I started writing this last night as a satirical piece, and I could not get it together. Imagery, irony and a bit of sarcasm the more used tools in my writer’s tool bag. I am going to try again. This time with simple narrative.
THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION, a work of fiction that is all too much of a reality for so many.
For 59 days the vast majority of the United States of America has been on lock down to stop the spread of a virus. The virus is new to scientists and it is killing people, about a tenth of one percent of everyone that it infects. Being on lock down means that the Jenner’s are at home all day. Like many Americans, the Jenner’s are out of work.
Griffin Jenner manages a locally owned bar, Woodson’s Pub. He runs a tight ship. The service at Woodson’s Pub is second to none, and this became the case when Griffin took over as the bar manager last fall. The success has been so notable that the owner, Jonathan Woodson, increased Griffin’s pay to $18 an hour, plus his share of the hourly tips. This amounts to roughly $6,000 a month before taxes. Jonathan wants to pay Griffin even more, but he is barely hanging on to his business after it was flooded during Hurricane Harvey in August of 2017.
Before the shutdown, Griffin was making more than he had ever made before and he had saved close to ten thousand dollars over the past three years, this afforded him the opportunity to give his wife, Ashlyn, the one thing that she always wanted, but never had, a home to call their home. Ashlyn came from a difficult childhood. Her family bounced from one low income rent apartment complex to another until her father passed away and her mother went to prison. Ashlyn was just 17 when she met Grif, and he was there to pick up the pieces when the shambles of Ashlyn’s home life were finally completely decimated.
Ashlyn still daydreams about the day they met. Griffin is her guardian angel, best friend and strong, handsome companion. She was sixteen, and he had been hired to fix the furnace in the rental complex where she was staying with her parents. Ashlyn’s mother was too embarrassed to greet Griffin at the door because she wore the remnants, in the form of a busted bottom lip and swollen left eye, the remnants of a violent argument she had with Ashlyn’s father the night before. This was commonplace in Ashlyn’s childhood until the day her father drank himself to death.
Ashlyn was in jeans, a sweatshirt and a jacket inside the apartment, yet still cold in the unusual freezing temperatures in Houston that December day. Griffin knocked gently, something about the gentle knock and the arrival of someone to save her from the cold, gained her trust immediately. She opened the door to find her future husband, tall, thick brown hair, kind green eyes that sparkled with the contrast of his deep tan. He looked upon the beautiful, short blonde with incredibly hair and striking blue eyes, and he had to take a moment to find his words.
One could judge the 20 year old with a 16 year old, but nothing about their relationship was ever inappropriate. From that day, Griffin became her protector. In the beginning it was him simply making sure she was safe and had something to eat each day. In time, their time together became romantic. The two make a beautiful couple. They married when Ashlyn turned 19, and they made a daughter, Alyse, as beautiful as the two of them when she turned 21.
Before he went to work at Woodson’s, Griffin worked various manual labor jobs to put Ashlyn through cosmetology school right after she graduated from high school. They look back on those days as the most difficult of times. He barely made enough to pay for school, much less rent in their run down apartment and bills. They survived with one car. The twenty year old car that Ashlyn’s mother had left behind when she went away to prison.
Ashlyn graduated from cosmetology school and cut hair for a short while before she stayed home with Alyse for a year. Then Griffin’s sister had a baby and offered to babysit Alyse a couple of days a week, so Ashlyn could return to work part time.
On New Year’s Eve Griffin and Ashlyn tucked Alyse into bed together as they often did, and they went to sit on the back porch. The back porch of THEIR own that they had moved into just a few weeks ago. The house was a humble 2 bedroom, 2 bath house, with a nice little yard and two car garage in a safe neighborhood. It took everything they had to become home owners. Ashlyn would wander around the little house sometimes, opening the kitchen cabinets, and bedroom doors, turning on the bathroom faucets, marveling in the fact that they were her kitchen cabinets, her bedroom doors, her bathroom faucets. She did not notice at all that the kitchen cabinets were basically empty. She wanted for nothing more than a safe place to sleep with her protector, her husband and their beautiful little girl. Her little girl would never see the terror that Ashlyn saw in her childhood, and this brought Ashlyn a great deal of comfort.
The Jenner family rang in the new year full of great hope. They believed that 2020 was going to be their year. They should have been right. They truly worked for every dime that they had. The two were truly devoted to one another. There little girl, an angel among us all. The little girl’s favorite place on earth was their backyard where she could watch the squirrels run along their fence line. Alyse called the “squires”.
Griffin surprised Ashlyn with a small pallet of flowers that they would plant together in the backyard for Valentine’s Day. At one point, Griffin looked upon Ashlyn beautiful, fair face as she stared at the back of their little house. She was in her happy place. Running amuck in the backyard while her parents planted flowers had worn Alyse into exhaustion She was ready for bed after a little splash time in her bath that night.
The loving parents put their beautiful daughter to bed, and then Griffin to Ashlyn by the hand to the shower. The shower was not really big enough for two, but they made it work. They snuggled in their little double bed afterwards and they talked giving Alyse a sister. Ashlyn had a sister, Alyse, that had passed away when Ashlyn was 8 and Alyse was 10.
