Clarissa Gets Served

We rode in total silence for nearly an hour before either of us said anything. Finally, I couldn't take any more.

"Are you hungry?" I asked.

Clarissa just kept staring out the passenger window and shook her head.

"Do you want to stop and grab something to drink at least?"

"I don't want a divorce, Patrick. I know I signed the papers, but I didn't want to."

I kept both hands on the wheel at 10 and 2 and gripped it in frustration. I sucked in a deep breath through my nose and exhaled slowly. "Clarissa, we have already been over this. It is a done deal as far as I'm concerned."

She wasn't actively crying but tears were streaming down her face again. "Well, if this is your way of torturing me, Patrick, it's working."

I couldn't stand it anymore. I hit the brakes hard without locking them up and pulled over to the side of the road and slammed the lever into "park".

"Torturing you, Clarissa? What about me? Huh? What about torturing me?"

"Is that what you think life would be like with me, Patrick? Torture?"

"Jesus, woman, you are really fucking dense! I'm not talking about spending my life with you. I'm talking about all the shit that would have happened to me if your little adventure with Bud Roberts had succeeded!"

"But it didn't happen, Patrick! Okay? Everything fell through with that! Maybe it fell through for a reason! Maybe we're supposed to stay together! At the very least, you need to learn to move on from it!"

"I can't, dammit!"

"For God's sake, Patrick! Why the hell not? Why can't we at least try to move on together? Why is divorce the only option?"

I looked away from her. She was so oblivious to her own deviousness and utter insanity that she now physically and emotionally repulsed me. I sat there for a few moments as I could see her giving me a pleading look from my peripheral vision. I did everything I could to look away.

It took all I had to not break down, to find some way to keep my cool and fight the urge to slam Clarissa's head into the dashboard over and over and over and over again until there was nothing left but her neck and a bloody stump where her stupid, thick melon used to be.

And then, I thought of Shannon and that familiar, serene wave of calm washed over my body and I once again found my center and the true purpose in my life. I closed my eyes and thought of her and imagined the feel of her body, the feminine strength of her embrace, the taste of her lips and the smell of her soaps, lotions and perfumes. It was then that I was calm enough to tell Clarissa what I had been trying to find the strength to tell her all along.

"I can't, Clarissa. There is no way for me to move on from this. To do that, Clarissa, I would have to go back to being the old me, the one who trusted you and loved you enough not to question whether you would ever cheat on me - the one who never questioned whether you loved me in return. What you did to me, Clarissa, absolutely changed me on a molecular level, if that's possible.

"Your affair and the plans you shared with Bud Roberts to absolutely crush and destroy me changed me into someone I never thought I could be. And that is both amazing and absolutely tragic at the same time. In order to save myself I had to learn to think just as evil as you and Bud. In order to save myself I had to learn to plot and connive and beg and borrow and steal to get what I needed in order to stay out of jail.

"I have broken laws I swore to uphold just to serve what I believed to be a larger purpose. I have ripped the threads of the law to keep the blanket of justice intact to safeguard an unknowing public from dangerous people who would otherwise have been free to roam the streets and countryside again because of what you and Bud Roberts tried to do to me.

"I have become what I despise and that is to be devious, manipulative, conniving, underhanded and whatever other adjectives and superlatives you can possibly think of to describe me.

"But I never did ANY of those things for myself. I did them for my boys. I did them for the public at large. I did them for you. And I even did them for Bud Roberts and Marion Lawson. I don't have blood on my hands, Clarissa, but I have a helluva lot of dirt on them now. I'm not the Dudley Doright that I used to be. But the positive of it is, Clarissa, is that your and Bud's actions have made me a survivor.

"I can honestly say that there is NOTHING that I wouldn't do to protect my family, my friends and the people of Mason County from harm. I have stood at the face of death's door because of my commitment to that end and returned to tell about it, both literally and figuratively."

I put the Expedition back into gear, signaled, and pulled the big SUV back onto the highway and headed back towards Red River Falls.

"So, yes, Clarissa. You are right. I am tough as nails. Fighting for your life - whether from death itself or an existence worse than death in jail - will pretty much do that to you. So I won't thank you for destroying our family. But, in a way, I do thank you for making me a stronger person. Because I can honestly say that I never would have been prepared to become Sheriff if you hadn't."

