That morning Jena had gotten up like always with a knot in her back just between her shoulders, which made her feel older than her years. It slowly eased as she drank her powdered milk tea with microwaved boba pearls. She sat passively at her kitchen's breakfast nook scrolling through her phone and reading social media posts. Most were of her once close friends who were thankfully far off anyway from her in her stagnant life which was now more akin to a dysfunctional dream that she viewed from afar. Her marriage to Nate had an unsaid rule of them each artfully avoiding one another through the days. They had begun their life together as twenty-somethings who had been high school sweethearts, hoping to find someone better, and neither ever did. A co-worker once described this arrangement as a "situation-ship."
Jena could have learned to care for Nate as more than a friend had he not bulldozed her every attempt at self-actualization over the years until she stopped trying altogether. Every compromise or resolution to their conflicts somehow involved Nate getting his way without a single drip of effort, resembling a concession toward Jena's concerns. This affected her marriage to him causing her to feel that she was a ghost who was both negatively acknowledged and positively ignored, that her best years were fading, all while incurring debts that were smothering from his inflated ego, self-indulgent lifestyle and the fallout from his impulsive decisions that only she dealt with the consequences of.
Nate was off living his dreams with her at home scrubbing his soiled toilet after another one of his successful colon cleanses. They could have easily afforded a maid, but Jena didn't want another person judging her in her own house. There were already enough who did that without a paycheck. She resigned to this life because Nate was idolized in the community. Jena surmised she might eventually ride Nate's coattails into something for herself. It was an unlikely scenario to turn out in her favor. Yet, Jena was so depressed that she sadistically convinced herself that there was a light at the end of the tunnel for her.
When she was finished wasting her morning upstairs, she put her oversized mug into the dishwasher as she looked through the bay window of their barndominium's kitchen. She was checking to see if Nate's car was in the driveway. She knew it wouldn't be, but she liked the reassurance of knowing she was home alone until late evening. With that, she went to her den to watch cable news until someone or something interrupted. Her parrot Tiki placed himself on her lap. Jena still had on her hideous neon pink and green polka-dotted bathrobe since she didn't have work that day at the after-school childcare facility for her church which paid her minimum wage and conveniently somehow always dropped her work hours on her paystub but never accidentally added any. Discontentment aside, enough of her needs were met to be comfortable, which was what she was for the time being. Nate did well enough for himself to allow that.
He was the partial owner and acting authority of a construction company that maintained contracts throughout the state, KT Construction & Affiliate Co. Nate created it with a former classmate, Joel Klutz-Turner, who simply went by Turner. Turner purchased the company's assets after a series of events starting with his father's accident. Dale had passed out after running an outdoor heater inside his trailer for too long during a particularly brutal winter that year in Northern Oklahoma. Turner had found him and pulled him out, but by then Turner Senior was brain-dead. Dale was said to have a blood alcohol level of .3 that day. A low compared to his usual, if his many previous DUIs were a reference. As for Turner's mother, Shanna, she returned for long enough to pull the plug on old Dale and then was off to where she had been living in Florida the moment the funeral had concluded without so much a leaving her son a forwarding address to reach her. However, as quickly as she was off into the sunset, she certainly made sure that Turner was on the hook for all of his dad's medical debt and property taxes, sparing herself any liability before she hit the road.
When he was alive, Dale had been a low-level oil worker until he threw in the towel and like so many others became dependent on social assistance to get by. He had no life insurance when he passed. It wasn't until a few years later that Turner found out that his father's trailer sat on valuable land, due to a few oil deposits that escaped notice at the time that his great-grandfather had bought it. Turner had been planning to sell it to the bank knowing it was soon to be foreclosed on. For once it seemed Turner had a good run of luck out of so much misfortune. There was enough to sell off to push Turner into lifelong financial security. Nate immediately latched onto him upon finding out that information. It wasn't Turner's money to Nate, it was "them", "us", and "we" when he spoke from that day on.
Turner himself was no prize when they were in school. Turner had dropped out after freshman year. Nate had made fun of him on more than one occasion on the phone with Jena when they were still just a long-distance relationship. Nate found it funny that Turner had tried to join the Army a few times over but had always scored too low on the aptitude test to qualify to enter. Eventually, his recruiter stopped returning his calls, when Turner started scoring lower on subsequent tests.
