THIS STORY WRITTEN BY ONE OF MY OLD FRIEND SO I DECIDED TO UPLOAD THIS STORY AT 2 TO 5 PARTS
Ray and I had known each other all of our lives. Our parents were best friends and next door neighbors so we didn't have any choice but to try and get along. But for some reason, and I don't know if either one of us could say what it was, we never liked each other. We had maintained an uneasy truce and a less than friendly rivalry since we started playing together at our parent's insistence. Even back then though, even at the ages of three or four we didn't like each other.
We lived in a small town though, so we had to learn to get along despite the way we felt. I don't know population of our town. It's less than five thousand. I think it's less than four thousand. We have one main street with a dozen stores and a Post Office. The town has one grocery store at either end and one gas station at either end. There is one café where all the old folks gather in the morning and there is a Dairy Queen on the edge of town where the kids gather in the spring, summer and early fall when it's open. It closes in the winter. The nearest mall and the nearest theater are both in the city almost sixty miles away.
We have a high school and kids come from a half a dozen towns in the area to attend. We also have one grade school. They built a new one, larger one, a few years ago and tore down the one that we went to.
They have added on to the high school. When I went there were sixty-seven kids in our graduating class. It isn't that much bigger now though. I think I read that the graduating class this year is ninety-two kids.
When we graduated from high school Ray and I both went away to college. Ray's dad owned the town's only hardware store and was doing well. He put Ray through college and when he graduated Ray planned on coming back and going to work for his dad.
I had to drop out after one semester. My dad had worked all of his adult life at the town's one industry, the small plant that made wood furniture. They made good stuff and had a good reputation. But they did a lot of hand work and it was labor intensive. They reached a point that they couldn't compete and went bankrupt.
It was a shame for two reasons. That company had been making high quality furniture for almost two centuries. They had a great reputation but a small client list. They just couldn't compete with cheap imports. But the worst reason is a little more personal. My dad lost his job and his pension and his whole idea of who he was. I lost my ability to afford to go to college.
I came home from college after one semester and started looking for work. I hated to do it, but the only job I could find was working for Ray's father in the hardware store. It wasn't that I hated working for Ray's father. I loved him like a father. Mr. Nash and I were very close. I often got the impression that I was closer to him than he was to his own son. It was just the idea that once he graduated Ray would be coming back to that store too.
I worked hard and learned the business pretty fast. But I dreaded the day that Ray would come home from college and go into the business. I still saw him when he came home to visit. We didn't like each other any more now than we did when we were kids. We were civil, at least most of the time, but we still didn't like each other.
The problem was that we still had the same friends. So that whenever he came home from college if there was a party or just a few guys getting together then both of us were there.
All through school we had competed in everything. We competed for grades. We competed in sports. We competed for girls. When we got cars we nearly killed ourselves racing on the back roads. Most of our friends thought it was amusing. They knew that we competed in everything. But they thought that it was a friendly rivalry. It wasn't. We couldn't stand each other.
Ray met a girl in college, Kathy. She was a beautiful blonde from upstate. She was smart and funny and personable. I never knew what she saw in him. But they got married right after they graduated from college. They to town and Ray's dad helped him build a nice little house on an acre of land down by the river just outside of town.
Ray came to work for his dad and it became my job to teach him the business. I was his teacher, but he was my boss. I tried not to let my resentment show, but we didn't get along any better now we did in the past. The trouble was I didn't have any choice but to put up with his shit and suck it up. This wasn't just the only decent job in town. It was the only decent job in this part of the state, at least for now. My only other options were to either leave the state to find work or to get a minimum wage job at one of the dairy farms outside of town milking cows and shoveling shit. I used to work on some of those farms during my summer vacations when I was in high school. It was actually pretty nice work. I enjoyed it. But it was hard work and the hours sucked and the money was not quite enough to survive on. And there was no way of working your way up the food chain.
So, I put up with Ray and kept my mouth shut. I don't think that Ray's parents or mine had ever been aware of the friction between us. I think that before very long though, Ray's father, Mr. Nash, became aware of it and there were several instances at work when he intervened on my behalf when Ray was giving me a hard time about something.
Ray had been pretty wild before he went away to college. He went through girlfriends like a hot knife through butter. I doubt if he ever went with a girl for longer than two weeks. I heard some stories about him later, about some of the things he tried to make the girls do. But I don't know if they were true or not.
He also started drinking pretty heavily. We all drank a little from time to time. But he, well, I suppose he had a drinking problem. And sometimes it a couple of guys to keep him from doing some pretty stupid things when he had been drinking.
When Ray came back to the hardware store after he graduated he seemed to have settled down a little. I met his wife and I saw her now and then. She seemed real nice and I thought that maybe she would settle Ray down a little. And at first she seemed to.
It even seemed like Ray and I were tolerating each other a little better at first. But that didn't last long. It wasn't six months before Kathy left him. He went after her and made all kinds of promises and she came back after a few weeks. For a while it looked like things were getting back to normal, like they were going to make a go of it.
It didn't last though. It was only about three months later that she left, for good this time. They got divorced and there were some rumors about the things Ray had done, or tried to get Kathy to do, but I don't know who was spreading them or if they were true.
