GENE. I had spent three years in Vietnam and seventeen more years after that god forsaken mess of a war was over in the U.S. Navy. Twenty fucking years. I lived on base, saving every penny I possibly could to try to spend my life succeeding at something.

I never intended to do any of this, or to build any of this for myself. I had always intended on doing it for my family. My wife and my daughter - the two loves of my life.

Women, to me, had always been like literature, and not like arithmetic. They weren’t something you could just calculate or figure out. They were un-fucking-predictable and always led you in a direction that you had no way of knowing where or how it may end.

After my daughter was born, my wife began using heroin again. She had promised right after the war that she was done with it, and that she would never use it again. From what I saw in the war, people weren’t able to stop using heroin and stay off of it for any period of time. That fucking drug killed people and killed their soul if it didn’t kill them first.

I bottle fed Kelli and tried to get Margaret some help to get off the drug. She couldn’t breastfeed because she had that damned drug in her system. That damned woman. Why she ever tried to start using the drug again – after being off of it for two years, was beyond me.

When Margaret overdosed, I left Kelli with my parents, and took her body back to San Diego to be buried. I never recovered from losing her. She was the one woman I loved, and the only woman I loved. I was a firm believer that there was one person on this earth that we were meant to love, and that person, if we were able to find them, made life worth living. Without that person, we lived an incomplete life.

After Margaret passed, my love for Kelli became so much different. Kelli was the love of my life. When I bottle fed her, I thought of Margaret. I spent many nights with Kelli while she was young, guessing at what to do to make her be as comfortable as she could be. She slept in my bed for three years, beside me.

She got where she would hold my finger in her little hand while we slept. Sometimes, when I woke up in the night, I realized it was Kelli, reaching over me and trying to find my finger to hold so she could go back to sleep. When I finally decided that she was getting too old for me to have in bed with me, she cried like she was a baby again.

I remembered going into her room, and sitting beside the bed talking to her, and trying to explain everything about why she couldn’t sleep with me anymore. It’s time for you to grow up and be a big girl, Muffin. Be a big girl for daddy and sleep in your room. Make daddy proud of you and sleep here like a big girl. I would hold my hand on the bed, and she would squeeze my finger until she fell asleep.

After she fell asleep, I’d walk into the other room and cry. I’d cry for Margaret. I’d cry for Kelli, and I would cry knowing that the rest of my fucking life would be spent alone, except for Kelli. I could never have another woman in my life. There was one love in my life, and she was gone. No one on earth could ever replace Margaret.

The military taught me plenty about life, and I have kept those thoughts with me throughout my life after the military. Discipline. Planning. Implementation. These things have provided me with a dealership that is recognized by BMW of North America as one of the greatest dealerships in the nation. These types of things weren’t handed to anyone. You earned them. I earned everything I have in life, and I earned this, fair and square, through hard work.

When Kelli was in grade school, she stood out. Kelli always stood out from the rest of the kids in school. Really, truth be known, Kelli has stood out anywhere she has ever gone. The most beautiful girl in the entire world and smart, too. She was in third grade when they wanted to move her up a grade in school. I told them I would not consider it, because there was no telling what problems might become of it later. They could not provide me with any form of statistical data to support that there would be no problems in the future – from her being the youngest one in the class – so the answer remained no.

Kelli never really dated anyone, and that had always made me happy. She had boys that were friends, but she had never been one to go out and date boys. She was in high school when boys started coming around, but she never had any interest in them to speak of. When she was twelve, I told her for the first time about my desire for her to run the dealership when she was older. We have talked about it every year since then, around her birthday. It was always something I looked forward to, letting Kelli know that she was the most important thing in my life, and that I wanted to give to her what my life’s accomplishment had been.

A woman in a dealership had always, right or wrong, been looked down upon. There still weren’t too many women salespersons in a dealership - they come and go, but it was more of a man’s world. I never quite understood that, and I have had several women on my sales staff, but the men always threw a fucking fit about it, and sooner or later, the women would leave.