After every shift at the bar, Griffin puts another $50 bill of his tip money into his saving account, via the ATM in the bar’s parking lot. In time he would have enough to welcome a second child into their home. That night, as he lay with Ashlyn, he told her that if everything goes as planned the rest of 2020, that they could seriously think about baby making on the next Valentine’s Day. Ashlyn giggled at his use of the term, “baby making”.
Griffin impressed a moderator of a locally foodie group, and that let to even more traffic in the bar, even more tips, and Jonathan Goodson planned to give Griffin another raise if St. Patrick’s Day generated the level of success that Griffin was expecting.
News of the virus had begun to spread, the Jenner’s live in a northern suburb of Houston, called Tomball. There was and is to this day no evidence of the virus in Tomball. No one dying, most if not all of the emergency rooms in the northern parts of Houston have yet to see a single case of the virus. This made what happened on March 16 hard to comprehend. A Harris county judge ordered the immediate shutdown of all bars, restaurants, hair salons and countless other businesses.
Griffin and Ashlyn were both immediately out of work. In the weeks to come there was a check from the federal government, and they finally got through for unemployment. The unemployment was considerably less than they made working, and the two enjoyed working.
Then the unthinkable happened. Alyse became very sick. She was not sick with the virus. She was sick with the same rare cancer that had killed her name sake, Ashlyn’s sister. The agony began. Only one of them could accompany Alyse to the hospital for treatment. One would leave with her to the hospital and the other would wait at home in isolation. Weeks and weeks went by, and they did not leave their home. Then the call came for Jonathan Woodson. He was going to have to let the bar go. He simply not afford the lease, and the lease agent was not cutting him any breaks.
Griffin no longer had a job to return to. The man, devoted to making his beloved wife’s dream come true, saw the dream slipping away. He did something that he had never done in life, he opened a bottle of jack, which he had been given as a Christmas gift the prior year, and he took a drink. The burn as he swallowed was unreal, but it took away the stress, the tension, at least until he vomited and passed out on the bathroom floor.
Ashlyn returned from the hospital that afternoon, and she was beside herself when she found him still asleep and obviously hungover. The horrors of her childhood flashed before her, and for the first time since she had met Griffin, she felt afraid. That sense of fear that stayed with her everyday of her life, until she had met Griffin, settled back inside of her. He promised with all of his heart that he would never drink again, but that promise did not hold long.
Griffin was used to work days filled with bar customers that he loved seeing, he was used to the hard work that came with running a bar. Now, he sat in isolation at home, without his livelihood and without the means of taking care of the only thing in the world that mattered to him, Ashlyn and Alyse. Of all things, knowing that he was going to lose the house, the only thing in the world that Ashlyn ever wanted weighed the heaviest on him. The uncertainty of the entire situation; the loss of his freedom; the loss of control of his own life, crushed him.
If there was ever a man in this world that did everything right for the woman he loved and the daughter that he cherished it was Griffin. This just makes it so hard to comprehend what happened. I imagine it was a momentary break that if he had just passed out instead of her coming home to find him drunk that this all would have happened differently. I imagine if he could have just held on a little longer that our economy would have started back up again, and there would have been a job for him. That is not how the story ends.
Ashlyn was so upset when she returned from the hospital to find him drunk, again. He was to a point that he was drinking everyday. He was depressed; he was no longer the Griffin she knew, her guardian angel. Ashlyn was overwhelmed, and she was desperate. She told him that she was leaving. This was a lie; she had no place to go. Griffin was in no state to things through rationally. He believed that he was losing everything in the world that mattered to him, and he grabbed her too tightly, he pleaded with her not to go. His grasp hurt Ashlyn, and it scared her. She ran into their bedroom and locked the door. He pounded on the door, and she knew she had just minutes until he would have it opened. She dialed 911, and between sobs, she asked for an officer to be sent to her house. She barricaded herself in the bathroom, so she had the protection of two doors between her and Griffin.
Griffin could hear her dialing for the police and he flew into a fit of rage. He was ruled by the rage and alcohol that filled his veins. The kind gentleman that everyone respected had lost all control of his life, he was on the brink of losing everything he worked for in life and everything that matter to him. He went to the garage, and he pulled his shot gun down from the rafters where he had put it to be absolutely sure it was out of reach from little Alyse.
Griffin took the shotgun from the rafters and he headed back into the house. The police arrived just a minute too late to save Ashlyn. Griffin heard the police sirens and he was deliberate when he ran out to the greet the police with the shotgun in hand and they shot him down, dead in the front yard of the little house that meant the world to Ashlyn.
Alyse would spend another couple of weeks alone in the hospital crying for her mommy and daddy. Of all the shifts that I have done in the children hospital the shifts with Alyse were the hardest. I had seen how much her parents loved her, and I just could not comprehend how this happened. I spent a great deal of time coming to understand their story; I needed some kind of answer. Maybe it would be easier for me to accept if the empty hospital I go to work in everyday here in Tomball had just one Covid19 patient. Instead, I cannot accept what has happened, and I am filled with anger.
Alyse left the hospital and she is now in our God forsaken foster care system, thrown into the world of poverty that Griffin had worked so hard to take Ashlyn out of.
When we take away a man’s ability to make a living and provide for his family, we take away his purpose. Purpose is what drives a real man. Our country’s leaders chose “an abundance of caution” over our freedoms, our livelihoods and then sent us pathetic little checks as if they were there to save us. I wonder how the history books will explain all of this to little Alyse. I wonder if she will ever know how deeply loved she was.