Doug moved on her. He had his hands out in front of him. He was going for her neck. Rather than run, Betsy stood, frozen in place, wide-eyed, as Doug bolted forward. He had about ten feet to close between them, which gave me enough time to get my arms around him from behind before he could latch onto Betsy.
“Doug!” I shouted into his ear. “Doug!”
He tried to wrestle away from me. He was a strong, wiry guy, like most people who work in construction. But I was just as fit, and I’d locked my fingers together on his chest, pinning his arms in place. He squirmed around for a second or two, then went docile.
Once Betsy saw that he was under control, she resumed her taunting, that finger jabbing into the air again. “You think this is what I wanted? You think I like standing out on my own goddamn lawn, can’t get into my home? You think-”
“Betsy!” I shouted. “Shut up!”
“And who the hell do you think you-”
“Both of you! Just shut up for a second.”
Betsy lowered the finger as I released my grip on Doug. “Look,” I said, “I get it. You’re upset and want to kill each other. If that’s what you want to do, maybe I should just let you. God knows I got enough other things to deal with. But it’s not going to solve your problem. You need to deal with the situation.”
“Easy for you to say,” Doug said.
I’d had enough. “Listen to me, you dumb son of a bitch. You’ve known this day was coming. You can blame Betsy, or me, or Sally for not bailing you out, but the fact is you and Betsy own this mess.” I turned on Betsy. “Same goes for you. You can either deal with this mess now and try to get your life back together, or you can stand out here screaming at each other. Which is it?”
Betsy had tears in her eyes. “He wouldn’t even open the bills. He just stuffed them in a drawer.”
Doug countered, “What was the point of opening them? It’s not like we could pay them.” To me, he said, “They ripped us off. The banks. They sold us a bill of goods. Said we could get this place for, like, nothing down, then when it came time to renew, they’re all like, Hey, we told you this was going to happen. But they didn’t, Glenny, the bastards didn’t tell us anything like that. Those fucking bankers, they take government bailouts and give themselves fat fucking bonuses and people like us get screwed!”
“Doug,” I said, too tired to say anything else.
He picked up the stack of DVDs and threw them across the yard, flinging them like Frisbees. Then he grabbed a kitchen chair and smashed it several times into the dresser. Betsy and I stood back and let him do it. When he was done, he put the chair down, sat himself on it, and hung his head.
To Betsy, I said, “Where can you stay?”
“My mom’s, I guess. In Derby.”
“She’s got room for both of you?” I asked.
“Yeah. But she’s gonna rub our noses in it.”
“If she’ll give you a place to live, suck it up and take it,” I told her.
“I guess.”
“Doug,” I said. He didn’t look up. “Doug.” Slowly, he lifted his head. “I’ll give you a hand, putting this stuff in your truck. You can store it at the shed.” That was the building where we kept equipment, out back of the Garber Contracting office off Cherry Street. “Probably going to take a couple of loads.”
He got up slowly, picked up a single DVD-a Predator movie-and walked it over to his truck like a condemned man. He opened the tailgate and tossed it in.
Loading up was going to take a long time at this rate.
I stuffed some clothes that were spilling out of a suitcase and managed to zip it shut. “This’ll probably go to your mom’s, right?” Betsy nodded. “So you might as well put it in your car.”
Moving equally slowly, she took the case and threw it into the back seat of her Infiniti. Neither of them said a word for the next half hour as the three of us picked up their belongings from the front yard and put them either in the car or truck. The dresser and the end tables wouldn’t fit anywhere, so Doug said he’d come back for those later.
“You heading over to the office?” he asked me.
“No,” I said. “I’ve got another stop to make.”
Finding the right house on Ward was a piece of cake. There are a lot of older, quaint, seaside-type homes down in that part of Milford, places that shared the kinds of architectural details you’d expect to find on houses on Martha’s Vineyard or somewhere up on the Cape. Sheila and I used to talk about shifting over a few blocks into this neighborhood, but whether you moved down the street or across the country, you still had to pack the same amount of stuff.
But those discussions had been a long time ago.
