Whiskey In A Teacup

Chapter Three

 did what I always did when times were tough.

I went to work.

Trey tried to stop me, but my mind was a whirlwind. There was nothing he could do or say. I figured I'd call Darcy from the office. I wasn't thinking about Trey, and how he'd lost his best friend too, I was thinking about my own sorry life and how I'd let it get this far.

Sitting behind my black glass and chrome desk, looking out over the bustling, crazy, stop for nothing city, I realized how long I'd known this was coming. Sooner or later one of us was always going to call time on our relationship. I just hadn't expected it to be then. What had she been thinking of? I'd ignored what was right in front of me, what the people I loved had told me all along.

'She's using you Danny.' Colton said one rainy, July afternoon. The twins were having their afternoon nap and we were out on the back porch. The air was humid, the rain doing nothing to refresh the air, and beer in hand I looked over at him. Colton could be real deep sometimes. He had this knack for reading body language, like you couldn't hide anything from him.

'One of these days you're gonna wake up and realise it's not worth it.'

He didn't have Sofia then, so I just brushed him off, saying he didn't understand.that he couldn't till he had children of his own.

But who was I kidding?

I used the kids as an excuse for fourteen unhappy years. Sure there were fleeting moments that I clung onto, that I prayed would lead to more, but they never did. We didn't see enough of each other and she was fine with that after a while. She had her own hobbies, she was on the school PTA board and ran a variety of charity events for the magazine. We were strangers living in the same house, for the sake of those we loved the most. The reality was I kept hoping that one day Caroline would wake up and come down the stairs and look at me with something other than indifference.

That day never came, of course.

I stayed with Trey. He was insistent, and I wasn't going to go and stay with my mother. I'd rather pull my own teeth out than listen to her reduce my relationship to a whole string of 'I told you so's', and a effortless, rehearsed speech about everything I'd done wrong in my life. Staying with Trey did have it's downsides, I won't lie about that. He brought a woman back almost every night and I lost an inordinate amount of sleep with the pillow over my head, drowning out the dramatic fake orgasms of nameless bar crawlers. He was good company though, when I wasn't moping in the office or locking myself in his guest bedroom listening to depressing music.

Three weeks after she dropped the bomb on me, and one week since Colton's funeral, she dropped by the office. Her face was drawn, and for the first time in years I wondered what the hell I'd ever seen in her. Maybe it was the anger, of her not returning my calls, of the girls refusing to talk to me on the phone, or refusing to come over and spend Saturdays with me, but she looked so far removed from the woman I met. Standing in the doorway, dressed in a pencil skirt and high necked shirt she looked like a school head mistress, severe and stern, and probably about to bust my balls over something.

I spoke before she did.

'Let me see my daughters Caroline. I don't know what you're....'

I stopped, she held her hand up, beckoning me to stop talking. Her lips were drawn tightly.

'Daniel the girls decided that.....' She swallowed, and for the first time, she looked uneasy, unsure.

'What? Just tell me.' I folded my arms over my chest, trying to ease my pounding heart. It didnt help.

'They don't want to see you. I asked them to come over today, to see you, and they don't want to.'

I think my mouth fell open in that instant. Running my hands through my dark brown hair I wondered what in hell I had done for them to decide they just weren't going to see me.

'Right now I think it's best if we respect their decisions. They are old enough to decide, after all.'

That's when I figured it all out.

Caroline had had three weeks to poison my children. Three weeks to spin the story her way. There was no other reason that they wouldn't want to see me.

'I think maybe this should go to court..' I said, defiantly. I know my voice shook, I know she saw the vulnerability in my eyes, but this was not an empty threat.

'Daniel I haven't said a word. They're just in a fragile place right now. Once they've come to terms with the divorce things will be different.'

There we were, facing off, me and the woman I hardly knew, trying to digest the fact that my kids had decided they didn't want to see me. I'd lost Colton and I was close to losing them too, I could feel it. They were heading into the world of female adolescence. They needed their mother. I was now defunct, useless, and just a spare part they only saw at weekends.

If that.

I couldn't shift the feeling that Caroline had orchestrated this, like she wanted to imasculate me even more. The divorced loser. His kids hate him. His wife keeps the dream house, the cars, the designer wardrobe. Hell, I'd be forced by the courts to keep her in the manner she was accustomed.

While I stayed on a stained mattress in the guest bedroom of my best friends questionably situated town house.

I sat on Trey's window seat, watching the rain batter the hell out of the glass panes, thinking about the day I got through to Darcy. The line was noisy, it echoed, and I felt as if we were in two different dimensions. The one I existed in, was one she expected Colton to still be in. She'd left him alive and well, with a kiss and a hug, and a reminder to collect some clothing from the cleaners. The instant she heard my voice she knew something was wrong, I heard the hitch in her throat, the undeniable sound of anxiety.

'Somethings happened.' She said, her voice wobbling. 'Please tell me everything's okay Dan? Please? He's okay isn't he? He's alright?'

On reflection I think my voice gave it away. I tried to mirror the calm tone the police officers had used with me but this was the hardest call I ever had to make.

Hearing her son as akin to someone driving a dagger into my heart and twisting the blade. I felt an unimaginable pain knife through me, far less than she felt, I'm sure and I felt sick. I told her what had happened as if reading from a page in front of me. I tried to detach my emotions, but hearing her break down was the most painful experience of my life. I could imagine her, on some foreign soil, clutching at the phone whilst Sofia clutched her leg, staring up at her.

She didn't blame me for the argument, she knew how bullheaded we could both be. She cried and I stayed on the line, trying to comfort her. Trying to be there for her, despite being thousands of miles away. When we hung up, the stabbing didnt stop. Nor did the nausea. Stumbling through the office I headed to the men's room, and something about my face must have scared the guys in there, because they vacated.

I spent the next few hours in there, and nobody bothered me.

They all knew about Colton. They tried to tell me to go home, but they left me alone when they realised I didn't have another way to cope with this. I missed my home. I missed having other people around. I missed what I'd never had. Someone to confide in. Someone to sit there and listen to me lose control over all of this.

.............

The week after Caroline appeared like a ghost in my office doorway, was a bad one. I drank too much, I was hard on everyone who worked for me. I imposed deadlines that weren't necessary, I was a bastard to Trey. He took it in his stride. He was better equipped than anyone at dealing with my self hating explosions, and I'd broken a few things around the house. I wasn't good at dealing with my frustrations at the best of times, and right now, I was like a bull in a china shop.

Trey tried to get me to come out with him. He knew the bars and clubs in a ten mile radius, like the back of his hand. Eight days after my talk with Caroline, I caved in. A single man for the first time in nearly fourteen years, ready to follow trey wherever the night took us.

'You like drinking right?' Trey said, eyeing my growing collection of glass bottles on the kitchen counter.

'Yep.' I replied, laid on the sofa, staring up at the ceiling.

'Well then get your ass off my sofa. We're going to a bar.'