Meet the Barksdales

Dudley Barksdale liked problems.

Not actual problems. Actual problems were terrible: broken furnaces, sick parents, water appearing where water had no business appearing, or the glowing check-engine light on a car three days before a road trip.

Dudley preferred problems that could be researched, analyzed and eventually organized into something unnecessarily comprehensive. Give Dudley uncertainty and he would ask questions. Give him enough questions and eventually a spreadsheet would appear.

This had served him reasonably well for most of his adult life. He had built a career around complicated business problems involving systems, people, technology, money and meetings that could have been emails.

Dudley liked knowing how things worked. He liked figuring out why they did not work. He especially liked improving them and then explaining the improvement to anyone who remained within conversational range.

Dudley also believed himself to be very funny. Just ask him. The available evidence on this point varied considerably depending on whether Dudley or anyone else was conducting the survey.

Betty Barksdale had known Dudley long enough to understand the difference. She had actually known him since they were eight years old, when Dudley began mowing her family’s lawn.

This was not initially romantic. Dudley needed money. Betty’s family had grass. They became friends. Then best friends. By high school, Dudley secretly adored Betty and handled this information with the confidence and maturity typical of a teenage boy.

He did absolutely nothing.

Dudley later explained that the friendship had been too important to risk. Betty accepted this explanation while reserving the right to point out that he had also been terrified.

Life eventually carried them in different directions. They married other people, built separate lives and raised children. Dudley became Barb’s father. Betty became Doug’s mother. Roughly two decades passed. Both marriages eventually ended, and Dudley and Betty found their way back to each other.

The funny thing was that the friendship had barely changed. Years had passed. Jobs changed. Children appeared. Houses were bought. Hair disappeared from places where hair had once seemed dependable and appeared in places where absolutely nobody had requested it.

But Dudley and Betty could sit down together and within minutes it felt as if someone had simply unpaused an old conversation.

About three years after reconnecting, they married. Dudley had, in his own estimation, successfully executed a very long-term relationship strategy. Betty described it differently.

“You took thirty years to ask me out.”

“I was building the relationship.”

“You were scared.”

“Risk management.”

“You were scared.”

“Prudent risk management.”

This was largely how their marriage worked.

They adored each other, although not in the polished way of couples selling anniversary cruises on television. They knew too much about each other for that.

Their favorite wedding song was John Prine’s In Spite of Ourselves, which seemed appropriate. They had not married because either one believed the other was perfect. They had married knowing an alarming amount of evidence to the contrary.

Dudley loved Betty with an enthusiasm he made very little effort to conceal. He thought she was beautiful, smart, funny and generally the most interesting person in whatever room he happened to be standing in.

Betty loved the way he loved her. She was smart, practical and perfectly capable of understanding complicated things herself. Years of helping people make sense of insurance had also taught her that clarity and additional detail were not necessarily the same thing.

She remained continually fascinated that a man capable of understanding deeply complicated systems could stand directly in front of a bottle of salad dressing and be unable to locate it.

“Where’s the extra dressing?”

“In the refrigerator.”

“I know that.”

Betty looked at him. Dudley was standing with the refrigerator door open.

“Second shelf.”

He moved a jar of pickles.

“Other side.”

Dudley looked.

“Dudley. It is directly in front of your face.”

He looked again.

There it was.

“Huh.”

Betty stared at him.

The problem also worked in reverse. Dudley enjoyed putting groceries away. No one knew why. More importantly, no one knew where.

If Dudley put away the extra coffee, Betty might find it beside the cereal, above the refrigerator, behind the mixing bowls or in a cabinet ordinarily reserved for things used twice a year. Betty had stopped searching blindly. Asking Dudley where something was usually produced a thoughtful look toward the kitchen and approximately twenty-four possible cabinets.

She had begun treating Dudley’s storage system like a game show. Choose the correct cabinet and win a prize. Choose poorly and receive a bundt pan.

Dudley’s other significant domestic contribution was snoring. Dudley did not snore gently. He snored like weather. Closing the bedroom door did not contain the sound so much as redirect it through the ventilation system.

Sometimes Dudley would wake up alone, walk into the spare bedroom and find Betty asleep there. He would stand in the doorway feeling terrible.

She would open one eye.

“Was I snoring?”

Betty would simply look at him. Dudley knew better than to request additional evidence.

In the morning he made coffee. This was understood. The first cup was reparations.

Dudley would place it in front of Betty.

“I’m sorry.”

Betty would take a sip. Then came the stare. The stare lasted until enough caffeine had entered the bloodstream for forgiveness to become medically possible. Betty was patient. Dudley was grateful. Neither considered the arrangement perfect. It was theirs.

Their children had grown into this family alongside them, bringing histories and loyalties of their own. The Barksdales did not pretend a blended family was a corporate merger that could be completed with a new organizational chart. They loved one another and kept showing up. Most days, that was enough.

Barb was Dudley’s daughter, a recent art-school graduate in Minneapolis. She had short red hair, a few tattoos and her first serious job. Fiercely independent, she had recently discovered the extraordinary freedom of earning her own paycheck and the equally extraordinary irritation of watching most of it disappear.

Doug was Betty’s son, a college sophomore in New York studying marketing. He wore thick glasses and possessed more natural style than Dudley had accumulated in fifty-six years.

This was not particularly difficult. Dudley owned approximately six versions of the same shirt and considered this operational efficiency.

The household also included two cats. Both were indoor cats, a designation they regarded less as a rule than as a challenge.

Jingo was a large tabby who adored Betty, followed her from room to room and resented any attempt to formalize the relationship through hugging. Borris was an orange-and-white long-haired cat who viewed the house as inherited property and Dudley as a somewhat unreliable member of the staff.

Both were accomplished escape artists. An open door was not an opening. It was an opportunity. Jingo preferred stealth. Borris preferred confidence. Either could transform bringing in the groceries into a low-budget prison break.

Borris was also a conversationalist. His vocabulary consisted of one word.

“Meow.”

Dudley considered this sufficient.

“Meow.”

“What’s that, Borris? Timmy stuck in a well?”

“Meow.”

“I knew it.”

Betty looked up from her coffee.

“Borris did not say that.”

Dudley looked offended.

“You don’t speak Borris.”

“Neither do you.”

“Meow.”

Dudley pointed.

“See? He agrees with me.”

Betty went back to her coffee.

The Barksdales were not fabulously wealthy. Nobody owned a yacht. Nobody had a private plane. Nobody summered anywhere.

They worked, raised children and paid bills. They bought houses and cars. They worried about money sometimes and ignored it other times. They saved—not perfectly, just consistently.

Thirty years of reasonably responsible behavior had slowly accumulated into something Dudley had never completely appreciated.

Choices.

That became visible one spring afternoon in Iowa. It was May. Winter had finally loosened its grip. Betty’s flowers were coming up, the trees had started turning green, and Dudley was opening the swimming pool.

The Barksdales owned what Dudley regularly described as a reasonably priced swimming pool. No one had accused them of owning an unreasonably priced swimming pool, but Dudley felt the clarification was important.

He was crouched beside the pump attempting to connect a hose apparently engineered by someone hostile to homeowners.

Betty stood nearby.

“Do you think I could retire?”

Dudley stopped.

This was not a pool question.

“Well…”

Betty knew the sound.

It was the sound Dudley made when a simple question entered his brain and immediately requested project funding.

She leaned against the railing.

Dudley thought.

Betty waited.

The hose continued leaking.

And that was where the trouble started.