Bart was unprepared. He never expected his girlfriend's mother to make a marriage proposal on behalf of her daughter. Rochelle wasn’t pregnant. She hadn’t even pressed the issue of marriage.
“Yeah,” he found himself saying.
Sharon was ecstatic, maybe more so than her teenage daughter bride and the bewildered groom-to-be.
“We can make it a double wedding,” Sharon gushed. “You and Rochelle and me and Gary.”
The plans had been made. Mother and daughter, estranged for years by miles, misunderstandings, and buckets of lies, were going to share something very special. Bart and Rochelle, Sharon and Gary, would be united in a double-wedding ceremony. Sharon was thrilled.
Rochelle and Bart slept on the floor in the living room, the kids in their bedrooms, Sharon and Gary in the master bedroom. Gary stayed up there three nights in a row. When they woke, the morning they were to leave, Gary was gone. He had done it again. He went back to Nancy.
Sharon dragged herself from the bedroom in tears. She was devastated by her abandonment. Who would not have felt sorry for her? After all she had been through, wasn’t she entitled to some happiness?
“I'm going anyway,” she said.
Rochelle and Bart exchanged wedding vows in the county clerk's office while Sharon and her youngest two children looked on. It was supposed to be her day, too. But Gary had left her high and dry.
Gary was free, but aimless. He had skipped out on Sharon before their wedding, but he still didn’t know where he was going or what he would do when he got there. He just had to get away. He drove up to Denver to stay with some friends, but no one was home. He went to his grown daughter's house near Denver and visited with her all day. At one point, as he tried to figure out what to do, he slipped away and called the landlord of the rental home that he and Sharon had planned to lease, and asked if the place was still available.
“No,” the landlord said, “the people are moving in right now.”
Gary thanked him. He let out a deep sigh of relief. Sharon was moving in. She was not going to be cooling her heels waiting for him in Trinidad. He really was free.
Gary drove south. And just like Sharon, he planned to start over.
“I wanted Sharon out of Wet Canyon… out, away from me, away from Nancy, away from my son. Maybe it was a rotten thing to do, but I just couldn’t think of any other way. She had a power over me and I knew I had to break it. The best thing was to get her up to Denver. She’d have a job up there. She’d still have the money. Just away from me.”
Back in the Canyon, folks had become used to the phantom neighbor. Sharon was home. She was gone. She moved to Denver. She moved to the Springs. She never stayed in any place very long. Some wondered if her coming and going had more to do with how they had treated her, than how she viewed her home.
“She wanted to be a part of the community, I think,” said one of her neighbors. “A lot of people kind of ostracized her. It was always out of sight, out of mind.”
Bart Mason had just left Robinson's sawmill when he saw Gary Adams’ familiar pickup truck. The nerve of that little guy showing up in the Canyon! Rochelle's husband was still bitter over how Gary had dumped Sharon, jilting her nearly at the altar. Bart positioned his truck across the roadway in a fashion that blocked both lanes. The two men got out of their trucks.
“You fucking pussy!” Bart yelled at his former beer buddy, his former defacto in-law.
Gary shrugged sheepishly.
The response only brought forth more ire from the hotheaded younger man.
“You’re a fucking coward!” Bart yelled.
“I know, Bart,” Gary said, clearly taken aback. He was obviously sorry that he’d run into Bart. He was also sorry that he had left Sharon in such a bad way. He just didn’t want to divorce the mother of his son.
“I'm sorry. I just couldn’t leave Nancy.”
BOOK III
Fireman’s Wife
“I’ve known half a dozen guys who have helped her get wood or done ditch work, but everybody would hold her at arm's length because of the opinion of what had gone on. “
—Bob Robinson, Weston resident
“It seemed like all of a sudden she got real greedy. It was buy, buy, buy.”
—Rochelle Fuller, Sharon's daughter
Chapter 21
THE FAMILIAR HIGH-PITCHED, RED METAL ROOF rose in front of the windshield as Glen Trainor turned off the highway in little Walsenburg, Colorado. Next to McDonald's famed golden arches, few restaurants were so recognizable as the Pizza Hut. Sharon Nelson Harrelson knew the restaurant well. She and Gary Adams had been there before, as had her children. One time when she was sneaking out for the thrill of “dining and dashing,” the former preacher's wife was caught by some pimply faced kid and hauled back inside to pay her meal bill.