Nashville: The Mood (Part 8)

By Donald H. Carpenter

Is Nashville simply Music City? The capital of Tennessee? A state of mind? A sea of corruption? A world of happiness, ordinariness, hypocrisy, vicious gossip, and political skulduggery? Where politics, religion, sex, academics, and crime cross paths in such a way as to be almost indistinguishable? Enter a world of uninspiring public officials, soulful prostitutes, scheming professional classes, and tormented preachers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Donald H. Carpenter
• Release date: Mar 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463299890

Donald H. Carpenter

Donald H. Carpenter is a former certified public accountant who is the author of six books: Dueling Voices, I Lost It At The Beginning, 101 Reasons NOT to Murder the Entire Saudi Royal Family, He Knew Where He Was Going (?), Man of a Million Fragments: The True Story of Clay Shaw, and LANNY. He is currently working on a fictional series about Nashville.

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NASHVILLE: THE MOOD

PART 8

by Donald H. Carpenter

Copyright ©2019 by Donald H. Carpenter

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved. This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

Cover design by Charles Hooper

Printed in the United States of America

NASHVILLE: THE MOOD

PART 8

June Whittaker paused at a corner on West End Avenue and looked across the street at the J. Alexander’s Restaurant. She stood all alone, except for the occasional passerby, the hot summer sun causing her to sweat heavily. Traffic on West End Avenue was unusually light for the lunch period, and she had numerous opportunities to cross. But instead, she walked along the street, down the sidewalk, turning frequently to watch the restaurant, its adjacent parking lot, the walkway leading into the restaurant, and the door of the restaurant. She saw a stream of five cars turn, one after another, into the parking lot and disappear down the drive. She hurried further down the sidewalk in order to be able to stand at a place where she could watch the vehicles park, and the occupants emerge. She found a shady spot under a large oak tree whose branches overhung the sidewalk, and she stood back a few feet behind the sidewalk, close to the tree, where she hoped she would escape being seen.

Ten years earlier, she had been June Graymorr, an innocent girl from fifty miles out in the countryside. Her father was a Baptist minister and real estate broker in a small town. The expanding presence of Nashville had eventually grown to within miles of where she grew up, but during her early years she rarely came to the city. Arriving ten years ago to search for a job had been quite an adventure for her, and she still remembered those first years in Nashville very clearly.

In addition to finding a job, she had met a young man newly arrived from Virginia, Derrick Whittaker, and the two had married before the end of that first year. He was an interior décor salesman at the time, but then later had a series of jobs, including being a car salesman, a bank employee, and a financial advisor. The two quickly had four daughters, and a large mortgage to go with their nice home in the suburbs. June had held a steady job since arriving in Nashville as an office manager and bookkeeper at a small architectural firm.

Derrick Whittaker’s ambition always seemed to outrun his ability to earn a living for his family. He was a dreamer, and always had a plan in his mind for how to make really big money. At each of his places of employment, his various bosses noted a common thread: a tendency on Whittaker’s part to suggest alternative lines of business for the firm, while at the same time failing to master the job for which he had been hired. He had a sort of restlessness in each job that manifested itself very quickly, and his bosses seemed to sense that he would not be there long, either because of his sense of frustration, or his ambition, or due to poor work product caused by his out-of-place schemes.

Whittaker was also a Baptist from birth, and he had hit it off quite quickly with June’s father. An outsider might have thought Whittaker had ingratiated himself with the preacher and real estate broker, such that he would tolerate Whittaker’s failure to achieve because, in the short run, he made June happy and had a pleasant personality. Over time, however, the personality aspects wore a bit thin, and June’s father started to take a harder look at him. So did June.

With four girls arriving over the course of a decade, the years passed fairly quickly. However, June had noticed early on a sort of distance between her and Whittaker, and it had often worried her privately. She never said anything to her family, and had only broached the subject here and there with her husband. Whittaker had always played an active role in raising their daughters, and that counted for a lot with her. So she concentrated on furthering her own career, such that it was, with the small architectural firm. Her two bosses liked her, and rewarded her generously with regular salary increases, expanded responsibilities, and a company vehicle.

