I said, "She left me a note about it in the box that had her father's hairbrush. I thought she would have at least told you about it."
She replied, "Oh my God, I got a letter from her on Friday before the accident. Since we talked on the phone every week I thought it was a little strange at the time. She wrote about some of the good times that we had together and how she still loved me in a very special way." Jean started crying and finished with, "I was going to ask her about it the next time we talked on the phone but," and her voice trailed off.
"I guess that was her way of saying good bye Jean," I said softly.
"Damn it to hell!" Jean yelled, "Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!"
I said, "I am sorry Jean, I didn't mean to upset you. I thought that you knew about this."
She replied, "It is not your fault Tony. Fuck! I have to get going. I will talk to you soon," and hung up the phone.
I was pretty upset as well, but a few days later I got a short letter from her apologizing for the way that she had acted on the phone. Needless to say, it was a very long time before the subject ever came up again.
The letters continued from Elizabeth as well. At first they were short, but she soon got in the habit of starting the next one soon after she had mailed the previous one and would keep adding to it during the month. Mostly they were about day to day life happenings but we talked about other things as well.
November 3, 1982 was the first anniversary of Katie's death and it fell on a Wednesday that year. The weather was cool with a little drizzle. I took a long lunch break, picked up a single pink rose on the way, and I left that on the front of her tombstone. I hadn't been there since the last weekend at Elizabeth's house, but the feeling of emptiness still lingered inside of me as I stood at her grave. The next year when I was there on November 3rd, there was a thin but tall glass vase with some water in it sitting on the base of the stone. I knew that Elizabeth must have left it there for me. I placed the rose in there and every year afterwards, the vase was always waiting for me. I also stopped and visited her grave a few times during the year if I was close to the area.
Elizabeth wrote about the vase, "When I saw that rose on the grave the first year, I knew that you had been there but I never doubted that you wouldn't come back on that day. I just felt that it was a little nicer. I will go back over in a few weeks and get it before winter sets in.
Her letters were always a joy to read. She could be so funny at times.
A year after we parted that she wrote, "Charlie has been pretty nice to me, so I decided the other night to do something special for him. We went to bed and played for a little bit, then I sat up, leaned down and started to well, you know, kiss his thing. He was really surprised that I would do that and I asked him if should I stop. He told me that if I kept that up for too long, well you know what's going to happen. I told him that I had a pretty good idea what was going to happen. He said okay and I went back to work. It didn't take too much time and his baby stuff didn't taste bad, then I lay down next to him and asked if he was going to kiss me. He got this weird look on his face but finally he gave me a little peck on lips. I asked him if he liked me doing that and he said yes, that was very nice. I said, well if you ever want me to do it again, you had better think long and hard about this next kiss. It took him a few minutes but he finally gave in and kissed me good and proper. After he was done, I said to him now that wasn't so damn bad, was it? He made a funny face but he said no. I said and I won't say a word about it to your fishing buddies. The look he got on his face was just special. I laughed for a good five minutes!"
I did ask her if she ever asked him to spank her.
She wrote back, "No, I know he wouldn't. I'm just going to keep those memories as they are. Not that I couldn't use a good one every now and then! And I know you will ask sooner or later but not in the butt either. He isn't interested in that. But that's okay. Things are good so I'll enjoy what I'm getting."
I slowly moved on with my life. I started getting better at selling computers and even had another sales representative working for me. The end of that year I got transferred back to Stroudsburg to open a computer center in that store. It was tough again for the first few months but things picked up.
I started seeing my girlfriend from college more and more after things ended with Elizabeth. The sex was okay but it just basic sex. She never much liked when I ate her and she never would suck my cock, plus she wasn't on the pill and I had to use a condom. But we had enough other mutual interests and didn't fight at all. We did talk about whom we had been dating since college and I told her a little about Katie and the accident. She thought it was very sad, but we never talked about her after that.
Her apartment lease was up the end of September in 1982 and we decided to get a place together. The place where I was living was too small for two people so I gave them my notice as well. After we got moved, she went on the pill, which made sex a little better. It was fairly regular, four or five times a week, so that made up for the lack of variety. When I moved out of my apartment, I brought my notebook, the candle, the box with the hairbrush, and Katie's picture down to my office. I just felt that it was best to keep that part of my life separate. I proposed to her that Christmas and we got married the following spring. Seemed like the right thing to do at the time. We bought a small house in her hometown which was close enough to where she worked and central enough to most of the places that I could get transferred to. Our first son was born and the second came along eighteen months later.