Ray started acting more like his old self after the divorce. I couldn't do anything but take it though. Some days I went home from work so mad I couldn't talk to anyone for hours.
Luckily when I got home I didn't have to talk to anyone. I lived alone in half of the old Putnam house. When old man Putnam died his son had the house made into two apartments. I had the second floor and half of the garage. It just perfect for me.
I didn't date a lot. There aren't that many single girls my age in town. A lot of the kids I went to school with had gotten married in the first year after high school, mostly to their high school sweethearts. My high school sweetheart had gone away to college and married someone she met there. She now lived in another state. I saw her every now and then when she came back to visit her folks. She seems happy and we're just friends now. I don't think that either of us had planned on anything after we graduated. We didn't have any hard feelings.
Anyway, I wasn't dating, but I wasn't a hermit. I had a lot of friends and we got together regularly. I would have liked to have had a little love in my life. But I was still young and I wasn't desperate. I figured it would come eventually.
It turned out that I wasn't the only one that was of the opinion that I needed some love in my life. I got a call one Friday morning from Sharon. Sharon and I were classmates and old friends. She had married Roger, another close friend and I saw the two of them often.
She invited me to dinner that evening. There was nothing unusual about that and I accepted gladly. When I showed up I was introduced to Roger's cousin, Erin. Erin had just lost her job at a drug store in a small town on the other side of the state when Wal-Mart came to town and drove them out of business.
She and I hit off immediately. She was smart and funny and pretty and damn she was hot! She was staying with Roger and Sharon and was hoping to get a job at the local drug store.
We ended up going for a walk after dinner that lasted for three hours. We didn't go anywhere and we didn't do anything. We just walked around town and talked and by the time I dropped her off at Roger and Sharon's house just before eleven that night I was in love. I'm pretty sure that she was falling for me too.
The hardware store was open on Saturday and I had to work every other Saturday. As luck would have it, I was off tomorrow so I invited Erin to go for a ride in the morning. She accepted immediately. I drove home that night with my head in the clouds.
Erin never did get the job in the drug store. But we were married six months later. It was a simple, civil ceremony held in her parent's home. My parents were there and a dozen of my closest friends. Ray's parents were invited and so we felt that we had to invite Ray as well. I was very disappointed when he came.
I wasn't worried about Erin and all of the attention she received from Ray on our wedding day. I knew that she could hold her own with him. But I felt that he was spending entirely too much time with her and I resented it. It was obvious, in fact it was too obvious that he was infatuated with her. People noticed and I think even his parents were embarrassed.
I had been living well within my means over the last four years. I wasn't making a lot of money by big city standards but I was doing alright and I had managed to save a pretty good bit of money. So we could have afforded a nice honeymoon.
We decided not to though. It would have been nice, but we decided to save the money instead start watching for a good buy on a nice house. Meanwhile my duplex in the Putnam house was a little small, but it was cozy and we were happy there while we kept putting money in savings. We didn't take a honeymoon but we had one at home.
We were perfect together. Neither of us had much experience with sex. We weren't virgins but neither one of us had gotten much experience in that area. But we both loved our sex life. We were somewhat adventurous and we were both open minded. There was more than enough lust in our lives, especially those first few months.
Eventually things settled down in our lives. Erin managed to get a few part time jobs every now and then but there just wasn't much work in our little town. We were doing alright though. All of our entertainment was free or almost free. We got together with friends. We had cookouts and swimming parties at the river. Maybe once a month we would drive into the city for a meal at a restaurant. It was a different lifestyle than people in the city are used to. But for us it was what we were used to. It was what we were comfortable with. It was what we enjoyed.
For the first few months after we got married Erin would come to the hardware store and bring me lunch and we would eat together out on a picnic table under a tree in back of the store. Ray started to be a problem though. He was constantly flirting with her. He would almost hit on her. It didn't seem to bother him at all that I was sitting right there watching him. He was careful not to cross the line, but he leaned over it often enough that it made us uncomfortable. So we started meeting in the town square in the center of town at lunch time and eating on a park bench or in the bandstand or when the weather wasn't so nice I'd go home for lunch.
That fall there were a string of tragedies in our lives that really shook us. My father was killed in an accident on his way home from the job he had found in a city with a commute of sixty miles of country roads each way. Within a couple of months my mother suffered a stroke and she died two months after that. Their house had been paid for. It's a good thing or they never would have gotten by when the furniture plant closed down. But medical bills drained the estate and then some.
While my mother was in the hospital dying, Erin's father, who suffered from Alzheimer's, suddenly got much worse and had to be institutionalized. Her father's health and the medical bills were a terrible strain on her mother and her health began to fail too. It didn't seem possible but by the end of the year we had lost all four of our parents. Needless to say, we did not have a merry Christmas that year.
We weathered those tragedies and I suppose that we felt closer and stronger for having survived them as well as we did. We started that spring with an unstated but mutual resolve to put all of that behind us and get on with our lives. We were still grieving for our lost parents of course. We had both been close to our families. But we were determined to get past it.
