Teed Off Ch. 01

***Author's note -- While not the first story I've posted, obviously, it is the first story I wrote a little over two years ago. I've not posted it before now because it is so long - 53k words (15 or 16 Lit pages). If you don't have time to read it, I completely get it. When my favorite authors post something that is more than 6 pages, I usually bookmark it for when I have more time. Also, it is my first, so I would probably rewrite a few things if I had the time.

I've broken it into three chapters; all complete and ready to post. So for the two or three of you that actually finish the story.

I'd like to say thanks to my editor for slogging through this. I have made a few small changes, so any mistakes are min.

It is a little golf 'heavy' the first couple of chapters, so if you cannot tolerate golf as a tool to set up the rest of the story, then you won't like it.

Thank you. I hope you enjoy.

*

Chapter 1

Tim Humphry was having a really good day, or evening actually. He was looking out his economy plus window seat window as the full moon was rising over the Atlantic. It was a beautiful site. He was going to see his very good friend, Neil, in Scotland. Neil had retired a couple of years ago, when the Motorola factory he had worked at closed. It was either retire or be laid off. Not much difference really. Fortunately, he had almost 40 years with the company at good salary, so his retirement would be decent. Nothing extravagant, but few complaints.

Tim never thought he would get to visit Neil, personally. His ex-wife never showed much interest in visiting Scotland, or Neil in particular. Whenever Neil would visit, Janet would seem irritated when Tim would invite Neil to the house. Neil was not the typical Scotsman. He was the cartoonized version of one. He was big and tall and loud with red hair, well mostly grey now, but it was red. He could even play the bag pipes. I kept waiting to see Samurai Jack show up whenever he was around.

Our daughters loved, 'Uncle Neil.' He wasn't someone you would expect to have a master's in electrical engineering from the University of Edinburgh. That wasn't enough for Janet, who obviously didn't think he was refined enough for her. As a director in her corporate job at Walgreens in Chicago, she didn't think many people were refined enough for her, but that was her loss.

Neil and I had built a great friendship over our 20 years together at Motorola and we truly had each other's backs when corporate was breathing down our necks. That's why it was so unfortunate when they closed their plant just outside of Edinburgh. Even though Neil wasn't ready to retire yet, he wasn't hurt too badly.

Since his retirement package was fully tenured, he could just slide into retirement. As a matter of fact, he and his wife, Edith, had a 2nd place up near Pitlochry, near the Scottish Highlands where they started a small tourism company. They would make travel arrangements and even provide guided tours at some places, like the nearby old castle ruins and lochs or some of the museums in Edinburgh.

He had been trying to get me to visit him for years, especially since the divorce. I had been to the Edinburgh factory, but never his place. Then I was laid off, also, about two years ago, so traveling wasn't something I could afford to do much of. I had fewer years of service than Neil, and my retirement wasn't large enough yet for me to retire, so after I was laid off, I needed to find another job.

I had spent my career in logistics, and even though I reported to the VP of logistics, I never made director, to my wife's chagrin. So then, at the ripe age of 48, I was finding myself too experienced (read that as too expensive) for most positions and not enough management experience to take on VP or director positions, for which I was interviewing. I was in no man's land.

When my sister told me about a friend of hers, who managed a factory east of Knoxville that was looking to expand globally and wanted to potentially hire me, I was ready to go. Well, I was the only one that was ready. My wife had no interest in my taking that position, even if it was a good opportunity for me. I studied in Knoxville at UT for my graduate degree in Engineering, so moving back to a place I liked and closer to family appealed to me. It didn't appeal to my wife.

Our twin daughters had moved off to college 2 years ago, so in our house was only the two of us. We did well with our house in Oak Brook, just outside of Chicago. It was worth close to $900,000, and we only paid $250,000 for it 20 years ago. Of course, at the time, it was more house than we needed, and certainly more house than we needed now.

