Last Call

Cathy looks up and blinks in a futile attempt to control her tears. Just then, the front door opens and Michael comes stomping in. He wants to talk to his mother about money, $80 to be exact, to buy new tires. If she can just see her way to loaning him the cash now, he'll pay her back as soon as he can sell his stereo speakers.

"We'll talk about it later," she says firmly, and Michael heads off to his bedroom. After he's gone, she confides, "He's a lot like his father--he wants instant gratification and doesn't think things through.

"Sometimes it scares me. Of course, he's only seventeen. His father...well, I used to joke that I was actually raising three children, and sometimes Bobby was the biggest kid of them all."

Five months after Brian was born, Cathy went back to college as a pre-med student. Meanwhile, Bobby's music career was hitting an all-time high with the creation of the band Dreams. It was more Top 40, but the musicians were all top-notch, and Dreams was a real show band with a huge following not just in Denver, but also in Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma and Nebraska.

Bobby was traveling with the band so much that "sometimes it was more disruptive when he came home," Cathy recalls. "We'd all have to readjust our schedules. In between, Brian and I were a self-sufficient little unit. I was making good money, and Brian was such an easygoing baby."

Occasionally Cathy and Brian would fly off to meet Bobby on the road. Bobby loved being with his son, and he always made sure the motel had a pool so that he and Brian could swim together during the day. But after Brian started school, the times apart increased. "Bobby was always gone and missed a lot of Brian growing up," Cathy says. "I was the one who was there when he got sick. I was the homeroom mom. The mom who put together the Valentine's Day parties.

"I was getting tired of being married and feeling single, without the benefits of either."

As Bobby's success grew, so did his intake of drugs, especially heroin. Cathy didn't understand it. The other members of Dreams weren't into the drug scene, but Bobby couldn't seem to stop. The people who hung around him were drug dealers and users. They were leeches, clinging to whoever was hot at the moment. Their drugs bought them special privileges, sort of as pseudo-members of the band, and so their drugs were always available.

By her senior year in college, their fifth year of marriage, the relationship was in real trouble. Cathy was studying for mid-terms when Bobby came back from a road trip. He seemed tense and ready to fight at the slightest provocation. Cathy was used to being ignored: Bobby's first love was his music, and he spent every spare minute playing; he'd even left her alone on her 21st birthday to practice with the band. And they'd had the usual marriage squabbles. But this was different.

Unsure of what was wrong, she decided to follow Bobby to the nightclub where Dreams was playing. At the club, Bobby acted aloof and hardly seemed to notice her. During a break, Cathy turned to the bass player and asked if Bobby was seeing another woman. She'd never before considered that he might be unfaithful--they'd been so much in love--but the idea had suddenly popped into her mind as she watched women in the audience flirt with her husband. The bass player hesitated, then said, "If I can't answer your question, does that answer your question?"

Cathy confronted Bobby. She was stunned by his coldness and knocked out by his answer. "Cathy, it wasn't just one. There have been thirteen others," he told her.

"I was shaking so hard, but I couldn't cry. I just left," she recalls. "When we talked about it later, he said he couldn't guarantee that he wouldn't be with somebody else again unless I went on the road with him."

So Cathy quit school and took Brian on a nine-week road trip--a decision she's always regretted. She turns to another page in the photo album. It's Christmas in a motel room, following Bobby's admission of infidelity. The small family is smiling, having a good time. Cathy disguised the hurt well.

For a time, Bobby cleaned up his act. He took jobs driving long-haul trucks. Promised to stop seeing other women. Got off the dope. He tried to be a good husband, but nothing took. There were always more women. More drugs. More reconciliations and bitter partings.

Michael was born in 1979. Seven years younger than his older brother, he was a cranky, needy baby. "Born with a chip on his shoulder," says his mother. He was two years old when the marriage finally ended, like a rusty clock that ran out of time.