I stopped talking at that point and my soon-to-be-ex-wife and I rode in silence the remainder of the trip. For Clarissa, it was literally a trip into the future as she would now have to decide what her future was going to be. Only she could set the direction. The only thing I knew was that her future would not include me, at least not as her husband.

When we arrived home, Clarissa simply went upstairs without saying a word and went to bed. She slept for several hours, probably from pure exhaustion after having spent the weekend in jail. The boys got home from their weekend trip with the youth group to the Twin Cities and were eager to tell us all about it. As I listened to their youthful chatter and excitement, I knew that there was no way I would have had Clarissa arrested had they been home all weekend instead of 200 miles east of here. A lucky break for me and a bad one for Clarissa.

Clarissa eventually came downstairs around supper time. She smiled and greeted the boys with hugs and kisses on their heads. She cooked a light supper for all of us consisting of grilled ham and cheese sandwiches.

And, much to my amazement, after supper, Clarissa asked us all to remain at the dinner table. I had no idea what was coming but she sat there and told the boys the news that she and I were going to be separating. She explained to the boys that we had been having some serious problems and that, although we loved both Nick and Jake dearly, that she and I could not stay together and she was going to be moving out for a while.

Clarissa even went so far as to say that this was a decision that she had made and begged Nick and Jake not to be angry with me as it was not my fault. She did fib a little bit when she said that she wasn't sure how long we would need to be apart, just long enough for her and I to settle some differences that we had.

I'm sure that her reasons for keeping things open-ended were to allow the boys time to adjust to us not being together and I was grateful for that. She also assured the boys that their home would not change and they would remain in the house and on the little acreage with their horses, cattle, dogs and cats that they had come to love so much.

Clarissa assured them that, although the boys would not be spending time with both her and me at the same time, that they would still see both of us on a constant basis. She even went so far as to ask them to please help me out as much as possible and also asked them for help in finding her a suitable place to stay in Red River Falls so they could spend time there after school before coming home to the farm each night.

To their credit, the boys were sad but took the news much better than I expected. There were tears, of course, but neither of them broke down fully or blew up in a tantrum. Perhaps they had suspected and even expected that things would eventually come to this. Nick had alluded to it even when I was at the law enforcement conference in Minneapolis over a year and a half ago. Sometimes, we adults don't give our kids the credit they deserve for their intuition and perceptions of the world around them.

Within a few days, Clarissa had secured a very nice apartment in a brand-new complex of town houses that was inside a gated community. The complex had its own playground and pool that the boys would probably enjoy this summer and was within six blocks of the middle school they both attended.

It didn't take Chris Hayes much persuading to drop the charges against Clarissa for assaulting a peace officer. I think Chris knew how difficult this would be for all of us and realized Clarissa was acting out of desperate self-preservation than any real malice towards him or any other deputy. Marion Lawson played ball, as I demanded he would, and Judge Hanna Bergen did her part to make the case go away.

If we ever audited for any reason, people would remember something had happened, but there was no paperwork or reports to specify what. I never told Clarissa any of that, of course, just to make sure the divorced went through its natural progression.

When I broke the news of all of this to Shannon, she was incredibly supportive of me as she knew the finality of my impending divorce was weighing heavily on me; not because I wanted to stay married to Clarissa, but simply grief and remorse of a dead and failed marriage.

It was strange, too, because I could now also begin to focus on my new life with Shannon and Bridget that would rise from the ashes of my previous life with Clarissa. And I knew in my heart that my boys would blend well with Shannon and Bridget and accept them as stepmother and stepsister. I was sure there would be conflicts and stumbles along the way, but my gut instinct told me there were to be far more wonderful days in our future than rocky ones.

And, eventually, I even began to hope that someday the right man would walk into Clarissa's life and give her the happiness that I was unable to.

Another big surprise was the revelation from my future father-in-law that his impending wedding gift to Shannon and I would be to pay off the mortgage for the acreage so that Shannon and I could focus on other things besides working to pay the bank. It was more than I could have ever imagined, more than I deserved and I was so shocked by his offer that I initially refused.

But Jack Sullivan reminded me that I didn't want to get on his bad side and there was nothing that he wouldn't do for his daughter and granddaughter. Then he laughed hysterically and pulled me in for a massive bear hug and said, "Welcome to the family!"

Thus, one major chapter in my life comes to a close. And the next chapter is now ready to be written. All of the principal characters are in place. There is no need to dwell on the past, only a bright future ahead. From this day forward, the only history that will matter is the history we make for ourselves.

The End

SB