Over the last several years, I had actually begun to hate our house. It was too much work, and Janet wanted everything always perfect which kept my honey-do list never ending. I'm sure she liked my list that way, so whenever there was something I wanted to do, like visit family or watch a ballgame, she could point to the list and say I needed to work on the list. Sigh.

Like the value of our house, a lot had changed in the last 20 years of our marriage. My wife and I started off great. We met here in Chicago. We were both moving up our corporate ladders. We were making good money and traveling together to tropical or European places two or three times a year. When we traveled all our troubles seemed to go away. However, when we weren't travelling, our troubles seemed to multiply.

Of course, the first couple of years were all lovey-dovey. We made love at least twice per week. We did little sweet things for each other. Primarily I was doing that, but she would reciprocate some. When we found out we were pregnant, we were both so excited. All through the pregnancy, we were busy getting the rooms ready, picking out names, establishing college funds. All the things you expect parents in our places in life to do. Then the twins were born.

After that event, my contribution to our marriage was no longer required. Her mother showed up to help the first month, and after that, I could do nothing right. I often told Neil, being married to Janet meant you had a 90% change of get a 50/50 question wrong.

No detail, no matter how important nor how small, escaped her attention. I mean, really? When closing the diaper, if the angle of the tape is off a few degrees is it that important? If I didn't change their tops immediately after feeding them because I knew that they would burp and spit up on the new tops, was that so wrong? At least give them half an hour or so, because no need to wash two tops instead of one. If I had to sit the baby carrier on the ground to get the keys out of my pocket, was it really going to ruin the carrier or the seat of the car, which was already protected by a cover. You get the idea.

This was continuous. As my daughters got older, Janet and I drifted further and further apart. It was ok for her to tell her family all that was going on in our lives, but when I tried to send videos of their dance or music performances to mine, I was sharing private information. What?! She turned into the biggest hypocrite you could possibly imagine.

We were both spanked as children, and it didn't seem to hurt us too badly, since we now earned well over $100k per year each. However, we both agreed that even though we were spanked, that we wouldn't physically hit our children. I was ok with this. No spanking, fine. We would use other form of discipline. So when my, then, 8 year old daughter dropped a plastic tumbler, spilling water, and my wife popped her in the back of the head with her hand, hard. I proceeded to call her on it.

Well that put me in the dog house for six months. No speaking to me, no sex. She communicated with me through e-mail or skype. Angry doesn't begin to describe my feelings towards her. I started checking up on her, secretly. Was she having an affair? Were there any of the tell-tale signs that she might be cheating. I'm almost ashamed to admit that I even put a voice activated recorder in her vehicle taped to the bottom of her seat. After months of listening to one-sided conversations, I never got any indication that anything could be going on. Actually, there were times when I was hoping she was cheating, and that she would run away with her lover. That wasn't to be.

Nope, she just seemed to get great satisfaction of trying to put me in my place. She did this with her work colleagues too. She reveled in people thinking of her as 'the dragon lady' or bitch. She was a hard-ass, and wanted all of her reports to know it. She believed it better to be respected and feared than admired and revered.

Oh, she was a really effective project manager. She had won awards and sizable bonuses. She was made a director of procurement 10 years ago, and kept waiting to be promoted to VP. That would never happen. Her management knew she could get the job done and lead major initiatives, but didn't want her as a VP because she could not lead, nor inspire her people, which was what they wanted from a VP.

She became even more bitter, and I was her favorite buffer on which to take out her frustrations. Guess what? I willingly took it too, because whenever I had to travel, the bearers of burden would be my daughters, and I would suffer many abuses for them. As they aged, they would ask me why I took it. My response was always, "one of these days you'll understand," knowing that until you have children you couldn't possibly comprehend.

I would do anything to be with my daughters for as long as possible. As far as love for Janet, there was no love between us any longer. We rarely had sex. It was maybe two or three times a year, and I didn't enjoy it. Oh, she was still very pretty. However usually we would have sex with the lights off and she just wanted to lay there, missionary position, doing nothing. Several times I never even came. It was terrible. We hadn't had sex in a year before our divorce, and the sad thing was, I didn't miss it.

