The Lovely Chocolate Mob

by Richard J. Bennett

David thought on it for a moment, and declared, “Time and observations have shown me that when a man, any normal man, has made up his mind to do something as stupid as leaving his wife and children for an attractive bimbo, there’s nothing on this earth that you can do which would make him do the right thing. You can talk to him until you’re blue in the face, and he’ll still choose to do the most stupid thing, even trading in his home. He’s enamored. He’s ‘in love.’”

  We both chuckled at that, the “in love” part. Dr. Franklin had probably been dumbstruck, and there's no known cure, unless a prettier, richer, and maybe younger girl came along who would show an interest in him. But that wasn’t going to happen, and it would still be no solution if it did.

  “What does Franklin love, besides himself? What means the most to him, besides this ‘fling’?” asked David.

  I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t know. I did the same with the next few questions from Dave.

  “Does he have any scruples? Is he a member of a church? Would this reflect poorly with his kinship of doctors in the city? How about the country club?”

  We laughed at the mention of the country club. Would they have a morality clause in their membership contracts? The thought of this struck us as funny, somehow. But not belonging to a club, we wouldn’t know.

  “What does he care about?” David asked.

  Does he still love Helen, after all these years?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I replied. Strangely enough, I honestly felt sad about this. Then it hit me.

  “He loves his kids.”

  David said, “Well, I’m glad to hear that. Now, here’s a hard question for you, Randall,” said David. “So don’t be getting mad at me for asking it.”

  I steeled myself. “Go ahead.”

  “Okay,” David continued. “I’d like to know why Helen came to you in the first place, seeing how she dumped you for Franklin many years ago.”

  This was a question out of left field; I didn’t see it coming. “Her daughter Mindy said she needed someone she could trust,” I said, feeling uncomfortable.

  “She needed someone she could trust, eh?” wondered David. “Or is it, she needed someone she could use?”

  “Use? You’re saying she’s using me?”

  “I’m not saying this, I’m wondering this,” said Dave. “I want to know why she didn’t just hire a private investigator to get to the bottom of this mess and acquire enough information to file for a divorce against the good Dr. Burke?”

  I thought on this for a minute, trying not to get mad at the question. David was a trustworthy friend; it’s hard to get mad at him.

  “I know they’re having financial difficulties. I also know that a P.I. can be expensive. Maybe she can’t take on any more debt without sinking their ship? Plus, she doesn’t want to break up the family.”

  “That’s a plausible explanation,” reasoned Dave. “So she comes to you instead, the sucker who’d do anything for her. Here’s another possibility: She doesn’t want her rich friends on the west side to find out about this family scandal, and so she’s slumming to have this problem quietly fixed…. for free.”

  “Why would she…?” I blurted out, not finishing the thought. I looked around at the people in the diner, and lowered my voice. “Why would she do this? Maybe she came to me because I could help her!”

  David gave a sad look, and continued the train of thought. “Like a leopard, a user doesn’t change her spots.”

  When this sank in, all I could say was “Oh,” but not as in “I understand,” but more like “That hurts.”

  “Sorry to be the one who brought this up, Randall. You were rendered almost comatose years ago; I didn’t want you walking back into the same situation with your eyes closed and heart wide open.”

  It still hurt. I took a drink on my soda-pop and gave the matter consideration, trying to be objective, trying to hold it at arm’s length, far from the heart.

  “Thanks for pointing this out to me. This certainly sheds new light on the situation.”

  David smiled, and drank his tea.

  “However, I said I would help, and I will. I’ll be more ‘on-guard’ though.”

  “Just trying to fill-in the gaps. Don’t want any college repeats.”

  “That’s not gonna happen,” I replied. Then, switching the subject, I said, “Hey, newlywed, I know you’re always looking for part-time jobs to supplement the income. How are you with house-painting?”

  “You’re talking physical labor here. But I guess I’m good with it. You know of a job?”

