Adam and John were his new roommates. The house belonged to Adam and he had a habit of picking up strays. Joe met Adam the previous summer when he responded to a flyer Adam had posted in front of a store Joe frequented every week-day for lunch. Joe’s divorce had just gone through the courts and Adam was offering a divorce class. But when Joe showed up the class was empty except for the teacher—Adam. Joe wanted to attend a class with more people but decided to make the best of it. Adam had been through two divorces and had plenty of insight on the subject. Joe could not comprehend going through the heartache of divorce twice. Adam was a balding man in his mid-fifties and had two kids from each marriage. His black moustache and dirty blond hair combined with his youthful smile gave an appearance of a man in his mid-forties. He had been married to his first wife for 15 years and a second wife for 16 years. Adam was nice enough, but Joe was under the impression he started these classes just to hear himself talk.
After their separation, Joe and Connie put their house up for sale and decided to live together until it sold. For Joe, it was strange cohabiting with his soon-to-be-ex-wife but he had nowhere else to go. Eventually, they both adjusted to their new living arrangements, with Joe sleeping in a separate bedroom, and they became nothing more than platonic male and female roommates. Joe never was intimate with Connie again. In fact, the only time he came close to her was when she graduated from college and she asked him for a hug. All other forms of human intimacy and contact ended the day she walked in the front door and said, “I want a divorce.” Those words still haunted Joe.
In the year they lived together during the separation and after the divorce went through the courts, Joe found himself spending more and more time away from a place that did not feel like home anymore. He worked more, ran more, and swam more. A journeyman carpenter with his own business for over ten years now, Joe could find some solace in working with his hands. He even managed to catch the eye of a waitress at a local restaurant he would frequent every Monday for breakfast. But he would always go to her apartment and never told his platonic ex-wife roommate what was going on. When his new girlfriend, Ronda, found out about his living arrangements, she told him he had to move out and find his own apartment. Joe’s response to her ultimatum, “You know Ronda, there’s one advantage to being divorced; I don’t have to listen to any woman tell me what to do. Goodbye.”
Joe stood up, walked out of Ronda’s apartment and never saw her again. He just had his heart crushed and broken by Connie and was not ready to listen to bullshit from any woman. Joe lost everything in his divorce: his wife and friend, his self-esteem, his security—everything but his pride. No one could take that away.
