Читать книгу Death by Manicure: The Case of the Poison Polish - Dr. Robert T. Spalding Jr. - Страница 4

An unshaven and disheveled Robert Johnson sat on the couch in his pajamas flicking through the mindless amount of daytime television. It was only 11 in the morning and he was on his second can of beer. The most important decision he would make today was whether to watch a game show or a soap opera and whether three cans of beer before noon might be overdoing it. Some mornings he had killed off the best part of a six-pack by 10:30 a.m.

It used to irritate him when his wife told him not to drink so much in the evenings. Now he could drink as much as he wanted at anytime, but he still missed her telling him to go easy. He missed lots of things about her. He was certainly not the first person to ever seek solace in a bottle after the loss of a loved one, and he sure as hell wouldn’t be the last. But anyone who knew Robert would most likely have said that his spirit was stronger than that.

Pam and Ed had been extra supportive even to the extent of letting the kids stay round their house on the occasions when Robert needed some extended time to himself. The kids didn’t mind; they got on well with Pam’s kids, so it was a chance for marathon video game sessions and other frivolities.

But Robert was suffering. He had not taken on any plumbing jobs since Katie’s death a few weeks earlier. He was taking it pretty hard. Whenever the phone rang he thought that it might be reporters or his lawyer, and he couldn’t handle it. When he left the house, people in the neighborhood would say that they were so sorry for his loss, but their condolences wouldn’t bring his wife back. When he went into town he felt like everyone was watching him and saying, “That’s the guy who lost his wife in such a silly way,” and it gnawed at his gut.

For a while he let the answer machine pick up any calls, but eventually he turned that off. He ordered his boys to just let it ring unless he told them otherwise. They were getting on with their lives. They didn’t have much of a choice, as they had schools to go to, and their teachers would not allow them to wallow in self-pity for longer than was the normal mourning period. Robert was his own boss, and he was taking advantage of this. If he worked for a regular company they would not allow so much time for a person to pull himself together. It was the stupidity of his wife’s death that really got to Robert … a stupid pedicure for God’s sake.

He went through all the normal stages of grief, denial, anger, self-pity, placing blame on others. First of all he blamed the salon and rightly so, but then he started to play the “what if” game. What if he had learned about giving pedicures? He could have done his wife’s nails and maybe she would still be alive. And then he would think, maybe and maybe not, a burglar could still have killed her while he was out of town, or she could have been knifed in a mugging incident. It was self-torture to play that kind of game, yet his mind just spun out of control at times.