  Special Assignment

  We were at Estella’s, by now the favorite haunt, being waited upon by Kim, where Walter and I spoke more on what he learned concerning Franklin and Helen Ceraldi-Burke.

  “They attend the First Baptist Church downtown,” said Walter, “although Frank is not what you’d call a pillar among the chosen ones. Helen is the one who drags the kids to church. I think it’s more of an appearances thing. That plus she wants to expose her kids to a musical culture.”

  I felt a bit of sympathy here, since I also liked the music aspect of church, and while not a soloist, did love to accompany the choir and congregation in song.

  “Do the kids go to Sunday school?” I asked.

  “Yeah, Helen makes sure of that. She also goes, but Frank only attends occasionally.”

  I sat thinking on this for a moment. Walter noticed my silence and said, “Looks as though the deacons, or elders, or whatever they’ve got are out.”

  He was on the same wavelength. Sometimes a congregation is represented by the leadership, the deacons and elders, and if they got wind that a member was heading towards a wayward lifestyle, they became instrumental in reining in that little lost lamb. Deacons had been known to show up on the front door step of church members to do just that, but it looked like this wouldn’t work in Dr. Frank’s case. He’d probably just tell them to go back home and then laugh about it.

  “How is Franklin’s relationships with his parents?” I asked. “Do they like Helen? Maybe they can have some sway over his decision-making processes.”

  “Frank’s father passed away a few years ago, and his mother is living in an assisted living daycare facility,” said Walter. “She has Alzheimer’s, and the care costs money, but her husband left her in good financial shape. This also drains away any money that Frank hoped to inherit, though.”

  “So there’s another authority figure in Franklin’s life that has passed from the scene.

  “Yeah,” said Walter. “With his dad gone and his mom in a helpless state, he’s pretty much free to do what he wants.”

  “And what he wants is another woman, perhaps,” I muttered. I was feeling a little jealous here; he already had one beautiful woman in his life, a girl he had taken from me, leaving me to deal with both loss and a feeling of betrayal. Now he wants to toss aside his wife as though she was yesterday’s newspaper. With this happening, and with the dissolution of his family, part of me felt that all my college suffering was for nothing.

  I had forgotten something. Oh, yes. “Do you know how his parents used to feel about Helen?”

  Walter said, “They worried at first that she might be a gold-digger, being from the ‘wrong side’ of the tracks, from the ‘hood’ where you and I lived. But in time they came to respect and adore her; she became the daughter they never had.”

  “So, Franklin was an only child?”

  “No,” said Walter. “He has a brother, but he’s worthless. Educated but trained for nothing, he can’t hold a job, drinks too much, gambles whenever he does have money, married three times, now living with some woman at her place…”

  “Sounds as though you admire him, Walter!” I joked.

  “He’s a real freedom lover,” admitted Walter, “but hasn’t shown much inclination towards responsibility. He has kids with all of his ex-wives; maybe they’re the reason he went through with the marriages.”

  “Great
. A planetary repopulator. Well, the world needs more kids, I guess.”

  “Yeah, but who’s gonna take care of them?” wondered Walter. “He sure isn’t.”

  “Maybe their rich uncle will,” I said, “once he gets his hands on the chocolate loot.”

  We snorted and chuckled a bit, then wondered. Who’s going to take care of Helen and her kids?

  I had a thought. “Walter, I need you to focus only on Franklin now. I want you to watch him the next few weeks, and get to know his schedule and habits and priorities. I want to know how he eats and drinks. I want to know how he communicates with Susan Lovely. I want to know how he communicates with his family.”

  “Boy, you’re not asking for much here, are you?” said Walter. “He works at a clinic and runs to the hospital and then out to see special patients; I’ll be on the move all day!” He waited for a moment before throwing in “…and maybe all night, heh-heh!”

  We both laughed at that. Poor jokes are good in serious times.

