Maybe she’d get on with her life, too.
The next day, Tuesday, first thing in the morning, Barb Ruscetti picked up the first line at the Trinidad office. It was Perry telling her to cancel his appointments for the day, and reschedule all for Thursday or Friday. Barb said she would. The optometry office stayed quiet that morning; Barb worked the phones and did a few frame repairs. She was a little ticked at the doctor for dropping his workload on to her lap. Sure she was paid to do whatever he asked, but she knew that patients kept their appointments and Dr. Nelson should keep his.
Just before lunchtime, Barb looked up from her desk to see Julie Nelson with a man she had not yet met.
The secretary smiled, but her friendliness was not returned.
“Barb,” Julie began, “we’re looking for Perry and Sharon. Do you have any idea where they are?”
Barb Ruscetti felt the blood drain from her cheeks. She knew instantly the reason for the visit. Without an introduction she knew that the handsome man with the broad shoulders and a touch of prematurely gray hair was Mike Fuller. Preacher Fuller.
Barb stood to face the pair. “No, Julie. I swear to you I don’t know where they’re at!”
“You know they haven’t come home,” Julie said. “We haven’t seen them.”
Barb shook her head. She conceded that she had talked with Perry that morning, but she had no idea he wasn’t calling from Rocky Ford. She had no idea what was going on. Not until now, anyway.
She studied the man for a moment.
God, Barb thought, this minister is good-looking. What does Sharon see in Perry if she’s married to this guy?
Finally, the minister spoke. He indicated in low, careful tones that something “drastic” had happened back in Rocky Ford.
“Sharon left a note saying she was leaving me and coming to Trinidad to live with Perry.”
”I don’t know a thing about that,” Barb sputtered. ”I don’t know anything. I don’t know where they are.”
When Julie and Mike left, they took a piece of Barb Ruscetti’ s heart right out the door. It was such a terrible mess. She felt sorry for the jilted spouses.
“So they drove around Trinidad and dumb fools, Sharon and Perry, had parked down at Prospect Plaza and taken a motel room there,” she told a friend about it later. “So what Julie and Mike did was they just went and got the sheriff and they had the sheriff open the door and they found Perry and Sharon in bed together and so Julie said, ‘We’re getting a divorce. I’m going to nail you to the wall.’ And eventually she did,” Barb said later.
Julie Nelson remembered the encounter between the minister, herself and the adulterers a bit differently, though no less dramatically than Barb. The spurned pair—Julie and Mike—had gone to the Trinidad police to get seven-year-old Rochelle away from an entirely inappropriate situation. The little girl was trapped inside her mother’s motel love nest and Mike wanted her home with him and her little sister, Denise. Though Rochelle was not his blood, she was never anything less than his daughter.
“The police went in with Mike and he told Sharon that he was there to get Rochelle and take her home so she could go back to school,” Julie recalled. “Perry was taking a shower at the time and Mike walked into the bathroom and ripped open the shower curtain and just stood there. I don’t know what he said. I don’t know if he said anything. He just wanted Perry to know that he knew he had taken his wife from him and his girls.”
Later, when Mike sought a restraining order against Perry and Sharon prohibiting unsupervised contact with his girls, he told Julie it was because Perry was shameless and Sharon was a neglectful mother.
“I asked Rochelle if Mommy slept with Perry and she said she did. Right there in the motel,” the minister said.
No matter his or her age, it was a child’s most terrible nightmare. It came to thirteen-year-old Lorri Nelson one night and it grabbed her like the bogeyman. She woke up with a start, her eyes wide, imprinted with what she had seen in her sleep. Her dad was not smiling. Her mom was sputtering cries and tears in the way that people do when nothing can soothe them. Outside the door of her dad’s dressing room were a pair of packed suitcases. Her mother said nothing as he gathered his belongings… it was over. All over. In the instant that her father would step from the house, the girl knew that the family would never be the same. Lorri stood in the hall, the scene frozen in her memory.
Later, when she was at a girlfriend’s house, the phone rang. It was her mother telling her to come home right away. There were no questions asked. No pleading to stay fifteen minutes longer. Lorri went home knowing what she was about to face.