if the food wasn’t palatable enough … well it was his right. He paid for everything.
Family services came by. Some cunt of a teacher had called them. She protected him by claiming that June had fallen off her bike. The second time, Matthias had been hit in the face by a softball. The third time, Matthias had been in a fight with another kid. She protected her man, her provider, because he gave her what she needed. All injuries were just the price paid for stability. He had a good job. Her kids had ramen and mac and cheese. They had an apartment. Their car seldom needed repair, and most of the time, he could fix it when it did.
Even when he shot the cop, like an idiot, she stood by him, but the system took him away. With him gone, the meth supply ran dry, and while she experienced levels of hellish insanity most humans cannot comprehend, her sister, Macy, nursed her backed to health, becoming more a mother to her children than Helen had, to date, ever been.
And the clouds went away.
With the help of Macy, Helen got off the meth. She took courses at the community college and got a cake job as a secretary for Northrup-Grumman. Just at the point when Matthias and June were enjoying home cooked lasagna and enchiladas, she’d met David online.
David was a software engineer for Hewlett-Packard, and was just what Helen needed. He was stayed, almost to the point of being boring. He was intelligent, well-spoken, humble and unassuming. His house was spotless, and his hygiene beyond reproach. He wept watching The Bridges of Madison County and laughed watching The Witches of Eastwick. He listened to her, and more importantly, to her children, with greater attentiveness than even her own therapist. Her cats couldn’t be further than fifteen feet from him without seeming to suffer from attachment disorder. He made her children smile again.
She’d made some very important choices in order to be reborn. With the help of Macy, her doctors and her therapists, she’d freed herself from addiction, and with the help of a lethal injection, kindly provided by the state, she’d freed herself from her marital captor. Her future and the future of her children could now be written upon blank, uncorrupted pages. She chose David as a co-author.
The first trip David took Helen and the kids on was to Disneyland. They spent a week there, and the kids were never happier. Then it was Mesa Verde, Colorado, the Big Apple, Lake Tahoe, Gettysburg, and so on. Every summer, David made sure the whole family took a superb getaway, but more than that, he was there for her. He was there for her children.
When Matthias and June were laid up with the chicken pox, he worked from home to tend to their needs. When June was being bullied by two girls at school, she cried on David’s shoulder, after which, he went to personally speak to the girls’ parents. It was a challenging conversation with some real troglodytes, but David managed to resolve matters peaceably. When Matthias was failing in science class, David tutored him. Matthias finished the term with a B-, which was good enough for him, not being in even the smallest manner, a fan of science. It didn’t matter that the sperm to create Matthias and June had been donated by a criminal moron, because David had become their father.
He was amazing as a husband too. He was an exceptional listener, a giving and gentle lover, a good-natured companion, and a splendid cook. When Helen’s father died, and the complicated well-spring of chaotic emotions flowed from her uncontrollably, he was there, absorbing it all, holding her when she needed to be held, letting her vent, even when screaming was involved, and giving her the space she needed to work things out on her own, all the while, loving, without judgment. When they spooned together in bed, it was as if all the troubles of the world magically vanished. He was the king of oral sex. Helen almost suggested he teach classes for men on the subject. He was a master at making lasagna, orange chicken, beef stroganoff, and just about everything under the sun, and what’s more, he always cleaned up after himself as he cooked.
Could he have been more perfect? Helen thought not. Could she have been more blessed? Again, Helen thought not.
Ah, but no one is perfect, and even the bravest of the queen’s knights casts a shadow.
One morning, Helen was getting ready for the day. Standing in her towel after the shower, she’d laid her clothes out on the bed. She glanced at the white cotton panties she’d almost thoughtlessly chosen for the day’s ensemble, and she happened to notice black curly hairs in the region of the crotch. Helen was a platinum blonde with pubes to match, so this was something of an oddity to her. David was the only brunette in the house.
What could this possibly mean, she wondered, only obliquely aware of the struggles that awaited her in the not-too-distant future.