ANNETTE'S SPRINGTIME

Winter in rural Drain, Oregon, was not so much just the inevitable yearly visitor - welcomed by some, reviled by others - as it was an overpowering invading force, quickly conquering the land and all her inhabitants upon arrival. Fall and spring in northern Douglas County were themselves but advance and rear guard to winter's inescapable siege machine, it seemed.

The brief, blistering summers would generally surrender to autumn well ahead of schedule, the rain clouds charging in - ranked for battle - softening up any remaining resistance for winter's pitiless occupation to follow. Then, for interminable long months, there was rain, wind, freezing cold, sleet, more rain, and even occasionally some snow, constantly bedeviling the little valley.

Springtime was only a proposed armistice rather than a binding accord. It could be deep into April, even May sometimes, before the storm clouds finally consented to withdraw and outdoor living could become a viable pastime once again.

Simple math must give us the likewise simple equation then: Drain = 2/3 Rain.

But they were getting a tantalizing little taste of that oft-delayed spring five days early - by the calendar, anyway - down on the valley floor. The seasonably frail sunshine was doing its very best to warm the chilly breezes dancing off nearby snow-dusted hills, if only as a feign: The forecast was calling for more rain and the return of cold temperatures overnight, down into the mid-thirties again.

Kevin and Annette eagerly celebrated this transitory peace, nonetheless. They were outside, sitting on the tiny cedar deck that was the back porch of their little rented singlewide, overlooking the canyon road and the densely wooded hills beyond. They were both valiantly exposing long-protected skin to the thin rays - wearing just shorts and tee shirts - parked side by side in the plastic armchairs, determined to enjoy the fragile ceasefire. It was premature, of course, as their goose-bumps attested, but it made them both feel a tad freer. Escaping the prison camp of winter's oppression, even for just a few hours, was by then a mental health imperative, particularly for Annette.

They were also celebrating an anniversary of sorts: It had been two years since they'd met. That day, March 15, 2008 was both a red, and now a black, letter date in Annette's personal chronology. It was fitting, then, that her reaction to what Kevin proposed was lukewarm, at best. Not that he noticed.

"I've decided we'll get married next spring." He said with a handsome smile, only turning slightly to her, expecting, of course, for her to sit up and make the physical effort to view the magnanimous love in his baby-blue eyes. "Maybe in May. Yeah, May would be good."

#

Although they hadn't really begun courting until a couple of weeks after they met, Annette had immediately been taken with the glib, articulate and confident (slightly) younger man she'd encountered that day. They were introduced by a mutual acquaintance, at a little house party up the road in Cottage Grove. Annette noticed right off that many of the other partygoers treated Kevin with apparent deference, listening attentively to his anecdotes and seeming to respect his opinions on widely varied esoteric subjects. She had been impressed.

At nearly thirty years old, Annette was finally ready to be with a serious, thoughtful man. Most of her past relationships had been based on all the wrong things: Sex, drugs, booze, thrills of many sorts. She was over all that. She wanted a Man. It was time to closet the CFM pumps and grow into her adult Land's Ends; embrace her womanhood with a practical and earnest eye toward her future with a complimenting, dependable partner.

For the longest time, after they did begin dating, Annette was sure that Kevin was The One. He was a wildly interesting man, unfailingly attentive to her in a gallant and flattering manner without being the least bit sycophantic. To the contrary, he was very self-possessed and fiercely independent, intellectually. If the conventional wisdom proffered black, he unabashedly advanced white, refuting the misconstructions of lesser analysts empirically. He followed no one and never bowed, except occasionally to her. It didn't hurt at all that he was marvelously easy on the eyes, as well.

She fell hard, of course, like the annually victorious rain in Drain.

They moved into the mobile home together on October 15th, that same year. Kevin was an artist - a classically struggling artist, he would repeatedly tell her proudly; challenging custom and blazing new trails of vision and interpretation - still living with his dad up until then. Annette had to come up with the first, last and deposit for the rental on her own, even though she and Kevin had agreed that all their living expenses would be equally shared. That should have been a big red flag, but Annette was in love and Kevin, ever so smoothly persuasive, had assured her that he would soon be pulling his own weight and much more, his pottery business was about to explode. Now that he could move his studio out of his dad's cramped single car garage into the huge shop building on the newly rented property, the sky was the limit, by God.

