The Widow Speaks

Focusing on a seemingly irrelevant slight, given her current situation, Kelley seems quite hung up on the fact that Jim skipped out on the Cumberland Heights family day. She often paints him as callous and uncaring—as an absentee husband and father. Kelley talks of Jim’s sister, the one who is now caring for the couple’s children, much in the same way she talks of Jim: in a gossipy manner, like she’s got an ax to grind.

If the story of her marriage were just as she tells it, it’s hard to imagine why Kelley would’ve stuck around. But to her, it was simple: She loved him. But like many of her Jim anecdotes, her explanation of that undying love touches on another one of Jim’s faults. “We weren’t social because he didn’t want to be social…to the point where he would rip the phone cord out of the wall if you talked past 10:30 or something,” she says. “He was a very jealous-hearted kind of person. But I was willing to do anything to stay with him and preserve my family. And most of all, I want my children to have a father—I don’t care what kind of father it was.”

And, when it comes to Kelley’s long-winded description of a marriage gone bad, it’s striking that, through all of the drama, she doesn’t seem to quite grasp how she possibly could be looked at as Jim’s potential killer. In her eyes, she took a broken Jim—a divorced man on the brink of bankruptcy—and despite his flaws, his threats to take away her children, his philandering ways and his attempts to characterize her as a schizophrenic addict, she helped him rise to glory. But in the flippant, stomp-your-foot style of a petulant teen, Kelley rattles off this summation of her life with Jim: “I was the MBA prom queen. I grew up here. I married this guy when he had just gone through a divorce and went bankrupt my first year and supported him. I took him back after the affairs and without a due—there was no separation, there was nothing..... And that was OK. I didn’t care—whatever.”