Betrayal
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE from CAUGHT UP Truth and Metaphor | An Imaginary Tale
Betrayal
23
Returning to the scene of the crime was a kick in the teeth. Everything stung. Her old shop with its new occupant, Leo parading about with Emma, his latest model-look-a-like girlfriend, and her beautiful son walking on eggshells. Given the pressure, it was an extraordinary accident that she stayed clean long enough to find an AA meeting. The five o’clock Happy Hour group was within walking distance of their new apartment, a respectable dwelling she secured from a motel room halfway between Florida and North Carolina.
Following her first meeting, April, a woman in her mid-forties with tight-curled blonde, over-bleached trailer trash hair, and her sidekick John, took her out for coffee and expressed their intention to adopt her.
“First things first, you need a local sponsor,” said April. “Sounds like you hit the home group jackpot down there in Florida, but don’t expect that support to follow you up here. Long distance never works out. You need people who’ll have your back when the shit hits the fan. I meet weekly with Lizzy. She’s my other sponsee. Why don’t you join us?”
Her unusual southern accent was a telltale sign she was born and raised in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Petra appreciated her direct approach and found the solicitation flattering. April seemed sure-footed, genuine and reliable.
The peculiar pair approached sobriety with an unusual spontaneity and freedom. John, a dead-ringer for Kurt Cobain, played lead guitar for a grunge band. April, ten years his senior, captivated by his boyish good-looks, charm and bad boy image, kept him on a short leash under the guise of safety in numbers. On Friday nights, they dragged her out to hear music in dive bars that reeked of beer, urine, and vomit.
“Aren’t we supposed to change people, places, and things?”
They shrugged their shoulders and in unison, as if pre-scripted, they offered an AA approved response.
“As long as we stay spiritually fit, we can go anywhere we want.”
April was five years sober and John had just received his one year chip. Unconvinced, Petra imagined The Fab Five rolling over in their proverbial graves, and fabricated excuses whenever possible.
She went the extra mile and sought out a Narcotics Anonymous meeting The Palace counselors had taken her to while she was in rehab. It was an evening meeting twenty-five miles south, but as she recalled, well worth the effort. Refusing to leave her son home alone, she dragged him along. In all likelihood, he would have preferred to play video games, but feelings of abandonment were fresh in his mind and it was too soon to pull any sort of disappearing act. Besides, it would be good for him to see what his mom was up to. It might help him relax.
To Daniel’s surprise, Mack, his favorite camp counselor, was in attendance. He was a good-looking guy who reeked of the wilderness from his muddy hiking boots to the buck knife suspended from his belt.
At the end of the meeting, Daniel tapped her on the shoulder.
“Hey Mom, I’m going to ask Mack to be my sponsor. Can I pick up my thirteen-year chip now?”
“Not right now. I’ll tell you why later.”
Explaining that a person has to earn a seat in the meeting by destroying their life was a tough conversation. She did her best to bring him up to speed on the car ride home.
Petra took April up on her sponsorship offer and began weekly 12-Step studies with her and Lizzy. Devastated by all she had lost, she was grateful for the opportunity to discuss her more personal failings regarding Leo. He continued to berate her and was quick to let her know all the various ways she had let him down. Lizzy, a petite, rail thin, brunette with sparkling emerald eyes, listened with an unnerving intensity and said nothing. She was ninety days clean and sober.
In a weird twist, she discovered a local NA group that met across the street from the Old Victorian. With the most impure of motives, she began attending the meetings three times a week, so she could monitor Leo and indulge an implausible fantasy where he begged her to come back to him because she was working so hard to get better.
It was an awkward setup, to say the least, what with her sitting across the road attending a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, while he puttered around in the yard with a joint hanging out of his mouth.
The guys in the meeting called the Old Victorian a drug house.
“No, it’s not. Don’t be ridiculous!”
They had no idea what a real drug house looked like.
“That’s my ex-husband’s house. Used to be mine, but he took it in the divorce. Yeah, they do drugs, we all did, but they’re not dealing, so you can’t call it a drug house.”
She noticed Dirk, a regular attendee, looking her up and down during the meeting. He was a good ole boy, born and raised a couple miles outside of town on a family-owned farm. He had a knowing, lights-turned-on, expression on his face.
Right after the meeting closed, he approached her.
“Are you Daniel’s mom?”
She nodded.
“I’ve seen him several times at the drug house. It concerns all of us. He says he’s okay, that he’s only visiting his step-dad from some camp.”
“First of all, how many times do I have to tell you guys? It’s not a drug house…How do you know, Daniel?”
Dirk sucked in a belly full of air.
“Are you kidding me right now? I know him from Cat Daddy’s. See those two guys over there? Well, the three of us raised your kid for over a year. He’s a damn good pool player, some might even say, a shark.”
He caught the attention of the other two guys.
“This is Daniel’s mom. She’s got no idea…We used to place bets with the tourists. Bets that he could beat them. I’m guessing he was ten or eleven at the time. How did you not know? He said you knew all about it.”
Wagging his head, he laughed, as he pieced it all together and concluded that the poor neglected Dickensian waif was also a little liar.
“He’s a great kid. We all love him.”
Petra, overcome by shock and a wave of gratitude, replied, “Thank you for caring for him. I wasn’t in my right mind and no, I had no idea.”
