Deadbeat Dads: Justice or Vengeance?

My very independent mother is the sort of 70-year-old who goes around telling people she feels healthier than she was at 30. So, when a 50-year-old man started doing all kinds of chores in and around her house, some neighbors thought they must be "romantically involved." Well, I'm sorry to disappoint those neighbors, but although there is a romantic Christmas story about this man, it does not feature Mother. She just started paying this man to do things she would normally do for herself, because she felt sorry for him.

I'll call him "Joe Eastman" in honor of the company that employed him, with job titles that included the word "construction," for more than twenty years. It seems that Joe's private life had its ups and downs even then. Some of the wildest adventures involved his second wife, a woman of action. For example, she wasn't satisfied with the trailer house in which they were living, so one day while he was at work she set fire to it. Then they lived at the Salvation Army for a while.

However, local property owners trust the Eastman Chemical Company to provide for its employees, so Joe and the kids soon had another home. If the second wife ever moved into this house, she didn't stay long. She soon moved out, taking the younger children (hers) with her.

There were probably some reasons why all three of Joe's wives had left him. Neither Mother nor I probed into this part of the story, but for one thing, Joe smokes more or less constantly. When he became Mother's yardman, he was also obese.

Anyway, Joe was coping with the disappearance of his third, baby-free, wife pretty well when an on-the-job accident occurred. Like all the big local employers, Eastman paid Joe decent compensation while he was flat on his injured back. Like all the big local employers, Eastman also hired someone else to do Joe's job and failed to provide a job that would not require heavy lifting when Joe got back on his feet.