Dewey's Nine Lives

Glenn thanked the man for the advice and handed him back his business card, along with some loose change. He never saw him again, and he never knew if the man had really been a banker or was just an old drunk with a business card, but his words stuck with him. Glenn never went to college, but he became a student of life. When his boys were young, he learned to cut hair at barber school. He knew police work and security. He could sell insurance, tend bar, and fix just about any make or model of car. He knew carpentry, plumbing, and just enough electrical to get out of trouble. “Learn to do.” That was his motto. “Learn and do” was his creed. But he had been born in a place where it was a short, easy path to the bottom and a long, hard road to the top, and if ever there was a time when he could have taken the lower path, it was after his divorce. He was angry enough, and hurt enough, to throw it away in a bottle of booze. Because it’s easy to learn a new trade, but it’s hard to learn a new way of life. And when the going got hard, the men of Pierce Street hit the bars. Glenn? He may have worked on Lower Fourth, but he spent his nights in a diner near his apartment instead of on a barstool. Three years later, he married a waitress there and moved with her to St. Petersburg, Florida.

“There were too many ghosts,” he said of his decision to leave Sioux City. “Too many people running around thinking they knew something. I just got tired.”

In Florida, Glenn worked construction, until the owner of the gym where he worked out, seeing how popular he was, offered him a job. Within a year, he was managing the place: selling memberships, changing pool filters, repairing the hot tub. He went to classes for six months and became a certified massage therapist. He worked seven days a week, not just for the money but because he was a blue-collar guy from Sioux City, Iowa, and he loved hard work.

When the investors pulled out, and the health club shut down, Glenn moved his family to Texas, where a friend had a contract to repaint the Dallas city schools. He was thirty-five years old, and he didn’t have a single key on his key ring. No house. No apartment. No bank account. He didn’t even own a car. But he had the important things: a wife, a new baby son, and a family dog. It was never about the job for Glenn Anderson. He could be happy doing just about anything. It was about having a family. They were all Glenn needed to feel at home.

But Texas wasn’t home. Florida had never been home either. Not really. Home was Sioux City, Iowa, where his parents had eventually purchased a small white house on a busy corner, and his kids from his first marriage were growing up in his old four-bedroom split-level ranch without him. After a few years, when the painting contract expired, Glenn and his new family moved back to northwest Iowa: back to the cold winters, the hard granite, and the questions from old friends. He went back to his old line of work, repairing cars. His wife drove regularly to visit her parents in Michigan, always taking their son along. The trips were a financial hardship, and he missed his boy terribly, but Glenn didn’t mind since it kept his wife happy. He was a year away, he figured, from the white picket fence, the big backyard, and the family home.

Her cousin was the one who spilled the beans. “She’s seeing her old high school boyfriend, you know,” the cousin told him. “She never got over him.”

Glenn didn’t know. Despite the collapse of his first marriage, Glenn Albertson was still too honest and trusting to consider the possibility that his second wife was cheating on him, too.

At least this time, he was warned. When his wife told him she was moving to Michigan and taking their child, Glenn didn’t ask why. He didn’t fight for his boy because he knew from experience that was a battle he couldn’t win. They just split the sheets and moved on.

He tried one more time. This time he married a friend, a woman he had known for more than ten years. He might have loved her, and she said she loved him, so marrying her seemed like a good thing to do. They weren’t young, so they started trying to have a child right away. After a few years of heartache and stress, she got pregnant. Then she lost the baby. For a month, they held each other and cried. Then the doctor told them she wouldn’t get another chance; they would never have a child of their own. It was devastating news.