I can’t believe I forgot the best part of the story.
She had remained fairly close with his parents and his sister; as I said, sleeping on a hand-me-down waterbed and watching a hand-me-down television belonging to his sister. But a two weeks later, when bringing the daughter back from her bi-weekly weekend, he informed her that “My family thinks what you are doing to me is really terrible. They want me to tell you that they never want to see you or have anything to do with you again.”
(It would be some years later before she heard the flip side: he told his family that “She wants me to tell you that she hates all of you and never wants to see you or have anything to do with you again.”
(The story came out when the sister rang her doorbell one evening out of the blue and asked to come in to apologize “for believing all those lies.” It turned into a very interesting conversation.)
About a week after that, she received a note from his sister: “I want all my stuff back. My bed, my television and my chair. We’ll pick them up on Saturday.”
When Saturday came, she had everything ready. The waterbed had been drained and its frame carefully disassembled. The television was waiting on the front porch. The chair was on the front lawn. Understandably, she had taken time to puncture the waterbed in several places and was ready to pour Coca-Cola onto the circuit board of the television before her new boyfriend talked her out of it.
He had a new girlfriend also, to whom he would later be briefly married, and when, many years later, his daughter asked him about the furniture incident and others, he had a ready answer: “It was _________’s fault. She made me do all those things. You know I would never want to do anything to hurt you. You were already unhappy enough at home. Unhappy… unhappy… unhappy.”
And she bought into it every step of the way.