Shortly after she packed her things for Walla Walla, Lorri received a letter from Sharon. She wrote to request the return of “everything I bought you to get you set up for your dorm.” She listed some director’s chairs, bedcovers, a curtain she had made. She wanted it returned right away. Lorri boxed it all up and shipped it to Colorado, even though she knew that it was her father who had paid for the stuff, not Sharon. She did so because she knew that no one could win an argument with Sharon.
Lorri enrolled in Walla Walla Senior High with the understanding that most of her credits from her Adventist schooling would transfer over and she’d be able to graduate with her class. As it turned out, many credits did not carry over. Bitter and disappointed, Perry Nelson’s “favorite youngest” daughter quit school to work full-time for an accounting firm. She didn’t know it then, but she was pulling herself up from an abyss so insidious that she had not even known it had consumed her. Eventually, Lorri earned a GED.
That same year, she wrote to her father. It was a long letter, full of remorse for the pain she had caused over the years. She had never been so sorry in her whole life.
A reply came postmarked Trinidad. Lorri recognized the handwriting as her stepmother’s.
“You have some nerve even writing to your father after how you’ve treated him!”
Lorri cried as she read Sharon’s bitchy string of hateful words. Sharon made it clear Lorri was not welcome and if she knew what was good for her, she’d back off. Once and for all.
“You used your father. Like the boy who cried wolf… you were always in a crisis! Help me! Those days are over. You’ve hurt Perry for the last time.’’
A door had been slammed shut; a wall had been built. The father and daughter who had once shared a precious closeness would remain estranged for two years.
Sharon Nelson, once more, got what she had wanted.
Chapter 9
MONEY FOR JULIE. MONEY FOR UNCLE SAM. MONEY to keep the business afloat. Money for Sharon. The outstretched hands were everywhere. Perry was close to busted and he knew it. As if she needed to do so, Sharon reminded her husband daily of their escalating financial troubles. And though the tax bills and business expenses were choking the life out of their bank account, it was Julie Nelson’s old charge accounts that made Sharon’s blood boil over. The way Sharon saw it, Julie, in a fit of justified spite, ran up bills all over town—all over Colorado for that matter. The local ladies’ shoe store, the Fashion Bar in Denver, a dress shop in the Springs. Sharon urged Perry to file bankruptcy so they could start over, but he wouldn’t hear of it.
“I was raised to pay my debts,” he said.
“I was, too,” Sharon scoffed. She reminded Perry that she was his wife now. She shouldn’t be saddled with expenses rung up by the first wife. She knew there was no way out of the alimony and back child-support payments. The other stuff, forget it.
“I was not raised to pay debts that you and this woman incurred over a five-year period of time and didn’t disclose to me,” she said.
And still the money drain ran unchecked.
Rochelle Fuller called her mother from Ohio one morning before Sharon arrived at the Trinidad office. Barb Ruscetti took the call and promised the girl that she’d have her mother call her back as soon as she got in. When Sharon finished speaking with Rochelle later that day she made a beeline for the check register.
“I’m sending Rochelle four hundred dollars for a stereo,” she announced.
Barb couldn’t hide her exasperation. “Sharon, you can’t,” she said. “We don’t have the money.”
“Well, I’ll be goddamned if I’m paying the bills! I’m sending my daughter four hundred dollars.”
Perry emerged from examining a patient, and put the kibosh on the stereo.
“Let Rochelle’s dad buy her one,” he said.
Sharon stomped her feet. Her face went red with anger.
“I’m not doing without money anymore,” she said as she stormed out. “I’m sick and tired of it.”
As Barb saw it, Sharon was trying to win back her daughter’s affection. The only way she knew how to make herself feel better, make her daughters feel like she cared about them, was to buy presents to send.
“I don’t think her little girls loved her anymore,” Barb told a friend.
And despite the lack of money, her strained relations with her daughters, Sharon would still have her dream. She wanted to feel good about herself. She wanted a fancy new custom house.
If Weston, Colorado, wasn’t so isolated, no cartographer would bother inking it on any map. But as luck would have it, the village located thirty miles of scenic roadway from Trinidad was always the perfect dot on the map. Nothing around it but a long, lonely, winding stretch of road. Snowcapped mountains brushed against the horizon where asphalt sliced through rocky outcroppings along the highway as it drops down the canyon where the little town was bunched up. A small green-and-white sign advises travelers not to blink: WELCOME TO WESTON.