Perry shrugged an apology, but didn’t clean up his act. He had never been a saint, but Sharon’s influence had dragged him down lower than a sewer line. Barb hated what she saw, but there was nothing to do about it. She was torn. She not only loved her job, she needed it. She could only hope that Perry would shape up. She couldn’t quit. Barb Ruscetti was stuck.
“I never heard him say one bad word until Sharon. And then, I mean it was like he was full of the devil,” Barb said, trying to come to terms with her beloved boss’ dark transformation. “He just did a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, you might say. He turned from good to bad.”
Perry, no longer the occasional-beer Seventh-Day Adventist that he had been when he was with put-upon first wife Julie, took to the bottle as his fortunes and personal life began to snowball into the biggest mess in southern Colorado. Who could blame him? His new wife—the cause of his ruin in the eyes of so many—had left him for his good friend, Buzz Reynolds. Yet many were left to wonder: What had he expected when he married Sharon? Did he really think that she would be true to him? Or he to her, for that matter?
The doctor sought solace from the bottle.
One time Barb pulled Dr. Nelson aside when she detected the boozy odor coating the slurred words of his speech.
“Perry,” she said, calmly masking her horror, but being as direct as she could be, “you can’t come in here like this. Patients won’t like it. They can smell it, too.”
He shrugged and turned away.
As the optometry business continued to fall off, Barb’s paychecks were often delayed. With only the Trinidad office open, Perry had expected patients from Rocky Ford to make the trip to town to see him. They didn’t. One week Barb collected only $14 in receipts. There had been no glasses to dispense. No exams to give. No nothing. People just didn’t want a thing to do with the Nelsons. Sharon once insisted that if Perry’s office offered Visa and MasterCard as a billing option, more customers would come.
But, of course, plastic money made no difference. The problem had never been with Dr. Nelson’s patients and their pocketbooks.
Mixed in with the anger and bitterness, Barb couldn’t help but feel a measure of sorrow for her employer. She frequently overheard Dr. Nelson talking with his banker as he sought to delay loan payments. The figures were staggering to the woman who put her children through school on crocheted booties and a small salary. Dr. Nelson owed $120,000 on the mountain house. The IRS was due more than $100,000; the State of Colorado, $80,000 in back taxes and penalties. Various lens labs around the country were due between $5,000 and $10,000 apiece.
Perry Nelson was in so deep he needed a snorkel to breathe.
One morning, not long before his Bronco was about to be repossessed by the dealership because he could no longer keep up on the payments, the doctor came into the office looking disheveled and wan.
Barb met him at the door. “What’s the matter, Doctor?”
“Oh, Barb,” he said quietly, “I’m going to end it all.”
“You don’t mean that, do you? You remember what my grandmother would say.”
The comment brought a smile to his haggard face. Barb Ruscetti was always talking about the advice her grandmother had doled out.
“What’s that?”
“You die, Perry, you go straight to hell.”
Perry let out a weak laugh. “I’m going there anyway,” he said.
The rest of the morning Barb kept her eye on him. He wasn’t stable and she was worried. At lunch, she closed the office and went to see a friend of Perry’s. She told the man that she thought Perry might be considering suicide. The friend said he’d go see his pal as soon as he finished his work.
“No,” she said somewhat desperately, “you ought to go now.”
The friend found Perry Nelson in his Bronco with a loaded revolver. Tears had striped shiny tracks down his face and his hands trembled.
But he had not pulled the trigger.
“Perry, you gotta hang in there. Things will get better. They really will,” the friend said. ”I promise. Things will get better.”
Though the kind words seemed to calm the eye doctor and avert tragedy, the friend was dead wrong.
Things would never get better.
It was the kind of Christmas surprise no husband wanted. Perry Nelson looked shell-shocked. Sharon had hit him with an announcement that sent him deeper into the bottle. He had invited her up to the mountain house for Christmas with Misty and Danny, some gifts, some dinner, and if he was lucky enough, a chance at a reconciliation. Sharon, however, had another agenda. She told him that she couldn’t come back to him. She was carrying Buzz Reynolds’ baby.