a lot can happen in that time…'
Chapter 2
Hank called up Juan on Monday morning, 'Hey buddy you ready? Ya know I gotta change that transmission out of the caddy and man that guy is waiting for it, called me on Saturday night. At home!'
'Si, I am ready Hank, come an' pick me up.', replied Juan. Hank had moved to Denver nine years ago, he loved the outdoors and while it was not his native South Carolina, it also had things that South Carolina, at the time, did not have, namely gainful employment. When he moved up he took a job at 'Carl's Imports', a garage that specialized in foreign cars, repairing them with cheaper, American made, parts to save the original owners a lot of money. Add the non-certified mechanics for their make and model of car and the place was a gold mine. The location worried Hank a bit when he applied for a job, south east Denver was filled with lower income housing and most of it was pretty old too. However under the veneer of age was a sort of quiet dignity, the houses were old, but had new paint, well cut yards and very little actual crime.
After nine months on the job Hank bought an old 2 bedroom house about 7 blocks from where he worked. Like all people moving into such a position, Hank figured he would be walking to work every day and saving a bundle on gas, the reality was it took 10 minutes to walk and 2 minutes to drive. So he drove pretty much every day, figuring he was paying the gas for an extra 16 minutes of free time every day.
At first his job was just a job, he got along with the people he worked with, even if most of them spoke Spanish and he could only remember three words of it from his high school years. Over the months though, that changed, after three years Hank was even invited over to several of his co-worker's houses for dinner and he could get along pretty well in his second language, well enough to work, well enough to joke around and well enough to understand when most of the 'old school' Hispanics started asking around why he did not have an 'esposa'.
Hank was not the marrying type, he did not talk about it much with his friends, though they could never quite stop asking him when he was going to 'settle down' with a good woman. He figured it was just a cultural thing, plus their wives could not stand to see a good 'catch' like him getting away. Now nine years later and with thirty seven years on this earth Hank could just not see himself changing to the point of marrying anyone. He drank beer on their back patios or in his friend's garage, never on the front porch stoop like a bunch of 'boyz in the hood', the women of the house would never allow that. Hank enjoyed hanging out with his co-workers, in particular he was good friends with Juan, a slightly younger man of thirty four years who lived a couple of blocks down the street from him. They rode in together, they worked like a well oiled machine on any projects they had, they just 'clicked'.
Juan's wife was a huge driving force behind the neighborhood conspiracy to find Hank a wife, so far though Hank had parried every attempt of hers to pair him up. And this was seriously hard fighting, if setting people up were a sport, Nanci would be in the major league. Parties were thrown with Hank invited, oddly there were always a few single women. Dinners with an added female companion; movies where one of her single friends tagged along. Hank didn't mind and enjoyed the odd relationship of fencing he had with Juan's wife.
Eventually Juan asked him if he were homosexual. This was not something Juan did after two years of friendship, but closer to five years into their relationship and it just came up one day when they were working on a Camaro that belonged to one of Juan's cousins. A nice car and Hank could not figure out what the hell Juan was talking about butterflies for. He had a surreal moment where he was thinking to himself, 'This can't be right, 'Am I a butterfly?', what the hell Juan?' Juan had looked at him really embarrassed and as he explained Hank become more and more embarrassed. They had been working together for so long that sometimes Juan forget that Hank was not a native speaker and didn't understand all of the Spanish slang. Juan patiently tried to explain that 'mariposa' was a word with a slang meaning of 'homosexual'. It was a gentle, teasing way of asking if Hank were gay.
Hank had burst out laughing when he finally figured out what Juan was talking about. He had always been tight lipped about his past and this was the result, his friends and neighbors thought he was gay! Nanci and Juan were devout Catholics and Hank had attended church with them a few times, even though he was more of a non- denominational kind of man. Nanci had come up with a theory, Juan explained, that Hank was religious and gay. So religious that he would not think of blasphemy by actually practicing his homosexuality, which is why no one ever saw Hank with another man.
Hank told Juan he just didn't want to date anyone, he explained that he had been married before, a long time ago. The experience he had as a very young married man had left him sour on the whole thought of ever having a relationship again. Hank and his wife had two kids too, which was news to Juan. No one had ever seen any pictures of children in Hank's house or at his work space in the garage.
Hank wen on to explain that the two kids he had conceived while married turned out to be those of two different men, if the dna testing were to be believed, but that was getting ahead of the story a little. By the time Hank had found out about his kids he been ready to believe anything. By then all his savings were cleaned out, payments were coming due for loans he had never signed on and his own mother had to tell him she came over to talk to his wife and found her in bed with another man. Hank's parents were not rich, but they had fronted him money for the divorce and the subsequent paternity tests.
Soon after the paternity tests came back Hank had hard decisions to make. His wife sued him for alimony and told him privately if he paid it he could still see 'his' children every two weeks. Hank had declined to pay alimony, his ex filed suit to keep him from seeing the kids he thought were his, a two year old and a four year old. Life had gone on. Only not quite. His ex was fucked up, no one doubted that by then and Hank had been given a choice of pressing charges against her for wrongfully signing on over seventy thousand dollars of loans with his name or of putting her away for forgery and a host of other charges. Still thinking of 'his' kids, he declined to press charges and was subsequently hit up for full payment of the loans. Hank hired yet another lawyer, this one an ace at resolving credit disputes, the lawyer explained the situation to the creditors and while they commiserated with him about the mess he was in, they said he had not pressed charges and they were still owed the money and needed payment. Eventually Hank declared bankruptcy, he had tried for months to keep up with the payment schedule demanded by the creditors, but his salary was just not enough and then, suddenly, he had no salary coming in anymore.
His ex would not leave him alone, she had kept coming by where he worked and demandimg money, if he did not pay she caused a scene in front of the customers. Hank thought his boss was pretty good for putting up with it as long as he did. Even after Hank had a restraining order his wife still showed up. Even after she was arrested and spent three days cooling her heels in jail, she continued to come back. Then cars started being vandalized at night, then a rock was thrown through the front window. Finally his boss called him in and they had 'the talk'. Hank couldn't be fired for what was going on, but South Carolina was a 'no cause' employment state and his boss explained that he had to let him go due to all the problems caused by his ex wife. The man was decent enough though; he paid Hank three months' salary and gave him a great letter of recommendation.
Apparently the news was out; there was no work in the area. In two weeks of applying for jobs he should have landed, no one even so much as called him back. That was when he stopped paying the loans and instead paid a bankruptcy attorney. The process took a surprisingly long time, during which Hank moved back in with his parents. He stretched the money he had and looked into attending college. Four days after his bankruptcy was finalized his parents were driving home on a rainy night and never made it. A state patrol officer explained that they had been in an accident, slid off the road and rolled, they had died quickly. The weeks that followed were a blur, funerals to arrange, the estate to settle, bills to pay off. They were some of the worst of Hank's relatively short life. At the funeral his wife had shown up. She caught his attention and beckoned him over. She told him that if he did not give her the money 'she knew' his parents had left him she was going to start in on him again, he had two choices, pay her or live in hell.
Hank knew then. He knew she had done it, killed his parents, the fucking bitch. Hank's first instinct, which in
