Nameless on No Name Key

Nameless on No Name Key - Part 1

Nothing could get to me; I was Jack Ryder, Junior. I was untouchable.

That's what I thought anyway, and why shouldn't I have felt insulated from something as alien as hard luck? I was raised in a well-to-do family, protected from misfortune by a loving mother, sheltered from hardship by my father's handsome income and investments. Our spacious three-story home, tucked away in an exclusive section of Bergen County, New Jersey, had a three-car garage and sat on two tree-lined acres with a view to die for. We also had a nine-room "cottage" on the Jersey Shore, not to mention the 38-foot cabin cruiser we kept docked behind it. Then there was our social life. Like everybody else in our tight-knit enclave, we always took first-class vacations. We had country club memberships, drove fine cars and dined in five-star restaurants.

The fact that my mom and dad had gotten into parenting quite late in life, and I was an only child, didn't hurt my carefree, easy upbringing either. Since they were doing extremely well by the time I came along I never had to worry about saving for college or anything like that. All the way up to the day I graduated from Rutgers I never worked a single hour. After that my cakewalk only continued. Shortly after scaling my graduation cap I landed a middle management position with a big pharmaceutical company, thanks to my father's connections. Four months later he stepped up again. When I married my high school sweetheart, Jenny Fontaine, Dad put up a good-sized down payment so we could buy a nice house similar to the one I was brought up in. Not long after that Jenny gave birth to our daughter, Taylor, and for fourteen years we continued to live the good life. But then one day I got what I thought was a really great idea, and soon after our lives went all to hell.

For obvious reasons, I haven't always been the type of person who considered the consequences of his actions. Call it ignorance, being spoiled, a lack of foresight or whatever you want, but that was me. Unfortunately though, my inherent flaws eventually caught up with me, and they brought me and my family down. And let me tell you, when we went down we went down hard.

It all began when I came home from work one day and told Jenny about my wild-ass idea. She was in the kitchen, and I had just come through the door after working all day in my Manhattan office. I kissed her, took a cold can of beer from the fridge, popped it open then told her what I had on my mind.

Standing in front of the sink with her lower back leaning against it, Jenny yanked her head back and her chin in incredulously. She squinted at me as if a third ear had just sprouted out of the top of my head, and with the corners of her mouth curling down like she'd swallowed a full glass of lemon juice, she finally said, "Florida! Are you out of your gourd, Jack? I am not moving to Florida! We've been there, done the Disneyworld thing a few times, that's enough for me. That's all I need to see of Florida. What has gotten into you? Did you and Marty stop for drinks on the way home?"

"No. No. We didn't stop anywhere." I said, resting a hand on Jenny's shoulder, looking down into her ever-alert, sparkling-blue eyes, getting ready to present my rehearsed pitch.

"Just clear your head for a minute, hon. Just listen to what I have to say. I found out today that...."

"For-get-it, Jack," she interrupted, drying her hands with a dish towel—wringing them really. "I just cleared the table and that's all I'm going to clear. You tell me to clear my head and listen to you? I don't think so. Nothing you can say is going to get me to leave our home, our family, our friends and jobs. Have you lost your marbles?"

Hastily, she then hung the towel on the oven handle while saying nothing. I didn't say a thing either. I knew she hadn't finished venting her objection yet and wanted her to get it all out before I told her about the rest of my idea.