Author: Steve

WHEELER/VAN IN LOVE

VAN IN LOVE
Copyright 2009 Steve Wheeler
38,812 words

VAN IN LOVE
Chapter One
The clock at the Aberdeen train station moved toward the four. Van sat in the plastic chair reading the paper. He had stopped at the pub across the street for a pint before he came here. The pubs in train stations were notoriously expensive and boring.
Gloria had a few business appointments to keep while they waited so she dropped him off in the high street.
Alex and his new wife, Belinda, would arrive on the four o’clock train from London.
Van got up and walked out onto the platform. He paced the length of the station thinking about Alex’s arrival. Whatever was going to happen, would happen. 
Gloria had agreed that Alex could come for a visit when he had requested it. She knew that the kids had worked on him. Maybe he had mellowed with age. Not like a fine wine, more like a fine whiskey.
At least it would be over soon, Van thought, one way or another.
Aberdeen was called “the granite city” because of the rock beneath it. The North Sea swept it constantly with rain and wind. There were days of warm sunshine, but they were few and far between and never without the wind. It was Van’s theory that the pubs in Aberdeen seemed more welcoming and warm because of the weather.
Van had only really seen Union Street where it met George Street and its nearby pubs on their regular visits from the northwest.
Gloria insisted on doing business in Aberdeen rather than in Glasgow even though the latter city seemed closer on a map to where they lived. She had once left him at a pub in the suburbs which contained Americans and Canadians. After that he insisted on being left in downtown Aberdeen. It wasn’t that he had anything against the North Americans, he was one himself, so was Gloria. It was that the Aberdonian accents sounded more like they belonged in the pubs.
Van watched the clock for a few seconds then turned toward the pub door. He wasn’t nervous about the visit, but it was unsettling to contemplate. He would never have done what Alex was doing, visiting the former wife who had taken half a million of his dollars, without vengeance in his heart.
Alex must have changed.