  New Session

  “I think it’s time you tell me more about this old flame,” said Miss Planter. “Obviously this female has made a mark on your life. I’d like to know all about her.”

  “Oh,” I said, “Miss Planter, you’re looking for a long and difficult explanation.” She said nothing, so I asked, “Are you up for this?”

  “That’s why you pay me, Mr. Owen.” I laughed at this. “I’m glad you think this is funny,” she remarked.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not laughing at you; I’m laughing because I’m under a bit of pressure. I’ll do my best to be objective and fair. Here goes: Like I had said before, it was many years ago, while we were at college. I was an upperclassman, an engineering student, and the underclassmen were in awe. I enjoyed that; it was flattering. They looked up to us! That was quite an ego-builder. We didn’t stop to think that wouldn’t last.”

  Miss Planter smiled, but there was a bit of a smirk in that smile.

  “We, and I, had our pick of dates. At college, I was in my last year, and I knew I’d be graduating in eight or nine months, so I guess I was feeling confident and maybe a bit arrogant and cocky. I had my choice, but there was really only one girl I wanted. Helen Ceraldi, a girl I had known since high school. She had followed me to college, well, not really followed; she came to the same school I attended. Because she was so bright, she’d managed to test out of a year’s worth of college credits, and had entered as a sophomore. She was three years younger than me, and so since we were already well acquainted, we struck up a college romance.”

  Miss Planter nodded; she wasn’t taking any notes. I guess I had her attention.

  “She was beautiful,” I continued. “She was smart, popular, and somewhat well-balanced, more than the average college girl. She came from an Italian-American household. The first language in their home was Italian, but all the children in that home spoke both Italian and English fluently.”

  Miss Planter began to write on her notepad. She didn’t interrupt.

  “I thought we made a good couple. We dated, and I wound up paying for all the dates since I had a part-time job in the engineering building, being a student janitor and sometimes teacher’s aide there. I swept classroom floors, mopped, emptied trash cans, and cleaned restrooms at night. This allowed me to keep my car filled with gasoline and to pay for dates. Anyway, things were going along smoothly with Helen and me, I thought. I became stuck on her, or I became enamored with her; she could have done much better than me, but I figured she liked me because I was older and nice to her, or at least I tried to be. Things were good.”

  Miss Planter stopped writing. She looked up from her notepad. She was reading me.

  “Anyway, after a few months of this, the next step, or so I thought, again, was marriage. Since graduation was coming up soon, and I was sure to get an engineering job, I thought it would be a good time for matrimony. It was time to pop the question.”

  Miss Planter was drawn in now.

  “I had saved and bought an engagement ring, the kind of thing girls liked, a nice-looking ring, too. It wasn’t very expensive, but was doable. It was just a temporary ring anyway, until it would be replaced by the real, wedding ring.”

  Miss Planter was nodding.

  “So I waited until the right time to spring it on her. I was really going to take her some place special, have a nice dinner in a classy joint, and slip her the ring. She’d say yes, and then we’d start making plans for our wedding and honeymoon and life. I’d let her make all the plans for the wedding, of course, because women like doing that kind of thing, and I’d just stay out of the way and watch and maybe help where I could.” I looked at Miss Planter here. “Kind of surprising that I at least knew that much about women at the time. Or I thought I did. Maybe I was doing too much thinking; what do you think?”

  “So what happened? Miss Planter asked, anxious to hear more of the romance.

  “I blew it,” I said. “I waited too long. Helen, as beautiful as she was, became a target for other fellows who were around. One fellow caught her eye, and in a matter of a few weeks, she dropped me like a hot potato.”

  “Who was this fellow?”

  “His name was Franklin Burke, a pre-med student. Rich, flashy, good-looking, dressed well, didn’t need to work while at school so he had all the time in the world to woo Helen. And a frat boy.”

  “You didn’t belong to a fraternity?” asked Miss Planter.

