PEPPER

One

After my wife died it was just Pepper and me. She was... oh shoot, I can't start like this. Let's back up. 

My name is Paul Sommers and I guess it all started in May of nineteen-seventy-nine. Cheryl and I had been married for twelve years and everything was perfect. Then she found the lump. Eight months and two days later she was gone. It wasn't quick, the chemo had terrible side effects and didn't help, but they pumped her full of drugs and most of the time she wasn't in too much pain.

I remember asking God, this was early on after she had been diagnosed, I asked God to give me the pain. Hell, I told God to give it to me... to take the cancer out of her and put it in me. He didn't.

Most of her pain was dulled by meds while my pain... the pain of watching the person you love most in the world... was clear and razor-sharp.

I hate to say her death was a relief but if I am going to tell you this story then I am going to tell the truth. When she died, it hurt more than anything I have ever experienced before or since. But at the same time, it was as if a weight was lifted off of me. I hadn't known that weight was there but when she died it was suddenly gone and if that sounds callous, too fucking bad.

There is a saying that I have heard bandied about by cynical S.O.B.'s that goes, "The cure for Cancer is money!" Well, I can tell you that money doesn't mean jack-shit to cancer, or any other disease. Cheryl and I had money... plenty of money. I owned my own business and without getting into the boring details, it was a good business. We had more money than we knew what to do with and she is just as dead. She had the best doctors, private clinics, and experimental drugs and none of that came to a hill of beans.

As such, I have become a proponent of the belief that when it is your time, it is your time and there is nothing you can do about it.

Sorry for sermonizing, that's not what I want to do here. Suffice it to say the woman I loved died and I had to get on with my life. It sounds easy to do when you say it like that but it is not.

Cheryl and I owned a big sprawling house, eight bedrooms, twelve bathrooms, a pool, tennis court, well you get the idea... I told you we had money. All that for just two people... we had wanted kids but my plumbing had some issues and Cheryl never held that against me. We talked about adopting and we probably would have, but then she died.

That big house... it was terrible to live in that place after she was gone. Every room had memories. I spent weeks rattling around the echoing empty rooms letting my imagination get the better of me. I would be sitting in one room reading or watching television and I would hear her call my name.

"What's up buttercup?" I'd call back, the words rolling out before I remembered she was gone. It happened all the time. Then my guts would clench and my eyes would burn with fresh tears.

Of course, the nights were the worst. I moved out of our bedroom and started sleeping in a different guest room every night. Sleeping was actually the last thing I did in those rooms though. There is no sleep for a man who has lost his wife like that, I believe. At least not under the same roof in the home they had shared.

Finally, I knew I had to move. I sold the house and all the contents for far below market value just to get the Hell out and slept at my office. At least there I could get some shut-eye. My real estate agent asked what I was looking for in a new home and I said I didn't really care.

She would bring me listings and I would turn them down one after the other, never even going out to look at them in person.

Living in my office was, needless to say, not ideal. After a few weeks, even I had to admit it was starting to smell like a barn. It got so bad that I couldn't bring clients there anymore.