“It was to get Mike out because everything had to be Mike’s way. You weren’t even in it,” she said.
In later years, Sharon liked to repeat her version of the truth. She was not to blame for the Fullers ending up in southeastern Colorado. She had not been the source of her husband’s downfall in the eyes of the church.
“Once I found out it wasn’t me…that Mike…didn’t want to admit nobody liked him, it was extra hard. Because I was having to leave the first place I ever really felt was my home, because people didn’t like Mike and his arrogance. His arrogance finally came through. We were there four years. Other churches we were only there for a year or so. Toward the end is when his overbearing ways finally got to people.”
There had been no lack of occasions when things could have turned out differently. There always are. There might never have been a long, hot drive to Rocky Ford, Colorado, in Sharon Lynn’s life. She had her out the year before. Yet no one would back her up, no one would support her in her quest for love.
Not her mother, not her father.
It was in 1975 when Sharon Fuller made a single move toward freedom from her husband, freedom toward what she felt was a “truer” self. She was entitled to more. She was deeply in love with Craig when she decided she could leave Mike and start over. She drove from Durham to her parents’ home in Maryland. She told no one she was going. Not her husband—not even her lover. For all the members of the church congregation knew, Sharon and her little ones went to visit an ill grandfather.
Her parents said she was a fool for leaving Mike. They could still work things out. Marriage was not easy. But a commitment before God cannot be tossed away like so much rubbish.
Sharon was in the kitchen when her mother answered a knock at the door from a floral delivery service.
Her mother, Josephine Douglas, rushed back with a stunning bouquet. A hopeful smile broke over the older woman’s face.
“Look, honey, I bet Mike sent you some roses.”
Sharon prayed the flowers had been a gift from Craig.
“They are from Mike,” Josephine said.
“Trash them.”
“Oh, no, honey, they’re God’s creation. They’re beautiful.”
“They’re ugly and I don’t want them.”
“I’ll put them in a vase and put them in my room.”
”I don’t want them in the house,” Sharon said, seizing the box from her mother’s grip and tromping out of the house and throwing the roses on the compost pile.
Mrs. Douglas was furious, but Sharon didn’t care.
“You wasted money, Sharon,” she said. “You should have let me send them back to the florist!”
Sharon ended the conversation by telling her mother she hated the damn flowers.
“They’re ugly,” she said.
A day or so later, another bouquet arrived, this time from Craig. Against her mother’s wishes, Sharon put the flowers in her bedroom.
“She had a fit,” she said later. “She never understood.” In the end, Sharon went back to her husband, partly because of the pull of the Church, a little bit because her mother told her it was the right and sensible thing to do. But she returned to Durham mostly because she figured she had nowhere else to go. When she got back to North Carolina, she learned her husband had been transferred to a church in Colorado. They’d be leaving in a month.
She went to her lover to say good-bye.
“I’m stuck with this,” she told him. “There isn’t any way out for me. Mike’s never going to let me go. I know he’s never going to let me walk away.”
Craig understood. He didn’t try to make Sharon stay. Maybe he hadn’t wanted her to stay? Maybe he knew that by her leaving town, less people would be hurt by their messy affair?
Just before the Fuller family left for the West, a letter arrived from Colorado. It had been signed by three elders from the churches in Rocky Ford and La Junta. All three were doctors: Ted Martin, Karl Wheeler and Perry Nelson. Sharon reread the letter in her Durham kitchen, torn apart by the moving process.
It was a missive welcoming the new minister and his family to their congregation.
“There was something about that letter—about Perry’s name that was like a magnet to me. I wondered what this man was like,” she said, later trying to convince a confidant the connection between the doctor and herself was predestined, preordained in some way.
Both pitched along the Arkansas River, La Junta and Rocky Ford, Colorado, are like many towns that freckle the somewhat desolate region. With a population base nearing the 10,000 mark, La Junta is by far the larger of the two burgs. Its historic claim-to-fame is its location along the Santa Fe Trail. It is also the Otero County seat. Rocky Ford shares no such distinction. It is a rancher’s town set amid the gently rolling terrain that jumps up to the Front Range in a matter of a few miles. It is the home of the sweeter-than-honey Rocky Ford melon. Good schools; scant services. Though only eight miles apart, both towns had congregations of Seventh-Day Adventists. Rev. Mike Fuller would be pastor of both.