She found an eight-dollar-an-hour, minimum wage job at the YMCA, use of the facility included. When they discovered she was a strong swimmer, the company offered her the opportunity to become a water aerobics instructor. Fifteen dollars per class. The combination paid the bills and helped her regain a semblance of health.
Coming up on two years clean and sober, she expected April to give her an anniversary coin and called to sort out the arrangements. It seemed odd that she needed to pursue her concerning something so important. Until recently, April had been micro-managing her recovery, a control issue that grated on her nerves, truth be told. She did not answer her phone or call Petra back. Three weeks passed in silence.
At the end of her NA meeting, she posed a question to the group.
“What do you do if your sponsor won’t return your calls?”
Dirk held the door for her and ushered her toward a rocking chair on the front porch. Some months back, Leo purchased the house next door to the Old Victorian and opened a bona fide hair salon. Over the last few months, she watched the renovations progress from the little NA clubhouse across the street, admiring his new girlfriend’s beauty and the way she worked effortlessly by his side.
As Petra took a seat next to Dirk, Leo and Emma appeared and disappeared between the two houses like a couple of mocking ghosts.
“Your sponsor may have relapsed. Have you seen her in a meeting?”
“Nope, but I don’t really like that meeting and rarely go.”
“Oh, yeah, why’s that?”
“It’s just so different from my home group in Florida. I can’t seem to connect with anyone with long-term sobriety.”
“You may want to check out some different meetings…and get yourself a new sponsor. I wouldn’t worry too much. Sponsors don’t just up and ghost their sponsees without good reason.”
“But I didn’t do anything wrong!”
“I didn’t say you did. Don’t let moss grow under your recovery. Move on. Do it quickly.”
It should surprise no one that she had been interacting with Leo regularly since she returned home. He seemed to enjoy toying with Emma by having in-depth conversations with Petra about nothing.
One of his most thrilling accomplishments involved corralling the two of them into the same room so he could watch their reactions. On one such occasion, he sent Emma next door to retrieve a custom designed, blown-glass weed pipe, while he, behind her back, confided his complete dissatisfaction with their relationship.
“Everything was great with her until her drinking got out of hand. She’s disgusting when she’s drunk. She reminds me of you.”
When the salon opened, Leo offered Petra space on a shelf in his product display case to sell vintage costume jewelry left over from the Main Street shop. Before going home, she checked her inventory.
“Hey, have you seen that crystal brooch by Weiss?”
He sauntered past her with a flip of his hand and an arrogant head toss. Leo had a healthy head of hair that grew well past his shoulders. Some called him Fabio, a comparison that turned his stomach. Others brought up an uncanny resemblance to Warren Beatty in the movie Shampoo. That just pissed him off. He repeated her question with the trill voice of a female impersonator.
“Have you seen my brooch?”
“Honestly, I can’t believe all the things I do for you,” he said in his usual condemning baritone. “You’d be nowhere without me and you’re not even my wife anymore. You’re taking advantage. I’m sick of it!”
That comment sent Petra’s mind whirling into an irritated, accusatory rampage.
“Who does he think he is? Does so much for me? What the fuck is he talking about? A shelf in a display case? This is bullshit! He probably sold that brooch and pocketed the money. I owe him my ass!”
Still angry the following morning, knowing there was no possibility of a reasonable conversation with a jackass, she drove over, knocked on the front door and when no one answered, she entered and began collecting her belongings. While removing and wrapping her brooches, she heard light footsteps approaching from the back of the house. Expecting Emma, a different but somehow familiar female voice surprised her.
"Can I help you?"
Petra looked up and guess who was standing there? None other than Lizzy tending to the shop, which meant only one thing. She was Leo’s brand spanking new girlfriend. Guess what was on her lapel? That’s right! The missing brooch.
“Are you fucking out of your mind? Have you taken the information I shared with you in confidence and used it to steal my husband?”
Petra, filled with the palpable power of murderous rage, sprung up out of a cross-legged seated position, quite the feat for a woman in her late forties, and lunged at her.
“You twisted little bitch! Is this why April stopped talking to me?”
Lizzy, terrified, turned tail and rode a surge of adrenaline out the back door. In the distance, she heard a car engine turn over. Leo was going to love this shit. Now he had three women to manipulate and pit against one another. Petra, disgusted and exhausted, wanted no part of it.
“Unbelievable. All she had to do was tell me. I wouldn’t have blamed her. It’s not like it was entirely her fault.”
Several weeks earlier, Leo offered a free make-over as a marketing strategy. You had to recommend someone and write an essay about why they deserved to be pampered. April’s due diligence won Lizzy the makeover.
“Yes, she brought them together, but how does that make her responsible? The only thing she’s responsible for is hiding it from me. Does she think I’m a monster? Am I that scary? This is too fucking much! I need a sponsor with some balls.”
As her emotional instability rose to new heights, all she could think about was how much she missed The Fab Five and her Home Group in Florida. Not only did she need to find a new AA group, she left her NA group as well. She realized something she should have known all along. Sitting in a recovery house across the street from “the wreckage of her past” was unhealthy behavior. She needed to extricate herself from Leo’s psychopathic grip, once and for all.
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A harrowing tale, shot through with unlikely humor and fantastical creatures.
This autofiction (autobiography and fiction) novel revolves around a lifetime spent underwater struggling to find the surface. The narrative follows the journey of an unlikely heroine from the bondage of childhood trauma to self-awareness and freedom.
It is a roller coaster ride from the depths of hell to triumphant success that finishes with a big Hollywood ending.