Nate on the other hand had done well in school, online school anyway. Nate had a full master's in construction management like his stepfather had. Nate saw himself as an up-and-comer, and so did everyone else who knew him for that matter. Nate had been the one to put down the money to get their barndominium up. He had been the one to get Jena back into town too. He was the glue that held together his peers in the region. Many had hopes of Nate eventually becoming the Mayor of Meadow Partings. It was all so hopeful and unexpected for a place that was almost completely abandoned after the housing crisis closed down the area's economy when they were kids. No one cared that Nate was running through Turner's money, because it was breathing life into town.
Jena had hurried out of Meadow Partings after high school. She went to the nearest state university and then was off to New Guinea to teach English for two years for a Peace Corps adjacent non-profit. Ultimately, New Guinea was not the springboard into the exotic or exciting life she had hoped for. Her pay had been too low to do much with when her contract ended. Before that, when she was there the burden of travel into and out of the island was arduous, making the location further isolating for her. She also hadn't anticipated the locals keeping a distance from her due to language barriers. By the time it was all said and done these issues caused her to not only lose track of her friends from college but to have fewer meaningful connections while she was overseas. Which was why she was almost glad that Nate had looked her up online at the time when she was on the fence about what to do when her contract was up.
Jena had deeply dissected all of Nate's motivations as to why he had sought her out and came to the conclusion that Nate's situation was one involving him waiting too long to commit to any of his post-graduation flings. She assumed that he found himself to be one of the few singles in a community that heavily encouraged marriage before thirty. It wasn't love between them, it was a relationship nonetheless. They had wed at a Manila airport after a whirlwind vacation, both agreed it was better to elope than deal with their families. Jena thought of Nate as a friend and found no fault in being with him under those pretenses.
Their individual histories were considered common knowledge within their hometown. Outwardly Nate and Jena had a fairytale marriage, but behind closed doors, they were cold and disconnected whenever together if they interacted at all. The fact of the matter was that they were too different of people. Jena had wanted to live finding adventure and Nate wanted stability. Oddly, Meadow Partings had somehow shaped their lives to allow Nate to be the outgoing one and Jena to be the solitary seeker between the pair. It was a strange way for things to sort themselves into, however, it had passed as such.
Jena packed her gym bag ahead of taking Tiki to stay at her kindly old neighbor's house, Mrs. Flossie, to be looked after. Before it got too dark Jena set out to her parent's house a few hours East. This weekend Nate was having his fortieth birthday party at their barndominium. KT staff were going to put a dance floor over the tacky shag rug of their living room early in the morning. Jena hated interacting with KT employees. Nate had a habit of complaining about their marriage to anyone who would hear it. This often included falsehoods of actual events in which he described himself as the victim of Jena's cruelty to excuse his actual bad behavior and numerous infidelities. Many times overly eager employees hoping to brown nose their charismatic boss would act out their assumptions of Jena's character by getting jabs at her or worse. Jena had been knocked into, pushed over, and suffered other hostile acts in the past. She didn't want the men fired but didn't want to see them again either. After all, she knew if she had heard what Nate had rumored about her to others, she might very well have felt the same as they did in their place. That was the trouble with being married to the town's darling, their conflicts came with an opinionated audience. Nate didn't want anything to tarnish his name, so he made it his business to push all truth aside. Jena leaving for the party was one less fight they had to endure with the same tired pattern or so she reasoned.
Jena hadn't the will to go to her parent's home much these days. The drive was smooth enough on a long road. It was back when her father was showing signs of dementia, no one wanted to deal with it, and they didn't. That is until after he attacked Jena's older brother Beau, who was stopping him from going for their mom. Sue had kept it to herself that Murray had started hitting her, she didn't want him to be sent off to an old home. It took an intervention by many concerned parties to convince her otherwise. By then Murray was too far gone for much else. Beau had moved in with his morose partner, Thallea to help Sue, who was getting on in years and had ill health herself from a lifelong chain-smoking habit.
