carrying his guilt like a cross for years. i tried to lead all of my children to the love of jesus christ. there was only one major obstacle to that ever occurring in a way that that i would be happy with. and that was my hypocrisy. what do you mean? huh? your hypocrisy? my hypocrisy chasing women uh-huh. blowing my marriage. as don tells it, women found his role as an ascendant artist quite appealing. never mind he was a married father of four. and that kind of thing destroyed this - literally, destroyed my family. by the time rachel was in middle school, don s string of affairs led to a home-shattering divorce. i think that the the obliteration of the nuclear family had a profound effect on rachel. now, he feared, the apple hadn t fallen far from the tree. his daughter rachel was in the middle of an affair herself and it was putting her marriage at risk.
todd took her credit cards and maxed them all out and bought a plane and just put her in debt for, like, $45,000. whoa. i was, like, whoa . i m all, aren t you freaking out? and she said, yeah, but we he ll take care of it. which sounded less like complaining than maybe boasting. tim, after all, could barely qualify for credit at all. eventually, being on the outside looking in was just too hard. i couldn t take it no more. it s, you know it was getting harder and harder. so he asked her to stop calling him. he had to move on, start painting again, forget her, though as he admitted to us, he wasn t very successful. i thought, you know, maybe later on down the road, we can, you know, get together again and share life again. wishful thinking, of course. tim simply failed to understand that rachel s life with husband todd was getting more exciting by the day.
fourteen years this went on. rachel wanted to get married and have kids. and i haven t asked her to marry me yet. and did you wanna have kids? i did. i did. i did, but i just wasn t there yet, you know what i m saying? well. it s an old story, isn t it? tim was blindsided by what happened next. rachel met another man, someone who was everything tim was not. todd winkler. focused, disciplined. a former f-16 fighter pilot, who was on track to be a corporate leader. tim scrambled. and i went and bought a ring real quick to propose to her. and i did. it was too late by then, of course. rachel turned him down, and announced her engagement to todd. it was really hard, you know, because the love of my life was leaving me for some guy that had a good job and a house and a boat and a nice car. tim, to me, was rachel s soul
tim charrington versus todd winkler? no contest, said her dad, don hatfield. the guy s an air force academy graduate. he s successful in business. he s a family man. he s you know, from the midwest. he s gotta be great. good, solid upper-middle class guy? up yeah, no. and he s got a plane and he s got planes and boats and you know, all over the place. what tim, the starving artist could offer, beyond love and loyalty, was a whole lot of nothing. todd, on the other hand. we went to orlando with them to disney world. and he was picking up the bill for this stuff? yeah. most of the time, yeah. don had no way of knowing that tim was, for a time, still in rachel s life. sort of. you didn t lose touch completely. no, we really kept in touch, and why would they do that? maybe because her marriage, rachel led tim to believe, wasn t all apple pie and ice cream . because she wanted to share with me what was going on. what did she tell you? she shared wi
and she leaned over from her chair and she grabbed my hand and says, james, i got something i really need to tell you. i thought i was, like, you re fired. [ laughter ] no, she said, i ve fallen hopelessly in love with you, and i don t know what to do about it. what was it like to hear that? it was a huge relief. relief? yeah. because you were in love with her. i was already in love with her at the time, but i couldn t tell her. i didn t feel that i should tell her. you know, i wouldn t know how she would react. i d rather have her as my friend than have her as nothing at all. so having left artist tim to marry ex-fighter pilot todd, rachel now launched into an affair with ex-marine james. this, by the way, wasn t one of those sneak off into a closet and steal a kiss kind of affairs. with todd living and working in the san francisco bay area