That spring, probably before we were really ready, we got a good deal on a house. You need to realize that in a small town like ours, the real estate business isn't the same as it is in larger towns and cities. People live in their homes for generations. Their kids grow up and if they are able to find work and stay in town they stay in the family home or they build homes nearby and stay in them. People don't move in and out of houses. So finding a suitable home for sale is very difficult. We would have liked to have been able to buy my parents house but to avoid liability for my parent's medical bills that remained unpaid after the estate was settled we were advised not to.
When the River's were moved into an assisted living home by their son who had moved to Connecticut they put their home up for sale. A good friend let us know about it before it was even advertised and we jumped at it. The house was a little large for our needs. But we were planning on starting a family in a few more years so we didn't think the extra rooms would go to waste. It took every cent we had in the bank and the payment was higher than we would have liked but we loved the house and buying it seemed like a way to put the tragedies of this past winter behind us and start anew.
Just as things in our lives started to be getting back on track Ray's father decided to retire. That left Ray in complete charge of the store. had really liked Mr. Nash and I was going to miss him. But more than that, I dreaded what life was going to be like with Ray in charge of the store.
I had never stopped keeping an eye out for an opportunity to get into another line of work, or the same type of work in a different business. had known from the beginning that one day Ray would be in charge and I dreaded it. But unless we wanted leave the area I was going to have to stay where Im was and count myself fortunate to have that job.
So I did the best job that I could do and put up with Ray's crap and kept reminding myself that I was lucky to have a job.
Things took a turn for the strange when Ruth, the woman who had worked in the office handling inventories and actually was more responsible for keeping this place running and well stocked with merchandise than anyone else decided that she couldn't work Ray any longer and gave her two weeks notice.
That same day Ray came to me and asked if Erin would be interested in the job. He wanted to get someone in as soon as possible to get them familiar with the system and get a little training. So if Erin wanted the job he would need to know immediately.
I had some pretty serious misgivings about having Erin in such close contact with Ray daily basis. But there was no denying that we could really use the money, especially right now after just buying a house that was more than one hundred years old and needed some serious upgrades.
As soon as I got home from work that day I discussed it with Erin. She was excited about the possibility of having a job finally. But she too had misgivings about working so closely with Ray. We had to be practical though. Our house payment was nearly twice what we had been paying for rent in our old duplex. We were getting by, but we were no longer putting anything into savings and any unexpected expense would really be a problem, like instance if our eight year old car needed repairs that I couldn't do myself.
So I called Ray at home that evening and told him that Erin appreciated the offer and she would love to take the job. He told me to have her come in with me in the morning and get started.
Erin was more excited about the situation than I was. But it really did take some of the pressure off that she was employed and we had more money coming in.
We both let our guards down a little in that first two weeks while she was training under Ruth. During that time, other than to ask how Erin was doing, Ray left her alone. He even seemed to be easing up on me a little bit. Every night when we got home we would talk about our respective workdays and I would ask about Ray. She knew what I was worried about and she reassured me every day that Ray had been a perfect gentleman.
Things started changing after Ruth left though. It was a slow change. He didn't start grabbing her ass or anything like that. He did start touching her though. He would rest his hand on her shoulder or on the small of her back or touch her arm. After a while, whenever he was talking to her he was touching her. Just not in a way that she had any reason to complain about.
Then one Monday, after she had been working there for five or six weeks, he came into her office and said, "Erin, you're doing pretty good job. But I think you should start dressing a little sexier."
That was all that he said. Then he turned around and went back into his office.
That evening while we were eating dinner I could see that Erin was upset and I was almost afraid t ask what was wrong. Because I had a pretty good idea that it was something that Ray had said or done at the office.
I had to ask though and when I finally got her to tell me she kept insisting that she could handle him. She was just going to ignore him. We needed the money, I couldn't deny that. We talked about it and decided that as long as he was manageable she would try to put up with him. It would be nice if we could at least get enough money put aside to replace the roof and the heating system in our new old house.
We left there, but I can't deny that it was praying on my mind.
The next morning at breakfast I noticed that Erin was wearing light, breezy little sundress when she came downstairs. I cocked my eyebrow when I saw her and she shrugged and said, "I'm fully dressed. If it keeps him happy, well what the hell."
I said, "If you give in to that then what will his next request be?"
She said, "This is not a sexy dress. It is a little less businesslike than what I've been wearing, but it isn't sexy. I'm not going to sleep with him because I'm wearing a sundress to work!"
I didn't say anything else. I figured the next move was up to Ray. If he left well enough alone then I didn't have a problem with Erin dressing like this. Somehow I didn't see Ray leaving it at this. I knew that any man in his right mind would love to go to bed with Erin. She is pretty and sexy and extremely desirable. But Ray would want to sleep with her if she wasn't, just because she was my wife. Even better, he would love to take her away from me. And he couldn't do that I have no doubt that he would take great pleasure in breaking us up. He was just that kind of an asshole.
As usual I asked her how it went at work when we got home that evening. She shrugged and said, "He didn't get fresh. He said I looked much better, that was all. He didn't try anything. Hell, he pretty much ignored me the rest of the day."