Steel-Toed Boots

I stared at the crowd and told the biggest lie of my life.

In a courtroom, in the witness seat, testifying regarding the divorce agreement I was settling with my soon-to-be ex-husband, I said, “Yes. This is the amount I agreed to take in my settlement. Yes, I think it’s fair.”

I looked out at the courtroom, found him smiling wickedly at me and was glad of the lie; glad to be alive.

Robert had a towing service when I met him. It took him two years to commit to a relationship, and only then when I dated someone else. The night we got married it snowed, and I ended up in the tow truck with him, wearing my veil, as he pulled cars out of places they shouldn’t be.

“My business comes first,” he told the minister during our pre-marital counseling. Later the minister said he wished he hadn’t married us. I agreed.

Over the six years of our marriage we accumulated a service station, several properties, and a home. I finished college, got a teaching position, and spent the majority of the time after work alone, while he did what he was obsessed with doing, making money.

That last summer was different. We grew a garden together and spent vacation time at my cousin’s place on a river in Oregon. Their little girl was precious. Robert loved spending time with her, as he did with our friends’ children, but he never wanted one of our own.

When he finally agreed to having a child I got off the pill, got pregnant, and miscarried two months later. “Good! I really don’t want any kids.” And then, “I don’t love you and I don’t think I ever did.”

That was it for me. I left that night with a suitcase. He held everything else hostage, including my wedding dress.

A month later I got into counseling. Robert wanted to reconcile. I will only consider it if you see a counselor, too, I told him. He wanted to see mine. “Absolutely not,” said the psychiatrist. “He’s trying to manipulate you through me.” He saw a therapist once and told me, “I’m not doing this. I need my pain. It’s who I am.”

The year we divorced Washington state was new to the concept of no-fault divorce. The law gave a 50% settlement to each party. Our assets aside from his original business, which he had sold, totaled $250,000. Not bad in 1974.

My dad hired the best divorce attorney in the city. “You’re going to need him,” he said, with a hug. That lawyer spent a ton of time hammering out the details of our settlement with Robert’s attorney.

A week before our court date Robert called and asked me to go with him over the newly opened North Cascade Highway which traveled over the Cascade mountain range, from Western to Eastern Washington. “I have business in Winthrop. Come with me. We can talk about the settlement. I have some ideas.”

We had settled into an amiable if not friendly relationship. “I would love to see the highway. But there are rattlesnakes over there. I don’t have any boots.” I thought that was the end of it, but he said he would buy me some.

He picked me up the next morning. On the way he stopped at a shoe store and got me a pair of steel-toed boots.

The trip over was uneventful. We stopped at a campground where there was a huge meadow with a shooting range where we shot beer bottles with his handgun. He told me he had received a $20,000 down payment on the towing service. He offered me that as my share of our property. I shot him a look. “Are you kidding? $20,000 when my share is $125,000? No way.”

He slept in his truck. I had a tent, and kept the gun next to me, just in case.

He completed his business while I shopped in the quaint western town. As we climbed out of Winthrop the next day, reaching the summit, he said, “There’s a great park with a lookout I want you to see.”

I should have realized then something was up. How would he know that?

He pulled into the parking lot. We got out and walked through the forest along a trail until we came out at the edge of the mountainside into a small, grassy space. At the edge of that was a short, white picket fence with another six feet of grassy mountainside beyond that.

We walked to the fence and looked out over the miles of highway as it spilled down the Cascades, twisting and turning like an anaconda, the vehicles getting smaller until the ones farther down looked like matchbox cars, and finally, at the bottom, like ants.

“Let me take your picture,” he said, as he pulled a camera from the pouch in his overalls. He backed up to the trees. “I can’t get you all in the frame. Step over the fence just a bit.”

I looked over the fence at the land beyond, a precipice jutting out sturdily from the mountain. I stepped over, one foot after the other, turned around, and the earth gave way. As I slid down the face of the cliff those steel-toed boots caught on an outcropping of rock, stopping my fall. I grabbed onto roots left exposed when the land dropped out from under me. Finally breathing, I realized I was too far down to pull myself up.

His shadow fell over me as he walked up to the fence. “So…how does that $20,000 sound now?”

“It sounds fine,” I answered. It wasn’t, but it had to be. And that’s how I ended up telling that big lie to the judge. I knew Robert would have walked away that day…that he had cut the earth just enough for it to appear stable until I stepped on it, tearing it from its home, sending me into oblivion if I said no. I would have become the earth. In my heart I knew that if I told the judge the truth I would end up dead, somehow, anyway, before the check was cut. I had no heirs, no Will. But I had the will to live.