It didn't take Annette very long after that to realize that Kevin was infinitely more interested in the processes that transpired in his clay shop, and talking about those processes, ceaselessly, than in any actual products that might come out of it. Kevin mostly spent what little he did make on the sale of the vases and jars he occasionally stooped to crafting - at her concerted insistence - on new tools, equipment and supplies for the shop. And he didn't spend wisely, either. He'd never pay five dollars for something when he could get it for twenty-five someplace else.

His contribution to their household finances should be a future one, he then insisted. He was building the business for her and for the children they'd so often speak of having, pioneering new techniques and inventing new processes. Spending what he made now for food, rent, utilities, etc., was a foolish waste of opportunity and momentum at the expense of innovation and refinement.

He was sorry, he always said, that she was unable to grasp such an elementary business concept. He would carry this burden for her himself, though, and drag her kicking and screaming to their future, if that's what it took. She should just concern herself with the mundane, minor, day-to-day needs of their household - food, rent, utilities, etc., - and let him do the big-picture, long-range planning. He was so much better suited to it, didn't she agree, him being so smart and such a deep, expansive, creative thinker?

Well, as she too late found out, what Kevin was, in reality, was a monumentally passive / aggressive, petulant five-year-old. He was a greasy, slick tyrant that always got his way by wearing down Annette with either his thinly gilded self-serving oratory or his insanely condescending attacks on her personality and intellect that were frighteningly cruel. What she had taken for supreme self-confidence originally was in fact but baseless raw conceit; he strutted through life like he was All That and a Bag of Chips, while he was truly None of It and a Sack of Crap.

He was a raving megalomaniac, bragging incessantly of nonexistent accomplishment - both in the arenas of his putative crafts business and all true intellectual endeavors he ever attempted to engage in - characterizing his universal failures as amazing achievements of epic proportion. Those who could not see the value of those successes - and that was everyone but him - were blithering idiots who couldn't even begin to sound the depths of his prophetic genius.

Kevin was a full-blown narcissistic brat and accomplished bully who did what he wanted and only what he wanted, a borderline sociopath. He only loved Annette as she accommodated his needs and she served and glorified his exalted existence.

Annette, being wholly vested in the relationship by the time she discovered his true self, decided she'd endeavor to help Kevin grow into the man she was sure he could become. After all, had she not herself so recently grown into the shoes in which she now chose to walk? If she loved him, shouldn't she give him that same opportunity to blossom? That man she thought she had met, not so long ago, was inside him somewhere and Annette was confident she could draw him out, as she had coaxed the responsible adult out of herself.

By the time Kevin (sort of) proposed on that false-spring afternoon, however, Annette knew she could do no such thing. He was long past help, way, way too far down his dark well of self-indulgent arrogance for rescue, at least at her mortal hand.

#

"Next spring?" She echoed in reply, still lying back in the chair, her eyes remaining closed. "Sure, ok. Whatever."

"May fifteenth. Yeah, that was my Grandma's birthday. We'll do it on the fifteenth." He continued, hardly having paused for her comment. Her response was not really of interest to him. He had said it, and it would be so - in his mind at least.

The first thing Annette thought about it was: That gives me over a year to effect my escape. Then she smiled, to herself. Good thing he didn't say this spring.

Annette was already gone. She just hadn't left yet.

#

By the end of their first long winter together, Annette was beginning to see the writing on the moldy walls of their trailer. Endless months of being cooped up with him in their tiny home, listening to his nonstop self-worship and Cliff Clavin level fabricated wisdom was not at all what she had signed on for.

She now realized that the others at the party where she and Kevin had met were always so attentive to his stories and opinions because they wanted to see just how outrageously he could display his haughty ignorance. They were not introducing the esoteric subjects for true discussion, but rather to discover just how big a fool he could make of himself by presuming to expound on them. He was the party game. Intellectually outmatched by all in the room, including the little Goldfish that wiggled around in the bowl on the coffee table, he blithely - and oh so predictably - made an ass out of himself for their entertainment. The loud laughter she had heard coming from other rooms in the house that night was undoubtedly directed at him, she now quite reasonably suspected.

How she could have fallen for him - how she could have not seen through his flimsy loquacious façade to the starkly barren interior - was a mystery to her. It was so obvious now it hurt. She had, yet once again, been compelled by other than her head. Damn hormones, anyway.

Despite what had been - if not a true love, at least a love truly given - at the beginning, she could hardly stand the sight of him by the time spring finally broke through the lines that first year. On top of everything else, he was the laziest human being she had ever known. He was patently unmotivated to accomplish anything real, totally disinterested in participating in even his own existence. His expectation that Annette support, house, feed, accommodate and stimulate him was his only investment in their relationship.

