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what she had done, she rushed to rectify her error. The longer she had
been away from Morris, the more she had missed him and come to realize
what a good man he was that he was the man she loved. She had been
momentarily bedazzled, but her eyes were open now. In a sequence of
events right out of a soap opera script, Jerilee left Gabby Moore's home
and bed and moved back in with Morris Blankenbaker. It was a move that
seared Gabby's soul, one that drove him nearly insane with jealousy. He
drank to salve his pain, and drinking made him even more paranoid. By
1975if not earlier gabby Moore had come to a point where he saw
everything that happened in the world in terms of how it affected him.
He had no empathy, no sympathy. He had no rational or emotional ability
to step back and view a situation from another person's point of view.
If he had ever felt any guilt over betraying Morris, he fought it down
before it could bubble to the surface of his mind. He could not now
admit that Jerilee had been Morris's to begin with and that she had gone
back to her husband and the father of her two little children. He could
only beat his breast and cry out that he had been deeply wounded. The
startling thing about Moore's position was that he believed that he was
absolutely within his rights that he was the injured party. He would
have been astounded had anyone suggested otherwise.
His great love was gone, and he could not allow that to happen.
The campaign that Gabby Moore mounted to win Jerilee back was prodigious
he used all of his considerable weapons. When Jerilee and the children
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moved back in with Morris, he was still living in the big frame house on
North Sixth. All of his roomers except for one had moved out, and he
made plans to move soon. Morris, Jerilee, and the children occupied the
downstairs until then. If Jerilee had believed that Gabby would let her
go without a fight, she soon found out she was mistaken. He called her
every day at the Pacific National Bank in Selah, Washington, where she
worked and at the house where she lived with Morris. He made several
trips to the bank to confront Jerilee at work. She had a good job as a
loan interviewer, and it was embarrassing when one of her coworkers
announced that Gabby Moore was waiting to see her. She knew what he was
going to say. He would ask her, "When are you coming back?" and "Won't
you give me just one more chance?" He told Jerilee that he wasn't going
to make it without her, and she caught the manipulative threat. He was
telling her that if he couldn't have her, he didn't want to live. When
she refused to come back to him, he got more specific. He was going to
kill himself, he said, and he wanted her to watch to see what she had
done to him. Perhaps frightened by his threats of suicide, and worn down
by his pleas, Jerilee may not have taken a strong enough stand with him.
She may have agreed to meet him to talk more often than she would later
admit to. There were those in Yakima who blamed her for being too "wishy
washy," and for not making the clean break that they felt would have
kept Gabby Moore from pining after her. Despite his drinking and his
depression, Gabby had any number of people who loved him devotedly. His
two daughters and his son came to Jerilee as emissaries from their
father. Amanda and Rick had always followed Derek Moore around like
puppy dogs, and they were thrilled when Gabby sent Derek over to take
the children out for an icecream cone. "I let them go," Jerilee said.
"They thought a lot of Derek."
Gabby's daughters phoned Jerilee. They asked her what she thought she
was accomplishing by leaving their father all alone. They blamed her for
his pain. "They asked me wouldn't I please go back and give their dad
another try?" Jerilee recalled, and she said she simply could not go
back to him again ever. She felt sorry for Gabby's children, and she
could understand why they had come to her pleading his case. But there
were things they didn't know. Once she was free of him, there was no way
she was going back. She tried so many times to explain that to Gabby.
She and Morris made plans to remarry shortly after her divorce from
Gabby was final on November 10. They hoped to be married by Christmas.
In time, she hoped that the whole episode with Gabby would be only a
distant memory. "I asked him very definitely to quit bothering me, [told
him] that I was trying to start a new life, I wanted my family all back
together and would he please quit harassing us." Gabby had just stared
at Jerilee as if she were speaking to him in a foreign language. He was
never going to let her go. Didn't she know that? Whatever it took, he
would do it. Whatever she wanted, he would get for her. He would not
accept that all she wanted from him was her freedom. He just didn't get
it. "He would say," Jerilee recalled, " If it wasn't for Morris, you
would be back with me."" But there was Morris, and she was grateful that
he was still there for her. Nevertheless, she would not have stayed with
Gabby even if Morris had turned his back on her. She could no longer
live with Gabby's rages and his volatile moods. In one of their
conversations, Gabby told Jerileealmost with a flourish the depths to
which she had made him sink. "I'm losing my job," he told her, "and it's [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]