Chapter 15

Jimmy wrote back and thanked her for the emails and empathized with her about her past and unfortunate choices in men. He said he wasn’t there to judge her on what she’d done in the past or, even what she did in the future, for that matter. He was just looking for a friend and hoped they could be friends.
He wrote for a while about how different their houses were and how it must be great to have all that space and not to be living on top of your neighbours constantly fighting for parking spaces. Then he asked about her stepdaughter and how she got on with her and how her daughter felt about her and even how she got on with the girls mother. Was she happy looking after her step daughter every weekend?
Jimmy was interested in all these questions, of course he was, he was on a fact finding mission, but really he was just skirting around the questions he really wanted to ask. He wanted to ask about her husband, about Adam. Jimmy didn’t like him already and he didn’t even know the bloke, but he had a picture in his mind and couldn’t shake it. First impressions and all that! He even had trouble writing his name, “A-d-a-m!” shit he couldn’t even say it out loud without getting a taste of bile in his throat!
Jimmy eventually filled his boots and asked his questions but first he wrote a pre-cursor saying that he sometimes asked questions that were none of his business and if he was out of bounds she was to tell him to mind his own business and he wouldn’t mind. He could feel his nose growing as he wrote that sentence!
So he asked; what did Adam think about her chatting to strange men on the internet and was he the only one? How were they getting on at the moment and when was the last time he hit her? Did he ever hit Sandra and how was his relationship with her? Why did his marriage break up with his last wife and what was all the secrecy about the garage?
Jimmy thought maybe he had gone overboard and asked far too many questions about Adam and not much about Corrine but it was well after 3am now and the lack of sleep was catching up on him. He signed off hoping to hear again soon and trudged up the stairs back to bed.
By the time he logged on again Jimmy had another email from Corrine which was pages long and addressed all the questions he had asked!
Corrine told him that she was happy to answer any of his questions and couldn’t think of anything she would be uncomfortable with but would surely tell him if she was. Then she went on to talk about her relationship with her stepdaughter, Martha and Martha’s mother Beth. Corrine and Beth apparently got on famously sharing the same common denominator, they both hated Adam. Though at this point Corrine didn’t call him Adam she called him jackass. Jimmy loved it and was much happier calling him that!
Up to and after the birth of Martha, Beth had put on a lot of weight and this hadn’t pleased jackass who started sleeping around. When Beth found out she threw him out, she might not have been so quick to, she had said, if she had realised how vicious the backlash would be. She endured months of physical and verbal abuse from jackass and his friends. She had windows broken and her car tyres slashed and it wasn’t until she had a court order against him that the torment abated. Corrine didn’t know any of this until she had been married a while to jackass.
Corrine also got on well with Martha and treated her like a daughter. Martha had no time for her dad, probably fuelled by her moms hate, and even called him Adam! Sandra and Martha also got on well they played and fought like sisters sharing a room on the weekend when Martha came to stay. They were the closest thing to sisters without being related, Corrine had said, as when she had married jackass he had also adopted Sandra, so the girls even shared the same surname. Corrine had added that she generally didn’t mind having Martha stay every weekend as it was company for Sandra but she would sometimes appreciate some participation from jackass who wouldn’t even go and pick Martha up and, she added, some weekends it would be nice to have some time to herself!
Then she got on to the man himself who she said was passed out on the bed next to her while she was typing this email. She went on to explain that the computer was in the bedroom and he had spent the afternoon drinking and was now sleeping it off. She said that he paid no interest in what she did and if he knew she was chatting to him he wouldn’t care. Jimmy somehow was not of the same opinion, but what did he know? She told Jimmy that when she signed on to the dating agency that she had opted to pay for the package which allowed men to contact her for free which may have been a bad move. She had been inundated with weirdo’s telling her what they would like to do to her sexually or asking for naked pictures and in one case actually sending her one! She said it was refreshing to hear from him without the sexual innuendo.
Corrine said that although her relationship with jackass was frosty at the moment he hadn’t raised a fist to her in a while. She tried to stay away from him to avoid confrontation and his “evil mouth” which he used to good effect on Sandra whom he called the little bastard.
She was unsure what was going on out at the garage and why all the secrecy but was interested to find out. He had started associating himself with a lot of unsavoury characters who would congregate out by the garage, some of them scared Corrine. A lot of the guys seemed to be Mexican, there were a large influx of illegal immigrants to the area lately, and Corrine wasn’t sure what their interest was in jackass or jackass’s interest in them. She knew he was interested in cars though and was pretty handy under the bonnet. Maybe these guys had something to do with cars though she didn’t think so. He was building up a large collection of cars Corrine had added some of which he was insisting in registering in her name which was odd. Odder was where all the money was coming from to buy the cars, some of which obviously weren’t cheap. When she had broached the subject with him he told her “keep your fucking nose out of my business bitch!”. What a lovely guy thought Jimmy!
She finished off the email by asking a bit about Jimmy, his family, his work and something which came as a bit of a surprise, his religion, then signed off with a kiss.

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