The Broken Circle by Rodney Barker

Author:Rodney Barker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Two family photos immortalize Ted and Doreen Burke. In one, Ted, tall and handsome, poses beside a tanker truck wearing a leather jacket and a white-toothed grin, looking like a World War II flyboy just returned from a mission that has made him a hero. In the other, Doreen, brown curls floating on the shoulders of a tight gray sweater, smiles shyly, like a 1940s sorority girl waiting to be asked to dance. You get the impression that each was the other’s photographer and they had a game going—that as soon as she snapped his photo he saluted the camera with a beer, and when she heard the shutter click her nose wrinkled with laughter.

If you look at their lives starting with their romantic beginnings (he was a Missouri farmboy football player, she a piano-playing uptown girl, and over parental objections they had eloped to California) and follow them through the day they moved into a new three-bedroom brick house (in Sunset Heights, a new development situated on a leveled hill with luminous views to the west) to the birth of twins (whom they named after the Apostles Peter and Paul, as an expression of thanks), the Burkes were almost a fifties poster couple. But it was all downhill from there.

The twins were still in kindergarten when Ted, employed by a gasoline distributor, was unloading volatiles from a diesel truck and a spark set off an explosion. With clothes aflame he staggered toward a nearby irrigation ditch where he was found by a passerby. Burn victims don’t always look so bad at first, but as the damage continues its relentless course the disfigurement and pain get worse. He was burned over 50 percent of his body, severely around the face and chest, and had taken a lot of heat and gas into his lungs. He lingered for almost two weeks, conscious much of the time, though it would have been better for him, and easier on his wife, if he weren’t.

His death devastated Doreen, who acted as if she had been stripped of her purpose in life and, after that, to all appearances, seemed incapable of facing life without him unless she had a drink in her hand. As the Doreen all her friends thought they knew disappeared in an alcoholic slide, a slovenly irresponsible drunkard took her place. To this day, women who knew Doreen when her husband was alive will turn with a start whenever they pass someone wearing White Shoulders perfume and think of Doreen Burke; this miserable substitute paid little attention to personal grooming, wore the same clothes for days running, and rarely brushed her hair. Completing the loss of discretion and decorum, this woman who went by the name of Doreen, but looked and behaved nothing like her, began to live from one drink and one man to the next.

Judging by appearances, she was bent on destroying by rejection everything that had meant anything to her before, including her children. There had been two before

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