Charlie Greene
Get past the jokes. They came, surprisingly, late in life. His 28th birthday to be specific. That night his friend Andrew took him out to a party and they met a couple of people. One in particular looked like he was straight out of central casting for ex jocks. That was the guy who spit out his beer drawing the connection. He laughed all night.
Charlie went home with his girl.
He wasn’t that type either. Charlie was less manipulator and womanizer than rescue subject. When Charlie was sad people automatically wanted to save him. She’d saved him that night. Kept saving him for the next 7 years until they walked down the aisle, into the maternity ward, back out again with twins in tow, and, finally, into divorce court where she claimed mental and physical abuse. The cause of this abuse? Another woman had wandered back into his life wanting to save him: His mother.
Until that day Charlie hadn’t realized that Mother-in-law could be a justification for divorce. He took it as a sign and opted to be alone for a while. He didn’t fight her for custody of the twins. He didn’t even get to see them more than once a year. So distant were the visits that it fed into the deadbeat dad narrative. He wasn’t though–not in the financial sense. He did well enough as a day trader to pay considerable amount of Alimony and child support. Once when the kids were four, he believed, he tried to come visit them outside of his time. His ex, Sheila, explained to him that the reason they were divorced was because of things exactly like this. He lacked social tact. In truth he lacked social circles for most of his life. There’d been Andrew for a while there, but he was gone now. Brooklyn, Charlie thought….
Some Thoughts:
- Gotta get faster at these. Time runs out just as I hit a groove.