Interlude - Tommy

Tommy put the rest of his tools in his work bag and cleaned up the remaining wires on the floor. The new wires and plumbing he put in for Emma’s dishwasher would keep her in this old house for another few years without having to have someone come in to live with her.

“There you go, Emma. You’re good to go,” he said to her as he threw the leftovers of his work into the trash can in her kitchen.

“Thank you, dear boy,” the older woman said. “Ever since Marvin died, things just haven’t been getting done around here.”

He knew she would go on for hours about her late husband, Marvin, if he let her, but Tommy had three teen boys at home who he would like to get back to before they tore out walls or something. He’d spent the past two hours installing the dishwasher for Emma, one of the older people in the congregation at the church he attended and it was Saturday morning still.

Pastor Chuck, as he preferred to be called over Pastor Angelopoulos, had asked Tommy if he could take some time to help Emma and Tommy could not say no. A local charity helped with the funding for the dishwasher, but someone had to take the dishwasher out to the woman’s house, plumb it and install it.

Pastor Chuck asked Tommy and Tommy couldn’t say no because Pastor Chuck knew Tommy had the truck, had the tools, had the knowledge and loved helping others.

Tommy seemed to never say no to anyone asking for his help. It had probably cost him his first marriage to Missy and most certainly his second marriage to Karen. He had loved both women, but they eventually got so upset that he would give others his time, they would drift away from him.

Missy was the mother of his three sons, the oldest two, Ben and Ken, were 14 year-year-old identical twins, average in everything, but good boys, and Sam was the spoiled younger child at 12. He was spoiled because he was the youngest and because he was probably smarter than the rest of the male population of the family put together, taking after his mom. He was straight As every year and despite being more than two years younger than Ben and Ken, he was just a year behind them in school and was in two of their junior classes.

Secretly, Tommy knew one of the reasons Karen left was because she felt inferior, mentally, to Sam.

Tommy had met Karen while on a construction site a few years earlier. She was attractive in a farm-girl kind of way and had flirted with him every time he came out to check on his work crew. She was the daughter of the client who’d commissioned Tommy’s Contracting & Repair, LLC to build an insulated horse barn for some special racehorses the man owned.

Just 18 months out of his marriage with Missy, Tommy appreciated the prettiness of Karen, but she was almost 10 years his junior, so he didn’t take her flirtations seriously. Four weeks into the project, he was inspecting the wiring for the primary grooming area and Karen, dressed in a brief sundress, nearly danced into the room. It was just the two of them and Karen was not shy about making her intentions clear.

Tommy was flattered, as he was neither a handsome man, nor a very wealthy man anymore, but here was a 25-year-old woman making it clear she would enjoy time with him. She wasn’t a challenge to his intellect, but she was pleasant to look at and willing to spend nights sitting on bedrolls at the state park with him and the boys, and sometimes without the boys.

And enjoy they did and four months later he married his little kitten Karen and fourteen months later he divorced her. It was too much for him when she began spending more time away from him and his boys than with them.

Before he divorced her, he tried to get her to understand the importance of the family unit to her, but she would begin crying and complain about Tommy spending his free time helping others rather than taking her dancing or to dinner or on some romantic vacation. She’d complain that others took advantage of him and he didn’t see how he was being used. Tommy said he did it because he felt the desire to help others and it was his way of giving back to others, but she said he was being used.

As the arguments progressed, she would complain Sam was always getting the better of her in every game they played, that he knew the answers before she did on every game show and Sam was a better cook, and on and on.

Tommy was trying to rebuild his life and the drama of Karen was too much for him. He didn’t want to hear any more about Sam being smarter than everyone else, didn’t want to hear her complain about Ben and Ken eating her energy bars, and didn’t want to hear her complain about the money he donated to an African village he would never see.

Sam was Tommy’s son, Ben and Ken were Tommy’s sons, the food was bought for the family and somewhere tonight, a child in Africa was drinking clean water for the first time in his life and Karen was now just an expensive ex-wife.

Missy had been another story altogether. He’d married her because she was smart, pretty, hardworking, industrious, and frugal and had a sense of humor that paralleled his own. She was, or so he thought, a perfect match for him and his developing business. She had a degree in business administration and ran the office side of Tommy’s business and kept the books for him as well as being a CPA with a side business on her own.

They had been an up-and-coming couple for 10 years, the envy of her brothers and sisters, seven in all, and the rest of her family. Tommy’s mom had been very proud of him until her passing shortly after Sam was born. Tommy’s dad had moved with his wife to another part of the country and didn’t visit but once every couple of years and called only when he needed money for some damn fool idea he had. Tommy would give it to him, to Missy’s disgust because he never paid it back.

Her family became his surrogate family and he loved her brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews and parents-in-law more than his own.

Until Missy came home one Saturday morning from her office in town and said she couldn’t handle it anymore.

That was pretty much it.

“I can’t handle it anymore,” was all she said. Six months later, their friends wouldn’t talk to him, her family stopped talking to him, everyone who knew them as a couple stopped spending time with him.

He was pissed at everyone except his sons, who lived with him most of the time because Missy was off doing whatever it was she wanted, while he tried to run a business and keep what was left of his family together.

Missy hooked up with a wealthy realtor and moved into a beautiful five-bedroom house in the city and fought for the boys, winning custody because she could provide better for them. It cost Tommy the 15 acres the two of them had bought together with the four-bedroom ranch house and three-stall garage.

After all was said and done and the final papers worked out, he shared custody of his kids with her and paid about one-quarter of his yearly income toward child support and insurance, while she became a stay-at-home mom who volunteered her time to his realtor business, so as not be to on a payroll.

Tommy had gotten taken to the cleaners, as his attorney had put it, but he didn’t get bitter, didn’t seek revenge against her, and didn’t make her life as difficult as she’d made his.

He did what his faith told him to do and he turned the other cheek. There were times he wanted to lash out. He wanted to scream at her for destroying his life. He wanted to be angry at her for all the lies she’s spread about him. He wanted to explode because the great family he’d had was now just memories he experienced less and less often.

He couldn’t talk to her brothers and sisters, couldn’t go out to her dad’s lakeside cottage and fish, couldn’t sit down and talk with her mom like he’d done so many times since his mom had died.

Tommy was alone.

As alone as he’d ever been and it nearly drove him over the edge.

But Pastor Chuck had brought him back from the edge of the Chasm of Long Sleep before Tommy could do too much harm to himself or business. Many prayers, many people from the church he started attending, and many nights spent sleeplessly thinking about God got Tommy through the “dark times,” as he called them.

He survived his first divorce just barely and had to work harder than he’d ever worked in his life to rebuild his business to something respectable.

It took a few years, but Tommy was coming back and he had the people at the church and Pastor Chuck to thank.

He wanted to give back to the people who helped him in his time of need and the only way he had of doing that was his skills at building and repairing things. He had a knack with automobiles and his contracting business often had 10% of scrap which Tommy and his boys would carefully stack and store in the small garage beside their new, smaller, home on one acre of land near the city limit sign.

Tommy spent a lot of time helping others and less time focusing on being the rich contractor he thought he wanted to be. He took great pleasure in helping others and felt better than he had in many years in knowing he could.

It fulfilled him, but it also was another reason Karen left him. Karen would have liked to live in a house the size of the one Tommy had built with Missy, but Tommy wasn’t driven for that anymore. Now he wanted to raise his kids and help others, not collect wealth.

So while Tommy was alone in his bed, he slept better knowing he could help others in need and instead of having a family of 10 or 12, he had a family the size of a congregation.