A Life Wasted

Trying to Get Settled

The lie I told my wife was that a former computer customer decided to sell his large coin collection and I convinced him to let me sell it for him and split the profits. This is what she thought I was doing in my travels. In a way, it was what I was doing. Rather than simply selling all I had, which would raise suspicion among the tight knit coin dealer community, I went to coin shows, set up a dealer's booth to buy and sell products. For all intent and purposes I was a coin dealer. It didn't take long to learn the trade. With the "stock" I had I was well established and in no time I was actually making money legitimately buying and selling rare coins. Of course I could have never done this had I not "found" a large inventory to work with.

I had to be careful with how much money I let Mary know I had. I wanted to give her a bunch of cash, but that wouldn't work because under the premise of my lie I had to pay a portion to the guy I got the stuff from until he was paid off. She was already suspicious so I had to go slow. But I was actually turning a profit which I explained to her, so we had some money to work with.

The first thing I needed to do was move my family to a better place. So I convinced Mary we could afford to find a home to buy. After a week of looking we found a decent place on some land in Pennsylvania not too far from her parents. To me this place was perfect because it needed a lot of work and could be bought with owner financing. I liked this because I could slowly introduce my illegal cash through improvements on the home, which would improve our home and build equity at the same time. I made a large cash deposit on the place with a deal to give them more in thirty days.

Mary's birthday was coming and I wanted to do something special for her. Between living in Georgia and Alaska Mary had been away from her family and friends for several years, so my idea was a surprise birthday party with all her family and friends. To pull this off Emily (our oldest daughter) had to help me. Together we rented a double suit at the nicest hotel in the area and set up everything there for a big party. Mary loved birds, so my birthday present for her was a mated pair of doves and a mated pair of love birds. The doves were cheap and the love birds expensive, but Mary loved the doves more, which I should have expected beforehand. A dove is the symbol of the Holy Spirit and nothing means more to Mary than God.

The night of her birthday I'd planned to take Mary to dinner, which she had known for several days. At the last minute I apologized and told her we'd have to stop by the hotel for a quick meet with a coin customer. Mary took it in stride that I would do a business deal on the night I was supposed to take her out for her birthday dinner, which made me feel like a jerk. Not that I was deceiving her to take her to her surprise party, but that mixing business on her birthday was something she'd expect me to do. Most wives would have been mad about the detour, but Mary took it in stride. She was use to such things from me so she didn't even comment. My wife bought my story easily because I'd always been a selfish jerk. She accepted that I would make special time for her, and then throw a business meeting in at the last minute. I felt a little smug at what I was actually doing, but told myself that it was time to start treating my wife like the precious woman she really was.

When I knocked on the hotel room door the husband of a friend of Mary's answered. She wasn't expecting him there so she didn't immediately recognize him. What she did see was a room packed with people where she expected to see my lone customer. I'd explained to Mary the dangers of being robbed while doing the traveling coin dealer thing, so her first thought was that I'd been set up to be robbed and we'd walked right into it. Expecting trouble, Mary stepped out of the door and looked at me. I just stood there so she gave me a look that said, "handle it." In things like this Mary was confident in her husband. Realizing what she was thinking, I grabbed her shoulders and pulled her into the door so she could see who all those people were. When they shouted "Surprise" I knew I'd completely surprised her. She was totally taken in because the last thing she expected was for me to do something special for her. I renewed my self-promise to devote myself to being a better husband to this wonderful woman.

The party was a great success. Everyone loved Mary and they were all excited at the opportunity to shower her with their affection. Mary's lifelong best friend was there, so she and Sherry spent a lot of much needed time together. Long after everyone else left Mary and Sherry sat up talking.  I eventually went to sleep. The next morning I had to get up early to attend a coin show in Detroit. I left them at the hotel with plans of joining them there that evening. It promised to be a fun day with everyone swimming in the indoor pool that was just outside our suite's door. That night we planned a dinner together. It would be six years before I made it home again.