Why didn't I leave sooner? Same reason most men stay in unhappy marriages; the state of Illinois would absolutely rape me in a divorce. I know this because both attorneys I visited told me so. Also, you read the stories online, too. The best interest of two teenage daughters, in the court's opinion, will always lie with the mother, unless you could prove she was unfit, which was almost impossible. Crack whores have a better shot at keeping their kids than the fathers do.

My attorney didn't think my recordings of her yelling occasionally would be enough to sway the court. Also, since she made director, she made more money and that would weigh in her favor. At the time I made good money too, over $110k / year, but not as much as her.

I probably could have climbed the ladder faster, but I was always the one to show up for the plays and sporting events, or take them to the dentist. I drove them to their friends' houses. I took them and or their friends to the museums and other cultural events. Janet thought that because she selected the vacation destinations and came with us, that was enough to offset all of the other things I did. Never mind that she worked several hours each day on vacation.

The one thing I did allow myself was to go and hit golf balls fairly regularly. I never actually played, because that would take too long. But after having been on the receiving end of the silent treatment for months (yes, that happened more than once), I needed some sort of physical outlet besides running on which to take out my frustrations.

I'm surprised I didn't hurt myself. I would see that little ball, and imagine Janet laying there with the tee in between her teeth and the ball sitting on top, and then I would swing as hard as I could. Accuracy? Irrelevant. I was there to beat the hell out of a bucket with Janet's face on each ball - sometimes two buckets. On those occasions, I would use the 2^nd bucket of balls to actually work on my swing and my shots, but that was primarily to keep my swing from completely falling apart.

So really, should it have been any surprise that when the offer came for me to move to Tennessee that I took it. Well, I guess it was a surprise, because she screamed at me. She told me that I was breaking up the marriage, and that I should be able to find something in Chicago. I tried, hard, and I couldn't. I was given the silent treatment again. Hmmmph. Oh, well.

I was actually excited about the new job. I liked the plant manager and loved being near my sister, who I didn't get to see nearly enough over the last decade or so. On the fateful spring day when I was to drive down to my new job, I gave my girls great big hugs, dried the tears from all of our eyes, took half of the money out of our accounts and drove away.

I never called her. What would be the point? She wasn't talking to me anyway. I had been at my job a couple of days, when I finally heard from her. "Well, were you ever going to call me? Hmmm. What are you? Some kind of coward running away?"

"Hello Janet. How are you? What part of I was taking a new job didn't you understand? When I told you I accepted it, did you think I was joking?"

She was having none of that. "Hello Janet? Is that all you have to say for yourself? You haven't called. Were you planning on ever calling? And what's with your pulling so much money from our money market account?"

Typical Janet, she just ignored the whole part about needing work. Of course, she would do that, because it didn't fit what SHE wanted. "Well, Janet. If you must know, I had planned on calling, but I thought I would wait a few months. Since there were several times you went without speaking to me for at least six months, I thought I would wait a little longer. What's the matter? Is Skype or email not working?" This set her back a bit. Her response told me I had struck a nerve. I continued, "Also, I needed the money to open an account here and pay for the hotel and things. I'll need to buy furniture and to make a deposit on an apartment. You know, I plan to LIVE here."

She responded, "I know you need to get set up there. I just thought we would keep the same account, like we always did. As for our difficulties communicating, I had a lot going on back then. You know I was working on large projects and trying to make VP. I got large bonuses that padded our retirement accounts because of that."

"You are right Janet. It was all worth it. You are always right. Now, is there anything else you wanted to discuss?"

"What?! ...No. Fine. I guess not. Goodbye!" That's the only drawback of cell phones, is that there isn't a way to slam the handset down like on the old landline phones. I imagine if she had been on a landline, that is what she would have done.

