I haven’t been handling the divorce well.

* * * *

I fire up the BMW and haul ass in reverse down the driveway, almost hitting the mailbox. I hit the garage door opener and nothing happens. Hit it again, nothing happens. Jesus H. Christ. I get out of the car, leaving it running in the street, get the stepladder, disengage the thingamabob, and then just yank the door down by hand. I know this won’t get fixed for a month because a) I don’t have time for this shit and b) I am used to a wife taking care of it. I know that when I come home tonight, I am going to forget that the garage door opener doesn’t work and will sit in the driveway for a full minute, jamming on the button over and over again like an imbecile.

I went from living in a seven bedroom ghetto palace to a three bedroom rental where I still haven’t been upstairs more than a handful of times. I’m still in Greenwich, just in the other-side-of-the-tracks part of Greenwich. This is one of the cheaper houses in town. It might be the cheapest house in town. That’s the thing, this town is full of fucking busybodies, it’s a certainty that word has gotten around that Weber’s head trader is living in a steaming pile of shit. It’s like losing a real-life game of M.A.S.H. that you used to play in middle school and ending up in the shack.

But I gotta be here for the kids. That was what we agreed, just last month (Jesus H. Christ it seems like a lot longer than that), that the kids would have something resembling a normal childhood. So Katharine and I are literally just a few blocks away from each other, to the point where I’ve seen Michael out walking the dog (my dog) and this thing is just staring me in the face all the time; I can’t get away from it. In addition to the New Mexico can-plinking fantasy, I’ve also had the fantasy where I’m living in Trump Tower in Manhattan like Derek Jeter, in the penthouse suite, bringing girls upstairs and dropping like eleven loads on their foreheads. But that doesn’t work because the money is tied up in aforementioned ghetto palace a few blocks away from me. So I wake up every morning, and it’s the first thing I think about when I wake up, and I go to bed every night, and it’s the last thing I think about when I fall asleep, and everything in between is just a blur of executing Weber’s fucking trades.

I told Weber when it happened. “Do what you have to do,” he said, which meant “don’t take any time off,” even though he didn’t explicitly say it. I can’t take time off because there’s nobody who can do my job, which explains how I could afford aforementioned ghetto palace and also how I ended up in the shack. That was as close as Weber gets to being sympathetic. But I don’t think he approved of the ghetto palace in the first place, and I think he had a pretty low opinion of Katharine. I never thought about it at the time, but I probably should have been taking relationship advice from the weirdo. He’s right about everything else.