  “No, I didn’t. I was approached, but was too busy and the Greek stuff really didn’t appeal to me. Besides, I’m really a boring and routine kind of guy.”

  “You keep saying that. What makes you think that?”

  “Because I am!” I admitted, wondering how others didn’t see this. “I like the routine, and routines are boring for other people.”

  “So, how did you take being dropped by Helen? How did you find out?”

  “I found out about Helen’s interest in Franklin from other people. It’s kind of strange, but when other people see your girl with a different fellow on or around campus, it’s as though they have a moral obligation to tell you. So I was told that she’d been seen with another guy, while I was at work. I later asked her about it, and she said she liked Franklin and they were going to start dating, which left me out of the romantic equation.”

  “How did you react to that?” asked Miss Planter, matter-of-factly. Maybe she already knew.

  “Poorly.” I said. “I cried. I couldn’t stop crying. She meant more to me than she probably should have. Or else, it hurt me more than it probably should have. It hurt for a long time.”

  “How long?”

  I waited a moment. “What year is it?”

  Miss Planter smiled. “I’m glad to see you can joke about this.”

  “Well, “ I said. “After the initial shock, and after years of trying to deal with it, it’s better to joke than to cry about something you can’t do anything about.”

  “What was it like for you, Mr. Owen?” asked Miss Planter. “The overall experience, I mean.”

  “It’s like someone you loved died, only she’s not really dead, she’s up and about and running around with some other fellow, kissing and hugging some other guy when she used to …” I stopped here.

  Miss Planter’s face became serious. “Is that why you never married?”

  “I’m sure it was a factor.” I said. “It’s as though a switch was turned to “off,” if you can understand that.”

  “I understand that. It’s not uncommon to see in this business.”

  “Is that healthy, Miss Planter?”

  “Dealing with it is healthy. People deal with emotional shock in different ways. There’s no one way.”

  “In your opinion, do you think I’m healthy in this regard?”

  “I don’t have an opinion here. I’m merely an observer.”

  “So how nuts am I?” I asked her. Miss Planter smiled at this attempt at humor; I continued. “Do people get over this?”


  “Like I said, different people do different things. I don’t think anybody ever ‘gets over’ a romance gone bad. I think they deal with it, but I don’t think it ever ends. It’s much like children of divorce; they deal with it, they have no choice, they have to deal with it. But many of them never really get over it.”

  “Wow, so now I’m a child,” I said.

  “I didn’t say… Mr. Owen!” she laughed. Her laughing made me smile.

  Miss Planter continued, “I can tell you of one case I had long ago. A girl, or a grown woman, I should say, whose parents had divorced some 30 years prior was still affected by it. When she visited her parents for holidays or special events, she had to go to one house and visit her dad and his second wife for awhile, and then she had to drive across town to visit her mother, who also remarried. She adjusted to it, she was used to it, but she still had to deal with it.

  “So what you’re saying is, there’s no cure, Miss Planter.”

  “What I’m saying is, you’ll learn how to deal with it, if you haven’t already done so.”

  “So there’s hope.”

  “There’s always hope, Mr. Owen.”

  I suspected that Miss Planter had given me another insight into her life.

  David and Spouse

  My quiet friend, David Boudreaux, was at home with his young wife, Mae Ling. They were watching a re-run of “The Andy Griffith Show,” with Mae Ling discovering the joys of American television, curled up next to David on the couch, with David reading a book, looking up every now and then. The show ended after awhile, and Mae Ling looked over at Dave and asked, “Where you go the other night?” David looked at his wife, a bit surprised. “I call apartment; you no answer,” she said.

  “I was with an old friend,” said David, “someone you haven’t met yet; you should have called me on the cell phone. Remember me telling you about Randall Owen? We went to college together, along with Walter Dale.”

  “Where you go?”

  “I met Randall at Lucy’s Place, a Mom & Pop bar and grill in town. We talked about old times.”