It was a tight squeeze at the cabin. Beau had three boys from a previous relationship, plus Thallea who was coming along the way with another. The home's two bedrooms and one bathroom were bursting at the seams evidenced by the living room floors that were buckling under the over capacity number of occupants. Jenna took Nate's old truck there like they had discussed so she could sleep in the camper of the truckbed if she needed to. It was cool that fall. Jena wouldn't mind feeling the fresh air of the countryside on her face. To an extent, she was envious of how the boys lived in the countryside, still, she pitied their situation. They slept in tents in the backyard on warm nights and crammed into the main room in the winter in sleeping bags on the fold-out couch or the floor. Thallea was very vocal that she considered the arrangement temporary, but with all members of that household out of work with no change in sight Jena assumed that Thallea was saying without saying that they were waiting for Sue to be carted off like her dad had so she and Beau could take over the largest bedroom.
Despite the evening being a breezy one, the boys opted for their outdoor sleeping solution as opposed to staying inside, giving Jena the couch for the night. Beau had put together peanut butter smores over a campfire for them that the oldest, Rowell, supervised.
Once he had checked on his kids for the last time that night, he and Jena chatted quietly at the table. Thallea went to the bedroom to sleep after watching a rerun of Cheers. "How's it going here? Really" Jena asked Beau as she gestured toward the boy's things in piled-up trash bags in the room's corners. Beau matter of factly answered, "Thallea isn't taking it well living in the sticks. She has good days, but it's been mostly bad lately. I'm not sure if she's gonna run off on me if she's here all day and I'm off on a long haul. At least the school year is going on right now so she doesn't fixate on the boys. This summer it got really bad and I've been trying to keep them out of her sight as much as I can." Jena knowing that Nate would never let them stay with her at their house was at a loss for helpful words. Nate had all the money in their relationship that he made sure was tied up into the business so that if they ever did split, it was unlikely to go to her even after litigation.
Feeling like a jerk for not offering help, Jena replied, "I'm sorry Beau. I saw there was tension before, I was hoping she'd work through it by now. What does Tawny have to say about all this?" Tawny was the boy's mother who was nomadically bouncing from trap house to trap house since she had all but dropped out of society to pursue her drug habit from at least the time when she was pregnant with their last son, Evan. Jenna often wondered if it were for far longer of a time than Beau framed it that Tawny was an addict because their middle boy, Gage looked nothing like Beau, who probably noticed the same thing and had yet to ever bring it up. Beau was too good of a person to throw that boy to the wolves like Tawny had. Occasionally Tawny would call them crying to speak to the boys, always promising to clean herself up. She knew Beau wouldn't let her in if she was high, and so she didn't drop by anymore. Beau in a whispered tone, fearing he'd awaken Thallea said, "I haven't heard from her since last Christmas, but her mom says that she's been calling asking for money now and then."
Jena again feeling terribly for Beau's circumstance, but unable to be of much help sympathized, "Beau what can I do?" Beau shaking his head murmured, "Until Thallea calms down, I was planning to make everyone more comfortable here by turning Dad's old carport into an addition for the kids. Do you think you can talk to Nate about getting me some of the extra lumber that's left over from any of his jobs? I can pick it up, anything helps." Jena was well aware that Nate wouldn't help him without strings attached or charging Beau wholesale prices emptily agreed to Beau's request. She figured that she could use her savings to send out the supplies to Beau behind Nate's back.
In the morning Jena went to the store to buy as many groceries as would fit in the tiny cabin for her family. She also took the boys into town to get them out of Thallea's hair for a while by getting them winter clothes and taking them to a movie. That night she took everyone out for pizza too. Jena could see that Thallea made a point to be snippy the whole time, Beau had to console her frequently over the simplest of inconveniences. Sue for her part stayed out of it because as she explained Thallea would become more upset if she became aware that others noticed her behavior. Jena could feel that Thallea wanted her visit with them to be brief and so after they had returned to the cabin Jena made the excuse that the couch hurt her back to head out a day early. Off to the side, Jena stuffed Sue's purse with all the cash she could withdraw from the ATM accompanied by a note saying that she loved them.
Jena would rather be on the road that night than be in the stuffy cabin hearing Thallea make annoyed side comments to Beau about her feeling encroached on for another night. Jena thought that the best way to be of use at that point was to go. The idea of driving late that night wasn't her cup of tea, but it would be something she could manage. She didn't bother to call Nate and tell him that she was returning early. She instead planned to sneak into her own home quietly by parking her car and sleeping in it in the garage for the night. At least that way there was a bit of soundproofing and locks on the doors. In the morning she would pick up Tiki from Mrs. Flossie's. He was the only companion that she missed.
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