Once a month when no one else was at the store in the morning, I would light the candle for a few minutes to feel Katie's spirit with me and to talk to her a little. But sometimes she would come to me at the office without me lighting the candle, especially if I was having a bad day, just to cheer me up a little.
About the same time that my wife and I moved in together, Charlie moved in with Elizabeth as well.
She wrote, "He wanted me to move in with him, but I will be damned if I am going to have my life stored in a few boxes in his attic. I told him that if he wanted to move in with me, that was fine. If he wanted things to stay as they are, that was fine with me as well although I did tell him he had better call first before he came over, just in case I had company that night. He got the point real quick like! But it is nice having him here and he likes to have fun sometimes two or three nights a week."
They got married a week before I did. I had sent her an invitation to our wedding but she declined.
In her letter she said, "As much as I would love to be there, Charlie still has this thing about you and besides, you don't need any sadness on that day. We aren't having a real big wedding and the honeymoon is going to be at my house," but she did send a card and a check to us as a wedding present.
I worked under a succession of district sales managers after Danny quit. They were all trying to make a name for themselves and there was pretty good turnover among center managers. I got promoted to manage two freestanding computer centers in one year and the second one was one of the bigger ones in terms of sales volume in the district. Things were starting to settle in when at 4:00 PM on December 24th of that year I caught a call from the sales manager to meet him at a store in Harrisburg that was at the very end of our district and a two hour drive from the house on Dec 26th at 8:30 AM. I was not happy about that at all. But was he was a real bastard and I didn't have the option to turn the place down. While was as big as the one I was running and had the potential to be even bigger, I did not want to move and as it turned out neither did my wife.
I lived in an apartment for nine months and came home on the weekends. We bought a house down there and moved down. At first things were okay. I spent weekends and evenings on remodeling projects, cutting the lawn, planting gardens, and I would even take a week of vacation to do work around the house. There was a wood stove in the house and I spent a lot of time cutting, hauling, and splitting firewood. I did a lot of the cooking as well. When the boys started school they got involved with an elementary wrestling program and I helped out as a coach. I did everything that I possibly could do, to be a good husband and father.
But after a year my wife started getting increasingly homesick. I didn't understand why at the time, although I do now. The fights started and our sex life went from a couple of times a week to a couple of times a month. She would blame the pill for her moods and go off it for a few months, then go back on it again. Her moods weren't because of the pill, I know that now as well. During the off periods we were using or should I say I was using a combination of the rhythm method and withdrawal. One time I made a slight miscalculation on my part about the timing of the rhythm method and nine months later our daughter was born. My wife was in a better mood during the pregnancy and the sex got better and more regular for a while. She stayed that way for about six months after our daughter was born, but then the craziness started back up, this time even worse. Most nights she would head for the bed around 9:00 PM and leave me to watch TV or work on another of the never-ending home remodeling projects.
And yes, I still thought about Katie and I kept the candle hidden in my office along with the hairbrush and my notebook as well. I had a girl working for me that was in charge of the retail sales at our center. She had been through some rough times in her life and was understanding about my need to just close the office door every so often and not be bothered for a while. I never once put up a Christmas tree without thinking about Katie and that special night that we spent making love by the light of her Christmas tree and I still do to this very day. The same was true when the full moon would rise high in the sky on a warm summer night. We lived out in the country and had a few acres of land. After my wife would fall asleep I would walk back down in the one field and just stand there enjoying the moonlight and the memories of that magical night. But Katie never made her presence known to me during those nights. She stayed away from my house and my life there. I never once missed making the trip to the cemetery on November 3rd to place a pink rose in the vase that was always waiting on her tombstone and if I happened to be traveling in that area on business, I would stop there for a few minutes as well.
The company I worked for went through some major changes in their computer sales division. Even though I had done very well there for a couple of years, sales had declined sharply the last year. Not only at my location, but pretty much across the country. The lease on my center was up in June of 1990 and the company decided not to renew it. I could have transferred someplace else but by then I had enough of the corporate bullshit. I went out on my own and started my own computer consulting company. My former employer was closing a number of computer centers at the same time and since there was big surplus of office furniture that they had no use for, I was allowed to take a couple of desks, chairs and a filing cabinet. I rented a small office in Camp Hill and started working.
