Let's call her Tammy. She's not exactly a regular but everyone knows her and the bartenders know what she likes to drink. She's short with flashing blue eyes and is smartly dressed like, oh, a real estate agent. In fact, she's in the house-trading racket, working for a mortgage company.
It was a perfect May evening. With the sun setting gold beyond Goose Creek Road, I sat out in the patio with Tammy, Mayor Janey and her husband Tim, and Old Gus. As Tim and Old Gus studied their respective cocktails intently, Tammy and Mayor Janey regaled me with tales of Tammy's home life. Mayor Janey and Tammy are fast friends. Mayor Janey is the garbage commissioner of the town of Goose Creek. She runs for the post every year and wins in a landslide each time. One year, her vote total almost hit a hundred. I like to call her Mayor. She gets a kick out of it.
Tammy held a cell phone and peered at the screen. She told us she'd grounded one of her two teenaged daughters for some hijinks at a party over the weekend. She'd also seized the teen's cell phone, a torture on a par with waterboarding. Now she was monitoring the messages that came in one after another.
"Oh," Tammy said, "look at this! 'Big party Friday night. Maybe. If you're not there, you're square - ha ha ha!'"
"'Maybe' huh?" I said. "Sounds like code for, 'As long as my parents aren't around.'"
"Right. 'Maybe' is capitalized," Tammy said. "Well, looks like she's gonna be square."
The conversation got around to marriage. I told the group that I make a stellar ex-husband. Tammy raised her hand for a high five. "Oh yeah! Same here!" she crowed.
Tammy has a boyfriend now. She has no plans to wed. "He has his job and his kids, I have my job and my kids. We see each other when we can. Listen," Tammy confided, "it's better this way. If we had gotten married, we'd have been separated and divorced already."
With that, she launched into the tale of her first and only marriage. "He's really lucky he has me as an ex-wife," she said. "Any other woman would have killed him."
Tammy and her husband separated about ten years ago. For the first few months of the separation, he remained in the home with her for the sake of the kids and because, apparently, that perfect job seemed to elude him.
"Then, about six months later," Tammy recounted, "I found out he was having an affair with the woman who lived two doors down. It was funny because she'd been our babysitter. And my best friend!" All of us sitting around the table dutifully clucked our tongues.
"Oh, was I pissed! I told him to get out. Two days later, I see the woman's husband pulling out of the driveway to go to work. I chased him down. He stopped, rolled down the window, I leaned in and said, 'Did you know your wife and my ex-husband are fucking?'
"Of course, he didn't believe me at first because his wife was already poisoning his mind against me, saying things like I was delusional. But he found more evidence over the next couple of days and he couldn't deny it anymore. He moved out a week later. My ex-husband moved right in - shoom!"
Tammy followed this with a laundry list of her ex-husband's failings, a bill of particulars that would make Bernie Madoff blush. He lost money, he wasted money, he gambled money away, and he rarely, if ever, made money. He was, said Tammy, the classic Peter Pan. She felt as though she'd been raising three kids rather than two. He lied, he philandered and he left his underwear and socks on the floor.
"Still, I treated him with respect even after we split up," Tammy said. "It's for the kids. But it's really about me: I take the high road. I never say anything bad about him. If he had another ex-wife, she'd be talking about him all over town! Not me. I get along great with him."
Tammy then iterated that she never speaks ill of the man in front of the kids. Never has, never will. "But, man, the things I could tell them. Him and that woman."
Mayor Janey laughed. "Tell them about the time in the car," she said.
"Oh, yeah! Janey and me are in the car going out to dinner. The kids are in the back seat. I'm telling Janey about this woman, what a witch she is and how she deserves my ex-husband. All of a sudden, we get into an accident. The woman put a hex on me - she knew I was talking about them!"
Tammy took a sip out of her can of Coors Light and dragged on her Salem. "I took the high road. I had to work three jobs as a single mother just to put food on the table for my girls. I was only 30 years old. I don't know how or why I did it but I chose to be the better person. I took the high road.
"The only thing I regret is that he's such a no-good asshole. His daughters can't even respect him. They don't respect him. He doesn't give them any reason to respect him. He ought to grow up. But I've never said anything bad about him. I took the high road."
Tammy then told us that a couple of years after the divorce, her ex-husband and ex-best friend now were both unemployed and unable to keep up with the mortgage payments on the house two doors down. "As soon as I saw the bank's for sale sign on the front lawn, I called my mortgage company and bought the house. I waved bye-bye to them the day they moved out.
"She got my ex-husband and I got the house. I got the best of that deal."
It was getting late. Tammy stubbed out her last cigarette and drained her final can of Coors Light. She stood up. "That's my story," she said, exhaling menthol smoke. "I have to go now. But really, don't get me wrong - I love my ex-husband. I'm just not in love with him. But I'll love him till the day I die."
