Her mouth agape, Sharon stood motionless in the doorway of what her husband had promised would be their new home. Mike poked around the house. Nothing was completed. The builder had gone belly-up. Oak kitchen cabinets were stacked in the garage like children’s building blocks. The bedrooms were rib cages of stud walls. The outside of the modest home was raw stucco, neither finished in the final texture nor coated in the wash of beige coloring builders insist approximates the “look and feel” of adobe.
The Fuller family, exhausted and angry, checked into a motel. By 1 A.M. Rochelle and Denise were suffering from severe and seemingly unstoppable diarrhea. While Mike rolled over and slept, Sharon sat up with the girls and made several trips to the front office for clean bedding. It was a horrendous beginning to a new life in a new town. Sand crept into all of their belongings with an insidious grittiness. The girls survived on Kaopectate and cafe meals, their lips rimmed in chalky white from the medicine. Television talk shows passed the time in the room. There were no friends. No phone calls. No nothing. Since Sharon had left her own car in North Carolina, she was stranded in the stinky motel room while Mike went after the builder who had left them without a finished home. The first days in La Junta were not a page out of the welcome-wagon handbook.
Even the church was a disappointment. By anyone’s standards, the Seventh-Day Adventist Church in La Junta wasn’t much to look at. It stood in marked contrast to the beautiful old church that was Rev. Fuller’s charge in North Carolina. Built in the 1930s, La Junta’s church was small, holding no more than one hundred in its three rows of pews, nearly black from old layers of varnish.
Sharon bit her tongue. She didn’t dare complain. After all, Mike had told her leaving North Carolina had been all her fault.
A day or so later, Mike returned after work at the church and told Sharon to get the girls ready for a dinner at the home of one of the congregation’s elders.
Dr. Perry Nelson and his wife, Julie, had invited the new arrivals for dinner.
Perry Nelson was a superstar in southeastern Colorado. He was handsome, intelligent, head church elder and, best of all, a doctor. In a place big on menial jobs and short on the professions, a doctor was the shiniest link of the profession chain. The optometrist with kind but playful hazel eyes had smoothly planed features offset by a neatly clipped salt-and-pepper beard. He was tall at almost six-foot-three and weighed a trim 180 pounds. His medium brown hair was thinning a bit on the top, and in the fashion of many who just can’t let go of youth, he’d let his hair grow a little. Length, he reasoned, was a concealer of the years.
The passage of time notwithstanding, at 43, Perry Nelson seemed to have it all: a loyal wife, three nearly grown daughters, a pleasant—though certainly not ostentatious—home on the corner of Pine and South 12th Streets and successful optometry offices in Rocky Ford and Trinidad. Dr. Nelson was adored by his patients, which amounted to nearly everyone with a need for eyeglasses and contact lenses within fifty miles. He owned a motor home and an airplane. And, certainly among the believers, more importantly than anything, Perry Nelson held a prominent position with the church. So much so, it was a letter written by Dr. Nelson and two others that welcomed the Fullers out to Colorado when their world was crumbling in Durham.
Julie Nelson was quiet, sweet and, Perry chronically whined to friends, cold to him. If in fact she was unresponsive, it was because of her husband’s philandering. It was not the impetus for it. She was the original stand-by-your-man woman, long-suffering and still vulnerable. Julie helped out in his office, worked as a bookkeeper for another doctor and raised their three daughters, Tammi, Kathy and Lorri. Julie made him a nice home and through her devotion cemented his standing in the community. She had endured her husband’s four-year affair with another local woman, and by the time the Fullers came to Rocky Ford, Julie had thought that part of her life was over. She, too, had prayed for a fresh start.
And yet as she readied things for dinner and checked the living room one last time for tidiness, the doctor’s wife had no idea that her world would be turned upside down. Who could have known? Also invited to share in the informal dinner were other leading couples from the Adventist church, including dentist Karl Wheeler and his wife, Blanche.
When the new minister and his wife and two daughters showed up, the fate of so many was sealed with a hermetic bond.
Rev. Mike Fuller made the introductions of his family.
“This is my wife Sharon,” he said.
“Call me Sher,” she corrected. ”I like to be called Sher.”
After that, nothing would be the same.