She had to beg him to get out of bed - usually at around noon, or so; beg him to do any work in his shop - other than the foolish, costly experiments designed only to forestall any actual production; beg him to cut firewood for the wood stoves - their only source of heat; beg him to pick-up after himself; beg him to empty the garbage - his only individually dedicated domestic chore ... beg, beg, beg.

When she went off to work every weekday morning, she painfully extracted from him sleepy promises to clean the house, do laundry, stock the firewood, etc. Every evening when she got home, all such promises had been broken without exception. He usually said he didn't remember even making the promise in the first place, so how could she be angry about it? When he did deign to grace her with the benefit of some small labor, he would always perform the task in the most disruptive, inconvenient way he could think of, at the most disruptive and inconvenient time he could possibly do it.

When he brought in the firewood, for example - always long after they'd run out and the place was already frickin' freezing, of course - he'd leave the back door wide open so the trailer would get even colder as he slowly wandered in and out to fetch the fuel.

Were Annette so ungrateful as to criticize any of his passive / aggressive practices, Kevin would simply abandon his half-effort and inform her that if she didn't appreciate the way he was doing it - or not doing it, as was the predominant case - she could jolly damn well do it herself. Many times, at first anyway, she did just that. Until she realized it was just another of his continuing tactics to avoid engaging in any meaningful activity and to keep himself in the exact geographical center of the known universe, all eyes upon him.

The only activities he did find meaningful were downloading pirated music off the Internet and playing computer games. And talking about how cleverly he did both. Ad infinitum. Kevin literally never shut up. He even talked in his sleep.

But, even given all of that, Annette still didn't throw in the towel. The long, cold, damp winter must have been difficult for him too, stuck in the house alone for the most part. So she reinvigorated her reclamation efforts, mimicking the hopefulness of spring's promise. It wasn't until the height of summer, July 15th, 2009, to be exact, that she finally gave up on him and began planning her getaway.

She was roasting a chicken on the Weber that evening, sipping a wine cooler, smoking her only cigarette of the day - she had been nearly quit for months now - reading the back of the charcoal briquette bag out of boredom, or maybe loneliness. She had not previously known that Henry Ford had invented the briquette as means of utilizing, and so, profiting from, the scrap wood and sawdust generated by his auto assembly process. Hum. Interesting.

Kevin had been down in his studio for over three hours straight - a new record - diligently avoiding producing the wares he was ostensibly on the hook to contribute toward the rent. Her near-daily effort to once again get him to pretend to follow through on his scarce commitments, earlier that afternoon, was the shortest fight they'd ever had.

Arguing with Kevin was like debating with a ten-year-old. He simply ignored whatever the contested subject matter might be, such being of no concern to him in the first place, and focused keenly on whatever inconsistencies of speech or breaks in lineal thought Annette might inadvertently commit as she passionately defended her position. He would lay in wait for the rhetorical absolutes common in all heated arguments, quickly pointing out to her the one time he did when she said "he never" or the one time he didn't when she contended "he always", declaring then vitiation of her ridiculous point in its entirety.

His only interest was in getting out of whatever it was she wanted him to do, and one of the ways he effectively did so was by getting her so pissed-off she could no longer think straight. It was the one thing he was actually good at. Pissing her off, that is. He was like a garrulous Bart Simpson on steroids when he was on a roll. The arguments invariably concluded with Annette sobbing from the frustration of trying to deal with the hundred and ninety pound verbose fourth-grader, and with Kevin smiling and carrying on as if nothing had happened. And to him, nothing had. Except, perhaps, a bit of easy sport at her expense.

This argument had ended differently, however. In fact, it never even got started. When Kevin balked at her suggestion that he help with the rent, she simply said ok and went on about her business. Kevin was a bit taken aback by her failure to engage with him, so he went down to his shop and made noises like he was working while he tried to figure out what was up with her. He never did, of course; other people's concerns did not linger long in his vacuous, egocentric brain. So he was in the studio, listening to his proudly pilfered music, while Annette was up on the deck, barbequing and sorting out the details of her escape.

#

About two weeks after his "proposal", Kevin accosted Annette in the kitchen.

"Isn't it about time you sent out the invitations?" He asked her, his tone accusing her of procrastination or avoidance.

"Uh, it's a little early. The wedding is still over a year away." She said slowly, like she was speaking to a six-year-old. She quite graciously refrained from adding "Stupid" to her reply, although she truly wanted to, in a couple of different places.

