Barry Denver Stole My Wife

Barry Denver stole my wife the day after he stole my Cal Ripken, Jr. rookie card. It was a PSA-graded collectible from 1982 with a tiny grease spot on the right bottom edge and gentle foxing. A professional grader once told me he’d shoot himself in the foot if I couldn’t get $275 for it. Denver swiped it off my desk without remorse or,  I suspect, forethought, and put it up for sale on eBay. And then Lorraine ran off and I had to think about that, too.

I was uncomfortable categorizing Lorraine’s betrayal as an actual theft. Denver hadn’t actually “stolen” her in the sense that he’d come to the house like a man and staked his claim. Lorraine had left of her own free will. Although even here my reservations were legion.

Lorraine knew all about Denver’s private feeding frenzies, for one, which typically spilled over into company meetings at Bob Verd Aluminum Carousel Windows, where we both worked. I’d described them many times. His piggish, uncontrollable grasping at Cheetos and Vienna sausages, his orange lips and feed-maddened eyes.

It’s true that Denver brought home a paycheck, but selling windows for Bob Verd wasn’t his true ambition in life. What Denver really wanted to do was write what he called “humorous books.” Humorous books! If Denver had once lifted a pen to paper to express his amusing thoughts, I would have bought him a steak dinner, even after he stole my wife.

I tried Lorraine twice on her cellphone. Then I called Denver at home. It was still early enough in the morning to catch him in.

There was no answer, so I drove out to Cresthaven Apartments, where Denver had been living for the past eight years in a studio apartment he’d inherited, rent-controlled, from a deceased relative of his mother’s cleaning lady.

Denver’s apartment was a semi-basement unit with four concrete steps leading down or up, depending on your perspective. Thanks to the concrete, my approach was stealthy. I didn’t risk peeking through the front window, and didn’t have to. Denver was in there. His breakfast noises were unmistakable.

I wondered just how much of this breakfast piggery Lorraine would tolerate. In fact, I wondered if Lorraine was inside the apartment at all because I heard nothing but Denver’s oohing and aahing.

Just as I lifted the brass door knocker, everything went mysteriously quiet. Then the sudden, chaotic noises of an animal in flight.

Denver had a patio in the back facing the woods. The only object he kept out there was a cobweb-festooned Weber grill. He must have knocked the grill over because I could hear both the squeaking of the unlubricated sliding door and the ancient toppled barbecue clattering to the concrete. After that, his sneakers disappeared into the wet grass.

I knew exactly where Denver was headed so it didn’t matter if I pursued him on foot or by car. In the meanwhile, I let myself in and checked all of Denver’s likely hiding places for my baseball card. His faux pencil jar. His spare change pillow. The humidor he’d designed for his own ashes. Nothing. I checked his desk drawers and all the surfaces of his sloppy, little apartment. I even checked the bathroom closet because with men like Denver — men who lived in permanent fear of persecution, real and imaginary — you never knew what lengths they might go to to preserve their secrets.

Before I left, I wrote a note for Lorraine. It said: Please call me at your earliest convenience. P.S. This isn’t about my baseball card. Then I drove to the Dash In on New Hampshire Avenue, where I found Barry Denver exactly where I knew he’d be — in the magazine aisle flipping through a back issue of Bushcraft. We were both late for work now.

I said, “Barry, I want my card back.” The Dash In had CCTV cameras. I was hoping I might get Denver to incriminate himself on video with some rough insinuation.

“What card, Gene? Would you look at this beauty.”

It was a deluxe issue of Bushcraft. On the cover, a man camouflaged in what looked like tree moss was struggling to build a teepee in the wind. The issue was on sale for the price of a can of Mexican red beans. Either that or Denver had switched the stickers around. They probably had that on camera, too.

“You didn’t sell it yet,” I said. “I saw your eBay auction. I’ll report you. Then what will you do?” Denver spent half his waking hours rigging phony sales on eBay through a variety of shady aliases. In one fell swoop, I could shut him down for good.

This threat hit home. Denver led me outside, holding his magazine. The man at the counter didn’t even notice the theft.

“Do you remember Rosita?” Denver said.

“Your mother’s cleaning lady?”

“She asked for the card.”

“You gave my Cal Ripken, Jr. to Rosita?”

“No,” Denver said. “To Big Javier, the diabetic. They put him in diapers, you know.”

“I’m sorry to hear about Big Javier, but that was my card, not yours.”

“Well, now it’s Big Javier’s.” Denver’s mind had drifted. He was squinting at the magazine he’d just stolen. “Do you think you can build a teepee in the wind, Gene?”

“Probably not. Maybe. Barry, I need you to get that card back.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“Because Big Javier ate it. He was delirious and thought it was pulparindo.”

This was clearly a lie, but the thought that Rosita might have been demanding tribute from Denver eight years after she’d bequeathed his apartment to him was a sad and sobering thought. What promises had Denver made for the rights to his tiny, damp studio? Why had he promised anything? Then I remembered something.

“Barry, where is Lorraine?”

“Your wife?” Denver seemed genuinely baffled. “How should I know?”

I was re-sorting my baseball cards that night when Lorraine came home. All my other good cards were there, all but a ‘82 Tom Seaver that had devalued to 99 cents since I’d last checked. You could almost read the disappointment on Seaver’s face in 1982. It was as if he knew he would be worth 99 cents in 2024. Then again, how much better was all $275’s worth of Cal Ripken, Jr, sitting at the bottom of Big Javier’s stomach?

I decided I would let Lorraine explain in her own time. She’d come back and that’s what mattered. I suspect it was sharing a table with Denver that had brought her back to her senses. She must have witnessed Denver diving into a bowl of Fruit Loops like a mako shark with his eyes rolled back in his head. She’d seen that and then considered my neat and considerate ways in a new light. Sometimes it was the little things you lacked that meant everything.

I got out a jumbo box of fish fingers and put them all in the oven, even though it was technically Lorraine’s night to cook. Lorraine said she wasn’t hungry. She filled an empty suitcase with the rest of her things and handed me a forwarding address in Little Rock. She said the house belonged to a man named Cisco but that sometimes Cisco’s brother Everett answered the door. It was a complicated situation, she said.

Cisco, of course, was a vet. I say “of course,” because Lorraine had always wanted to marry a doctor. She’d told me that on our wedding day.

It took them a while to load the car, maybe because Cisco kept a full trunk. It was an older, mud-colored Buick with a partially rusted fender hanging on by a tack. The trunk was probably full of golf clubs and empty mayonnaise tubs that Cisco never thought he’d ever have to rearrange.

Eventually, he figured out a plan and the trunk fell shut. Cisco stopped a much smaller, cleaner-looking vehicle to make a full U-turn and they pulled off into the night, Little Rock-bound.

They stopped about 20 feet down the road. I thought Lorraine might have forgotten something or that she’d had second thoughts. But then the oven pinged on my fish fingers and all I could think about were those 20 pieces of fish I’d put in. I should have asked Lorraine if she was hungry first because now I had to eat them all by myself.

MAX SHERIDAN is the author of the novels Dillo and God’s Speedboat. He lives in Nicosia, Cyprus. Find his latest short story, Boomerangs, in Nude Bruce Review Issue 13.

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