Ronald Eugene Traylor had always dreamed of a quiet retirement. Not of grandeur, mind you—he wasn’t that kind of man. A recliner, a flat-top grill, and maybe some quality time teaching his youngest how to skip stones with military precision.
Instead, the very morning of his retirement ceremony—before the sheet cake had even been cut—his wife of nineteen years and 364 days told him, quite plainly, that she had never loved him, hated the sound of his breathing, and was leaving him for her Zumba instructor named Kyle, taking their four kids and both Labradors.
“The kids too?” Ronald asked.
“And the dogs,” she said. “But you can keep your Air Force retirement and your dumb little coin collection.”
She left him with a pension, a sad jar of cocktail peanuts, and the lingering scent of betrayal mixed with Bath & Body Works. Ronald signed the divorce papers with the same stoicism he’d once reserved for nuclear protocols, then drove straight to the VFW where he drank enough to put down a Clydesdale.
He stood on the bar at one point and gave a speech no one asked for, about patriotism and how “you don’t really know a woman until she says she’s leaving you for a guy with clear skin.”
The next morning, wearing aviators, tube socks, and a Hawaiian shirt that smelled like regret, Ronald wandered toward Green Hill, TN—drawn by nothing more than a whisper of lake wind and a promise from a former colleague that said … Read the rest