This is a sad story. Rodney Hollister was a really talented guy, but he had a weakness. He could never do anything the regular way. Give him a task, and he’d spend more time figuring out an angle than it would have taken him just to do it. Strictly speaking, Rodney was a contractor-builder, but he considered himself an entrepreneur, a wheeler-dealer. As a result, he was always nervously waiting to see how things would turn out.
Alice married Rodney just before he gave up his law practice and began putting deals together. She was only vaguely worried at first, but as the secure prospect of being a lawyer’s wife dissolved into the anxiety of his speculations, she began to develop a tic and spent long hours in a deck chair in the backyard, also just waiting.
I don’t have to tell you that Rodney had no real flair for life out on the edge. Invariably, he would sink money in already sinking ships, and as half-finished houses stood amidst discarded concrete blocks, he would turn away with a shrug and look for new opportunities, as he called them, saying things like, “there’s gold in them thar hills.” The pattern of wild enthusiasm followed by anxiety and finally resignation became the structure of their lives.
Here the story takes another turn (as you were already expecting). Rodney took out a second mortgage on Alice’s house and broke her heart. It was, she felt, all they had left, and, as she watched Rodney invest the whole amount in a screwball scheme to convert the abandoned mop factory at the edge of town into a game mall, she spent more and more time sitting out in the backyard.
The scheme was to provide all kinds of games in the huge building, everything from paint ball to a table tennis studio. There was to be a card parlor, a pool, snooker, and billiards hall, archery, and pin ball. And those were just for starters. It was as if Rodney had stuck a needle right into the town’s sympathetic nerve system—it lit up like Christmas and they had to turn away dozens of applicants for leases in their new adventure. The money poured in, Rodney paid off the mortgage, bought tickets for the two of them for a grand tour of Europe, and went around smiling all the time. He had finally struck it big.
The money was still rolling in when they got back from Europe. Rodney talked as if there had never really been a question whether he would strike it big or not, but Alice worried even now that it might all come to an end, worried whether luck this good could last, and she still spent a lot of time in the back yard.
She was really surprised when Rodney came home that Tuesday and announced that he had bought a sailing yacht, a Beneteau Oceanis 38, and that they were going to become sailors. He hired Howard Allison, a one-time recreational sailor who now worked in the pool hall, to teach them how to sail. It was on one of these training trips to Santa Cruz that Rodney had a heart attack and died on the boat.
Here is where the story ends. Alice continued the sailing lessons with Howard and they got married six months later. It’s awful to think how Rodney never got to enjoy his money after all his scheming had finally paid off. And it’s still more awful how a nobody like Howard could get his hands on Rodney’s wife and his money without barely lifting a finger.
Charles D. Tarlton is a retired university teacher who has been writing poetry and flash fiction since 2006. He and his wife, Ann Knickerbocker, an abstract painter, live in Northampton, Massachusetts, USA.
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