"How do you get "over a year" out of "six weeks", Stupid?" He spat, disinclined toward graciousness, true to type.

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"May fifteenth. Today is March 30th. The wedding is in six weeks. You should be making the arrangements by now." He lectured.

"No." She said even more slowly, "You said next spring. That's over a year away."

"Nooo." He mocked, snide and superior, as always. "It wasn't spring yet when I said that. This is next spring."

Annette laughed.

"Kevin ..." She said with sigh, " ... nobody plans a wedding with only two months notice, that's absurd. If you had meant this spring you should have said so. Then I could have told you it was impossible in such a time frame."

"It wasn't this spring when I said it. I realize you have only a minimal grasp of the spoken language and the accurate distinction quite obviously exceeded your ability to take notice of it, but you agreed, nonetheless. So get off your fat ass and make the arrangements."

He turned, in a huff, and stormed back into the bedroom from whence he'd just come. His computer game was paging him, apparently. Either that or the bed.

"As you command, My Lord." Annette said quietly to herself, smiling broadly.

#

Annette had both a Plan A and a Plan B to get away from Kevin. Plan A depended upon her squirreling away enough money out of their too-tight budget each month to amass a little grubstake that would allow her to move into a place of her own. For that, she needed more time; she had a little set secretly aside, but not yet near enough. It seemed Kevin wasn't going to give her the time she still needed, so she moved on to Plan B. Plan B only required the ever-dependable harsh winter overstay its forced welcome, as it always did.

So Annette set about organizing the wedding. She did so joyously and efficiently. As expected, May 15th was too close in time for all principal parties - her folks and her three sisters, Kevin's dad, mom, step-dad and younger half-brother - to all clear their calendars. The soonest date all would be available to attend was June 13, a Sunday. Still technically spring, by a good week.

Kevin was jerked, of course, that she'd screwed-up his plan, but there was nothing to be done about it. Annette gave him only one task to undertake for the wedding: Find a Best Man. She knew that would keep him busy; he'd have to delve deep into his address book to come up with somebody who'd want to stand up for him. He had no friends. No true friends, that is. Nobody actually liked the guy, they just hung out with him occasionally to watch him act like the idiot that he was. He finally, after exhausting all other possibilities, settled on his half-brother, Carl, who begrudgingly agreed to do it. Even nineteen-year-old Carl thought Kevin was a worthless horse's ass.

By the first of May, all was in order. She'd booked the church, the Elks hall for the reception, the Minister to perform the ceremony, the caterers, the flowers, the whole ugly ball of wax. And she'd rarely been happier doing anything.

They went down to Roseburg together - and a lovely couple they were indeed, that day - to procure the Marriage License. It was a blast. They made a party out of it, shopping and eating out. They strolled around, hand in hand, laughing and frolicking. Any who cared to notice could plainly see they were in love. They just couldn't see that she was in love with her impending freedom and he was in love with himself.

On the fifteenth, she had an eight AM appointment at the little wedding shop in downtown Drain. It was for the first fitting of her dress. She got up about six-thirty that Saturday morning and stoked the nearly dead fire in the little potbelly stove that heated their bedroom. Kevin hadn't stocked the wood, of course, so she used the backup charcoal briquettes - lots of them. It was cold inside and wet out, but for the last time that season. The long-range forecast was for clear skies and gradual warming to begin the following day. Spring was about to be set free. And just in time, too.

Annette showered, did her hair, got dressed, preparing to leave. She checked her wristwatch: 7:20, time to go. Just before she left, she closed the damper on the chimney pipe almost all the way. Then she lifted the little round cooking plate off the top of the stove, allowing the smokeless charcoal fumes to vent into the room. As she exited, she tightly shut the door to the tiny bedroom behind her.

When she returned home just before noon, she went back into the bedroom, opened the damper and replaced the cooking plate. The fire was quite dead by then, as was Kevin. The carbon monoxide had done the trick. Thank you, Henry Ford.

As she picked up the bedside telephone, she began trying to work up both the tears and the hysteria that would be expected from a soon-to-be bride robbed of her darling betrothed by such a cruel twist of fate.

But she was going to have to stop laughing first. Outside her bedroom window she could see that the clouds had lifted, the sky was a clean, cobalt blue and the long-awaited - and nearly forgotten - sun was once again shinning brilliantly at last.

The End

(c) 2010 Michael E. Sellars