Kelli being the owner of this dealership had been my goal since she was one year old. I thought, when Kelli was born, that I would sell it by the time I was fifty-five. Eventually, we would all move to another state and live through Kelli’s high school years in a place like California. Margaret and I retired, and Kelli going to school. Kelli would meet a good man, and live across town from us in a house with her husband. That dream was shattered by Margaret’s love for that fucking dope. God damned woman.

My parents were the only ones that ever knew what happened to Margaret. When Margaret was on that damned dope, I told everyone she was a drunk. Everyone in town thought she was a drinker, and that she couldn’t get off the bottle. I could never tell anyone that my Margaret was a heroin junkie. I loved her too much to embarrass her like that.

When she passed, I was in a trance. It was like I was in the war again. I have seen plenty of death, and might have a different view than most, but I never looked at what I did as being wrong. My parents, until their death, never quite agreed with me about what I did. I told them all along that I did it for Kelli and for my respect of Margaret.

I found her in the bathroom and held her in my arms, there at the tub. She was in her white robe, the one I had bought her for Christmas. God damned slippers were on the floor beside her, her body all twisted in a mess there by the tub. I brushed her hair back and forgave her for leaving us and prayed to God almighty.

I went in and woke up Kelli and took her to my folks. My folks and I talked, and I told them my plan. Although they never agreed then, or even later for that matter, they never said a word about it. Everybody knew Margaret as a drinker and would never question it.

I dropped off Kelli and went to the dealership and got a used pickup truck. I went in the garage and got a body bag from my foot locker, and put Margaret in it, and put her in the bed of the truck. It was the winter of ninety-one.

I packed some bags with clothes for both of us, put them in the truck, found Margaret’s dope and needles, and packed them into the glove box. I drove straight to San Diego in that truck with Margaret in the back. Twelve hundred miles. Twenty hours was what it took. I spent most of the time that I drove cussing and crying.

I started smoking again on that trip. The thought of living a life without Margaret was more than I could fathom, and it didn’t sit well with me. When I got to Chula Vista, I got a hotel room off the highway and waited till morning. I called the police in the morning and told them that I woke up to her, cold and stiff.

I explained that we had been driving all night and that I carried her in the room from the truck thinking she was asleep. They never questioned me, and said that she was dead when I carried her into the room. I explained that she must have taken a shot in Arizona at the truck stop.

They searched the truck and found her bag with the needles, dope, and such, and confiscated it. After the autopsy was done, and they called to release her corpse, I buried her there in San Diego and never said a word to anyone but my folks.

I told everyone that she left and never came back. For years, most thought one day she’d sober up and return. We’d been together for a few decades after all. Some, after a few years, started a rumor that I had paid her to leave, so as to keep from embarrassing Kelli. I let them say what they had to say, all the while knowing the fucking truth.

I loved that woman and still love her today. I always told myself one day I would tell Kelli, but I was afraid that secret would go with me to my grave. There was not one single shred of benefit that would come from Kelli knowing that her mother died as a heroin addict. Not one.

Kelli went on to have perfect grades throughout school. She never got involved in anything but track, and she loved to run. She would spend all of her evenings after school running and doing homework. Nothing ever made me happier than to see her succeeding at what she set as a goal.

She got scholarship offers from all over the country, and chose to go to school in the state, at KU, so she could be closer to me. She agreed to go to Columbia for her graduate school to get her master’s degree in business administration. We agreed all along that a woman in this industry would need that to be a success and to be perceived by others as being a success. She had my respect, but she would have to have that sheepskin to have the respect of everyone else.

Being without her, and knowing that she would be so far away was something that was going to be tough for me. Losing Margaret took a good chunk of me when it happened. Losing Kelli was going to be tough, even if I knew she was in another state going to school.

There were times when I wish that we could go back to the days when she held my finger in bed. Those days were long gone. Gone from ever happening again, but not gone from my mind.

Kelli was and would always remain the only thing in my life that I loved.