Read Excerpts from The Chaffin Journal

Fiction

           When Billy said he repaired the gutters, I should never have believed him. That was my first mistake.
If I had checked them myself, I would have realized the job had to be done all over again—but the right way this time. Then, the three-day rain wouldn’t have loosened them from the roof. And I would have been inside the house instead of dangling from an aluminum piece ten feet off the ground, and Aunt Aggie and the make-up lady would never have had their fateful meeting.
           Aunt Aggie wasn’t even my aunt but somehow, during the division of marital property, I ended up with her. She was married to Billy’s father’s brother, and therefore, didn’t even have a blood claim to the family, but she always liked Billy and kind of adopted us as her own children, since she didn’t have any of her own.
           Everybody liked Billy. That was the problem. Billy was a real likable devil, and women were always falling for his charm and curly hair and big blue eyes. Even when he left them crying over the results of their pregnancy tests, they still wanted him to come back.
I can’t fault the women. Hell, I knew what he was like and I still married him. But after the last time, I just had to draw the line. It was all getting too ridiculous.
            Billy was a truck driver, and was due to take a load of beef on a two-week haul across the country. That was his story. But when his girlfriend in Tucson called to ask if he’d left yet, I knew I’d had enough, especially when the 14-day trip turned into sixteen months.
           So, we split up, and Billy got the tractor-trailer rig, and I got the house and two kids and the mortgage. And Aunt Aggie.
           I don’t mind about Aunt Aggie—not really. It took me some time to get used to her appearance—the frizzy dyed red hair, the three-inch coat of mascara on her stubby lashes, the jangly assortment of pins, necklaces and bracelets she wore from early in the morning to late at night. I often suspected she wore the jewelry to bed, but never wanted to know badly enough to voluntarily enter her bedroom. I needed at least an eight-hour break each day from Aggie and her peculiarities.