When Derrick and June Whittaker had first gotten married, June’s father offered to let them have a plot of land that he owned next to his own property, out in the countryside. June was all for it, suggesting that the couple build a home on the property. She said that she didn’t mind commuting the fifty miles or so to her job, and lobbied strongly for Derrick to approve the plan. But Derrick had resisted just as strongly, and after several rounds of arguments about it during their first year of marriage, Derrick had finally prevailed, and the couple had bought a home just south of the city.

June was never happy living away from her parents, and she tried to get down to see them every weekend that the couple had no other solid plans. However, as time went by, the couple seemed to have plans on more and more weekends, and her opportunities to visit became stretched out. It was something that happened gradually, but she tended to blame Derrick for it. He seemed to be distant from her family, and clearly had never liked the idea of living in close proximity with them.

The young couple and their four children did depend upon June’s parents, however, for financial support. They simply couldn’t have handled the expenses of owning a home and raising four daughters otherwise, even with two salaries. June was a spender, and Derrick had his own hobbies that required funds, and the couple argued about money on a regular basis. June seemed to win most of those arguments, although she often wound up spending a lesser amount than she had initially proposed.

When had things really started to decline? It was a question June wondered often, and as time went by, it frustrated her that she could never pin down a specific starting point. Her memory was fuzzy on exact years, and periods of years, and at a certain point it seemed as if it had gone on forever, since the very beginning. But she knew that wasn’t true; there had been a starting point somewhere, or maybe a series of starting points. Put together, those starting points, which occurred at different times, different moments, fused together and seemed like one. It must have begun about five years ago…

She remembered a time when his work schedule changed, and he began staying late at work more often, and going in on weekends. The late nights were particularly noticeable, because he always had gotten home by six in the afternoon, and now he often would stay until close to ten o’clock in the evening. After it had happened often enough, she would occasionally call him at work, but she always found him there. She had never discovered he was doing anything wrong, but somehow in her mind that had always been the starting point.

Then there were the times that she wanted to meet him for lunch. In the first few years of marriage, they had eaten lunch together frequently, although they worked in different parts of town. Then, and it seemed that it began around the time he began staying late after work, he began begging off her invitations to lunch, maintaining that he had business-related obligations that kept him from doing so. It had started slowly, then escalated, to a point that it had now been almost a year since the two of them had lunch together on a business day. At some point, it was true, she had simply quit asking, having been frustrated once too often, but she was certain that her invitations had stopped only after numerous frustrations in that area.

Once, about three years ago, a friend of hers had reported seeing Derrick at lunch at a restaurant on the west side of town, with a female. The friend said the two simply seemed to be conversing, and that it could have been a business lunch, but she had nonetheless mentioned it. June had debated whether to ask him about it, and finally her curiosity had gotten the better of her. Derrick had answered that he had been lunching with a work colleague, and the story had seemed to check out, or at least he had given consistent answers about it, or at least answers that could have been true. It was difficult to know one way or the other.

In the midst of all those events, beginning before any of them happened, and continuing in between each incident and even after the last one, were the arguments. Constant, almost daily it seemed, often commencing in the morning before the two departed for work, and picking up again in the evening as if there had been no break. Both of them had repeatedly grown exhausted of the arguing, and yet the arguments continued with a regularity and intensity that seemed to be beyond their ability to control.

And now, some years later, however many, she was standing in the middle of a block on West End Avenue, under the shade of a large oak tree, looking across at a restaurant and waiting for her husband to appear. Slowly, over time, she had learned how to access certain records kept by her husband, and had begun to learn his schedule more than ever. She also had learned how to, somewhat effectively, gain information from a few of her husband’s co-workers that, along with other bits of information, provided opportunities for checking on his activities.

She was aware that nothing was certain, that it