I didn't believe for a minute that she was really upset about the money or my leaving. No. What she was really upset about was that no one was in the house any longer for her to berate. How could she make herself appear even more exalted, if we were no longer there for her to put down. Also, my having my own account meant that she couldn't scrutinize every purchase. Oh well, she'll figure it out. Eventually.

I loved my new job and poured myself into it. The factory manager was a few years younger than me and the owner was a few years older. They appreciated my experience in global supply chains, and I helped them negotiate the best contracts and terms of service for moving product everywhere - domestically and internationally. I also worked to put the right processes in place to ensure our customs documentation was sound. The international portion of the business grew to represent 25% of the total company after the first year I was there.

I had been working at the plant for a couple of weeks when the manager, Sam, came up to me. "Hey Tim. Found a place to live yet?"

"No not yet. I was staying with my sister, but I'm about to move into an apartment or long term hotel."

"I may know a place if you are interested."

"Oh?"

"My dad has a farm about 15 minutes from here. He's all alone now, except for a couple of cats, and has a small house on the place. I think he would like the company and he wouldn't charge you much rent. If you want to buy a house, that's great, but staying on his farm would be a lot cheaper and closer until you could find a place to buy."

I had visions of a dilapidated shack out of some of those places you used to see on 'The Waltons'. "Uh, Sam, what kind of place is this? What kind of shape is it in?"

"Hey, I'll bet I know exactly what you are thinking. No, it isn't run down at all. My sister moved back home for a while and didn't want to be underneath my parents' feet all the time, so dad converted one of his out-buildings into a small house. She got married about a year ago and moved out. If you want, just take a look. If you don't like it, no hard feelings. There is no long-term commitment and no deposit. You have nothing to lose." That was true, I didn't have anything to lose.

I told him I would go and look that weekend. He gave me the address and told his dad I was coming. When I got to the address in the GPS, all I saw was a dilapidated mail box, a bunch of large old growth trees and a cattle guard. "Oh, Lord, what have I gotten myself into," I thought.

Imagine my surprise when after 300 feet or so, the trees fell away, and I was staring at a huge pasture with a farmhouse on the other side. I saw a small house several hundred feet away, which I assumed was the place for rent, and there was a large barn behind the farmhouse. So I drove up to the house and introduced myself to Mr. Lampley. "Ken. Call me Ken. You are too old to call me Mr. Lampley."

Wow, now I feel old. "OK Mr. L.... I mean Ken. No problem."

"Well let me show you the place." We walked towards the place and he opened it up for me. It was quite nice, actually. Nothing too fancy, but compared to an apartment or crummy hotel, I could make this work. Hell, I was considering buying a trailer and living in one of those for a while, so this was a bonus. As I mentioned, I was really tired of our house, and so downsizing to something like this was perfect. It was just a one-bedroom house with a large bath with tub and a walk in shower. The kitchen was updated & combined with a nice dining and living area. It had a side porch facing away from the main house for privacy with a few trees and shrubs planted around it.

"$500 a month, utilities included as long as you don't go crazy. Our internet is via satellite, so it's probably not as fast as what you are used to. There is good cell service here, because there is a tower just past that tree line." He said this while pointing to the tree line 400 - 500 yards away. What do you think? It's not going anywhere, so no rush."

"I'm leaning this direction. Why don't you show me around and tell me about this place, while I think about it?" And he did.

The property had lived several different lives since it became his. His father raised cattle on it, but when he got too old and tired for it, Ken sold off the cattle and turned it into a sod and plug farm for Zoysia grass, which did well in the area. He became the number one Zoysia supplier for almost all the landscapers, commercial and residential, in the East Tennessee area. He has other pastures down the road, that I had driven by. Someone else manages those for him now.

When his wife died, he wanted a change and got out of the management of the sod farm all together. Now he writes a blog on gardening, raising chickens and beekeeping, and mainly visits his grandchildren. Not too bad. His two humongous cats followed us the entire time.

By the time we had walked back from his barn, which needed a little work, I had decided I would take the place. The price was unbeatable, and I thought I would enjoy the peaceful atmosphere of the country.