I sat up, tired of feeling sorry for myself.
That’s when I saw it. That’s when I figured out what I could do to take out my rage. The wood paneling. Steve had loved the wood paneling. He had a thing for oak furniture, and he made the oak go all the way up the walls.
Well, now the wood paneling had to die.
Leaping up from the floor, I ran to the garage and found a crowbar, and returned to the sunroom. Starting where the wood met the wall of windows, I jammed the crowbar under the paneling.
It turned out that it was actually pretty easy to pry oak panels off a wall. They hadn’t been secured very well by the contractors Steve’s designer had hired.
Even though it wasn’t difficult to remove the panels, it took me an hour to complete the task. It made a satisfying sound as I tore the glued panels off. After I finished, I surveyed the damage. I had managed to strip the walls completely. They had been scraped and damaged with a few holes left in the plaster, too. I was standing on a pile of wood panels, and there was wood all over the floor around me.
But I wasn’t satisfied.
It wasn’t enough.
I returned to the garage with the crowbar and came back to the sunroom with a sledgehammer. I didn’t know why we had a sledgehammer, and obviously, Steve hadn’t cared enough about it to take it with him when he abandoned me to live with a vapid Barbie doll. But we had a sledgehammer, and that was all that mattered. I could barely lift it, so I dragged it all the way from the garage to the sunroom.
“Kawabunga!” I shouted and let the sledge-hammer fly. Actually, fly was a generous term. I could barely lift it to my knees, and then I let it fall on top of the wood panels. It was a pitiful display of my strength, but it was effective, nonetheless. And satisfying.
After ten minutes, I was completely physically spent, nearly hyperventilating, but I had succeeded in splintering the wood sufficiently to take out my aggression. I felt almost healed. Almost satisfied.
“It’s Oreos time,” I said and plodded back to the living room, leaving the sledgehammer amongst the piles of rubble. I lay down on the couch, covering myself with a blanket, and put the sound back on the television.
I Dream of Jeanniehad been replaced withRoseanne. She was cackling and telling her child something about money.
“You tell her, Roseanne,” I said to the television, but I wasn’t in the mood forRoseanne. Flipping through the channels, I landed on PBS. David Attenborough was speaking in a relaxing English accent about bears in Siberia.
Siberia looked like such a relaxing place for bears. There were a lot of trees and snow, and quiet. I continued to watch the nature show, so engrossed that I forgot about my cookies and chips. When it was over, PBS asked for donations, and I got up and found myself walking back to the sunroom.
It was a mess. There was wood everywhere, all in various shapes and sizes now that I had gone to town on it. My anger had subsided. At least it had subsided toward the wood paneling. Staring at the chaos didn’t make me happier. I dragged the sledgehammer back to the garage, and I stopped there to look at the tools. Something in me decided to take some rope and a knife.
As in a dream, I returned to the sunroom and made a space for myself on the floor, surrounded by the wood pieces. Then, I slipped into the flow state I had been in earlier in the day with the mosaics. I picked up piece after piece of wood. I broke them by hand, weaved them together and bound them by rope. When I looked up from my work, I was surprised that I had made myself a chair. It was pretty. Bohemian and rustic, but not too rustic.
Gingerly, I sat on it, and I was thrilled to find that it could hold my weight. I had created an actually practical piece of art. Holy crap, I had crafted an actual chair! I was a craftswoman. I was an artist. All of a sudden, I felt a surge of pride in myself and my abilities. I thought of a whole new slew of adjectives for myself, and all of them were positive.
Artistic. Productive. Smart. Creative. Clever.
Yes, I was all those adjectives and more.Take that, Steve. Jerk Steve.
Finding my phone, I called Delivery Happiness. Thirty minutes later, I had started on a second chair, when Joe rang my doorbell with my delivery of a loaf of bread, a tub of cream cheese, four chocolate bars, and a bag of carrots. I left the chairs in the sunroom and opened the front door.
“Nice seeing you again,” he beamed at me.
I took the bag of groceries from him. “Would you like to help me seek revenge on Steve and Tight Tammy? Something naughty and illegal?”
CHAPTER 11
“A Poop Truck”
I put the groceries away and handed Joe a juice box that I found at the back of my refrigerator. I had decided to call him instead of Hudson to exact revenge on my husband because I didn’t want to hear “I told you so” from Hudson, and I was pretty sure Hudson wouldn’t do anything illegal that wasn’t sanctioned by the government on foreign soil. Joe, on the other, had an easygoing attitude that I was hoping would extend to acts of barbarism. I didn’t have any other friends at this point, since Destiny was in Hawaii, and my son was in New York. So, it was Joe or nobody.
“So, what’s up?” Joe asked, sipping his juice through the tiny juice box straw.
I planted my hands on the counter and leaned forward. “Joe, my jerk husband called me a bunch of adjectives.”
“Uh-oh.”
“He also left me, cut off my bank account, stole my car and all of my belongings, and he’s sleeping with a woman who believes that any woman over a size six should be sent to a prison camp to do squats every minute of every day until they die.”
