CHAPTER 3

Colin wasn't wrong about everything, though. Almost from the moment Bob stepped off the gangplank, Peggy sensed he wasn't the same carefree boy she'd said goodbye to two years before. There was a new wariness about him, and something in his soft, hazel eyes that hinted at terrible things seen that could never be forgotten. He had occasional dark moods when he wanted only to be left alone to brood on something he refused to talk about.

And he drank. As far as Peggy knew, Bob hadn't touched a drop of alcohol before he joined the Navy. Now it seemed he always had a can of beer in one hand, and he soon revealed a tendency to "cut loose" on the weekends, hitting the bar at 5:00 on Friday and partying until Sunday night. He never got drunk during the week, and worked hard and diligently at his new job on a purse seine fishing boat operating out of the Cedar Cove marina. Most of the time, everything was wonderful.

Most of the time.

Peggy never told Bob about what Colin had said and done that night in his car; she didn't want to add to her fiance's stress. Since coming home, Bob had shown a tendency to fly off the handle with very little provocation, and Peggy frankly worried about how he might react if he knew of his friend's betrayal. For his part, Colin seemed to have forgotten all about the incident. He was always congenial when Bob and Peggy saw him, which was frequently. They even double-dated with Colin and his revolving door of girlfriends. But Peggy made sure to stick close to Bob when Colin was around, and avoided speaking to him unless she had to.

After nine months of planning and happy anticipation, Bob Beldon married Peggy Durham on June 3, 1972, surrounded by family and friends. He was 21. She was 19. They were deeply in love and sure of a perfect, happy future together.

It didn't quite work out that way.

Like most young couple, the Beldons found that married life could be very hard. No matter how many hours Bob put in on the fishing boat, there never seemed to be enough money to make ends meet. Peggy worked as a secretary for a while, but when Michael was born almost exactly nine months after the wedding, and Robin the following year, she gave up her job to stay home with them. Bob was a wonderful , loving father … when he was sober. And that was still most of the time, for the first few years. But the black moods were still there, the nightmares that woke him up in a cold sweat several times a week. Bob came to believe that a drink or two before bed relaxed him and kept the night terrors at bay. A "couple" soon became 3 or 4, and Bob was regularly passing out on the couch. There were times, now, when Peggy had to call the captain of Bob's boat with excuses: Bob has the flu. Bob had a bad reaction to medication. Bob was called out of town by a death in the family. She hated lying to Captain Johanson, who was kind and patient. But she had no choice. They needed Bob's job.

Eventually, even nice Captain Johanson's patience was exhausted. It happened the morning Bob staggered onto the Jenny, still half in the bag from the night before and in a foul mood. The captain told him to stay behind and sober up; he didn't need some drunk fool stumbling around the deck, putting himself and his crewmates in danger. Bob let loose a stream of profanities and took a swing at his boss. He was restrained by two burly mates and dumped unceremoniously on the dock.

And that was the end of working for Captain Johanson.

Peggy was eternally grateful to the captain for at least not pressing charges. That would make it impossible for Bob to get a place on any other boat in the Sound. Filled with remorse, Bob went to Johanson, cap in hand, and begged for his job back. But the captain stood firm: He told Bob he'd be glad to have him back on the crew – when and if he got sober.

This was the beginning of a seemingly endless cycle of hope and heartache. Bob would quit cold turkey, staying sober for weeks, sometimes months, at a time. He'd get a job with one of the local fishing operations, crewing the Bristol or the Limpet or the Waverider. Then the nightmares would start up again, or Bob would see or hear something that reminded him of the war, or some other reason that Peggy never knew … and one day he wouldn't come home at the usual time. Peggy would feed the kids hotdogs and macaroni & cheese, drop them off at a friend's house, and start trolling the streets for her husband.

There were times, when things got really bad, that Peggy seriously considered packing up the kids and moving back with her folks in Cooperton. There were even more times when Bob, sunk in the depths of depression and self-loathing, urged her to go. "You deserve so much better," he'd tell her, teary-eyed. "This isn't the life I wanted for you."

It was hardest on Michael and Robin. He broke Peggy's heart to see her children hesitate when their father y walked in the door, never knowing whether to run to his welcoming arms or run to their rooms to avoid the scary daddy who smelled funny and yelled and broke things. As they got older, they didn't bring friends home to the house, and they begged Peggy not to tell their mom when they had sports or school programs, fearing their Dad might embarrass them if he showed up drunk.

But despite everything, Peggy loved him. The kids loved him. He was a good man, Peggy knew. A man scarred in ways she couldn't even imagine, tormented by experiences that even a strong man couldn't weather. And so she stayed.

Bob and Peggy had been married almost 15 years when he went on a three-day bender that ended with paramedics prying him out of the truck he'd wrapped around a tree. At the hospital his blood alcohol level measured .31. The doctor said he should have been dead, that anyone without a tolerance built up like Bob had would have been dead. Bob went straight from the hospital to a detox ward. That was the point when Peggy almost gave up. She no longer had any hope of things getting any better – in fact, it seemed inevitable that this love story would end with her standing over a grave and left to raise two kids on her own.

What a miracle it seemed, then, when Bob's angel appeared.