She cried how it was not her fault. Cross her heart and hope to die, it was an accident.
Perry called his estranged wife every name in the book. He told her she was a whore and a slut and if she wanted to have Buzz’s baby so damn bad, she ought to get a divorce and get on with it. If she ever wanted to come back into his life, she’d better get an abortion.
“I’m not raising no one else’s child!” he yelled.
A couple of days later at the office, Dr. Nelson was in another of his fit-to-be-tied moods. He didn’t have a nice word for anyone. He had three pairs of glasses that needed to be repaired, and instead of working on them himself, he threw them in a tangled mass on Barb Ruscetti’s desk. His abruptness startled her. She looked up from her work.
“You send these out to get fixed,” he said loudly.
Barb studied the glasses. “Whose are they?” she asked.
The doctor’s face went red. Barb could see the thermometer that was his anger threshold rise twenty degrees.
“You don’t have to know whose they are. I just said for you to send them in and fix the damn things.”
Barb stood up, her tiny stature dwarfed by Perry’s six-foot-plus frame. “Pardon me for breathing,” she snapped at his back as he retreated to a back room.
Dr. Nelson’s attack was so out of character; even when he’d been boozing at the tavern, he wasn’t a mean drunk.
She asked what was wrong.
Again, Dr. Nelson’s tone was off-putting. He was loud and harsh as he spat out his words. “Just don’t bother me. Just leave me alone. Don’t even talk to me!”
Barb backed off. A couple of hours later, the optometrist slumped himself onto the lobby couch. It was time to talk.
“What in the hell is eating you?” she finally asked. “What did I do for you to holler at me like that?’’
Perry Nelson buried his handsome, salt-and-pepper bearded face into the palms of his big hands and started to cry. Barb reached over to him, feeling sick to her stomach that her words had set him off.
“Barb,” he said, “tell me something. How would you feel if you found out that your wife was sleeping with your best friend and she was pregnant?”
His words knocked the wind out her.
“Who?” she asked.
“Sharon’s pregnant by Buzz.”
“You’re kidding,” she said, feeling her words fall flat.
Perry didn’t care. He’d said the same thing to Sharon that morning when she dropped the bomb.
“No lie, Barb, you could have knocked me over with a feather.”
He told Barb he’d thrown the rest of Sharon’s clothes out on the porch that morning and told her never to come back.
“What is she going to do?” Barb asked.
“I really don’t care,” he said.
After the Christmas holidays, Sharon begged Perry to let her come back home to the mountains. Things had not gone as well with Buzz as she had hoped. In fact, when she told her rancher/ lover she was pregnant, he booted her right out the door. Sharon whined how well-to-do Buzz Reynolds didn’t love her. Poor Sher. Her oldest two children were living in the Midwest with their minister father; her two youngest in Round House with their father. Perry had told his round-heeled wife to get lost. Sharon had no money. No one liked her. She hit rock bottom and moved into a seedy apartment in Rocky Ford.
“The rent’s around ninety dollars a month,” Perry told Barb one afternoon when he gave her the latest Sharon Nelson Update.
“What kind of place does she have that only costs ninety dollars a month?”
Perry made a face that slipped into a slight smile. “It isn’t in a very good part of town.”
“I didn’t know Rocky Ford was big enough to have a bad part of town,” Barb said.
The doctor nodded. “Oh, yeah, it’s not very nice.”
Those who remained close to Dr. Nelson knew that when he said he didn’t give a hoot about daughter Lorri’s wedding, he was the biggest liar in the Rocky Mountain State. His youngest daughter by Julie had been nothing but trouble and just because she had gotten herself pregnant was no reason to break out the brass band and dance at her wedding. Though he seemed adamant in his refusal to go to Montana, most suspected another person was the real reason. Sharon had never made a secret of her disgust with Lorri since the incident at the Adventist academy in Loveland:
“She’s no good. She’s got no respect for anybody!”
Barb Ruscetti couldn’t believe Perry was in his right mind when he said he wouldn’t attend the wedding.
“This can bring you back together,” Barb insisted. “If you don’t go, you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”